Alex Jones, founder of the media company Infowars, had made a fortune promoting conspiracy theories online. He's insisted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job and claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, staged by the government to justify seizing the firearms of American citizens.
Josh Owens spent four years in his 20s as a video editor and field producer for Jones and his media company. "In Jones' world, it was all about making things look cinematic," Owens says. "We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. ... But it was nonsense, it was lies."
At one point, Owens was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, because a conservative website had alleged that ISIS had established a training base just across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Finding no evidence of ISIS, Owens says the Infowars team dressed a reporter up to look like an ISIS operative and filmed him crossing "the border" while holding a prop of a severed head. Except it wasn't actually the border.
"We just happened to find a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande," Owens says. "We said we were on the border. The reporter I was with simulated the beheading, walked across, and that's what we posted."
Owens says the video of the fake ISIS agent garnered a million views overnight. Infowars did not respond to a request for comment.
Though he was troubled by work, Owens says he stayed because the pay was good and Jones was an engaging force. He says a turning point came when he was seated next to a Muslim woman with a young girl on a flight home from a different reporting trip.
"I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn't do anything. There's no reason for suspicion; it's just racism," he says. "It's not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently."
Owens left Infowars in 2017. He has since appeared in the HBO documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones and provided a deposition in the successful defamation case the parents of Sandy Hook children brought against Jones. Owens' new memoir is The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones' Conspiracy Machine.
Interview highlights
On how he discovered Jones
I grew up in North Georgia. When I got sucked into Jones' world I was relatively young. Throughout high school I played music. I thought for sure that's what I was going to do with the rest of my life. After high school that, as things go, just sort of fell apart and I was left directionless. ... And then, at the most opportune or least opportune [moment], depending on at what point I'm looking at it ... I was introduced to Jones' website, Infowars, and Jones as a personality.
On landing the job at Infowars
Jones put on he was looking to grow his operation and hire more reporters. And I saw the opportunity and I thought, "Why not? Why not give it a shot?" ... Infowars said [there] were thousands of [video] submissions and I got to the top 10, the final round. I later learned Jones didn't believe I quite had what it took to be a reporter, thank God. So he hired me as a video editor and camera operator initially. ...
Early on, I was well-meaning. I thought what we were doing was important. I felt like it was a big opportunity to be there. I had been plucked out of film school, where I didn't know what my future was, and it was just exciting. And I remember there were many times in the beginning, I would go into the office with a good attitude. Like the snap of the finger, [when] Jones would come into the office, sometimes he was jovial, sometimes he was playing around, but that playfulness could turn on a dime. And we were always on edge waiting for that to turn.
On Jones' denial of the Sandy Hook mass shooting
It happened in that exact liminal space between me being offered the job and me starting the job. And I think, if I'm being honest, so much of my mind was just focused on moving to a new place and I wasn't paying attention to those things. The reason I don't write much about that in the book is because I didn't really have much connection with that. I never worked on reports about Sandy Hook. ...
Looking back at it, I think, how many instances are we not seeing where that occurred? ... How many lives have been affected by his rhetoric?
Why did I stick around for so long? I don't have all the answers now, but I think exploring it and asking those questions and taking accountability was just sort of part of the process.Josh Owens
On how working at Infowars was like being in a cult
I am hesitant often to say that [Infowars was a cult] because I know there are people in those situations that deal with a lot of horrific things. But yes, I think that in many ways it was, and it was that fear, constant fear of you kind of can't leave. ... [Jones was] kind of a black mark on your resume. He would say this to us on a regular basis: "You cannot exist in the world outside of here because you are connected to me." And in that sense, yeah, I don't know another way to describe it but cult-like.
On why he wrote a book about his time at Infowars
I don't want to be a person that just moves on from it and doesn't take accountability, because then I don't feel like you can grow. And I would love to grow. I would love to continue growing. I would be a better person. I just felt like I needed to clear things up for myself. Why was I there? Why did I do these things? Why did I stick around for so long? I don't have all the answers now, but I think exploring it and asking those questions and taking accountability was just sort of part of the process.
Heidi Saman and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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