The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Machine

This wild debut tell-all from former Infowars editor Owens recounts his destabilizing stint working under Alex Jones. Owens was already an Infowars fan when he was hired in 2013. Yet even with foreknowledge of Jones’s extreme personality, his first day was a surreal experience, from Jones’s uncomfortable overshares (“I bet you weren’t expecting to learn on your first day that it takes Alex Jones thirty seconds to take a shit”) to foreboding warnings from new colleagues (“You don’t want to make him angry”). What follows is four years of constant instability as Jones churns out paranoid content based on mundane observations like a low-flying plane (“This is 9/11 all over again!”) and sends the author on harebrained “gonzo” assignments, including infiltrating an NSA data storage facility and crossing the border into the U.S. dressed as an ISIS member. The book serves as a morbidly fascinating character study of Jones, who’s depicted as a volatile self-proclaimed “drunk” given to outbursts of violence (destroying an office watercooler with a kitchen knife; goading underlings into punching him, then punching back; shooting at staff during a video production). Even as Jones “seemed to be struggling with the nature of reality,” his employees affirmed his delusional theories—not out of true belief, Owens asserts, but fear of his retribution. It’s a riveting insider account of a deranged media ecosystem. (Apr.)