Alex Jones

Alexander Emerick Jones was born on February 11, 1974, in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in Rockwall before his family moved to Austin during his second year of high school. He attended Anderson High School, played football, and graduated in 1993, then briefly studied at Austin Community College before dropping out. As a teenager, he was heavily influenced by *None Dare Call It Conspiracy*, a book by John Birch Society writer Gary Allen that argued global bankers, not elected officials, control American politics. Jones later called it the easiest primer on the New World Order.

The 1993 Waco siege, which ended in a fire and many deaths near the end of his senior year, shaped his worldview. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it confirmed his belief in hidden malevolent forces. Around that time, he started hosting a call-in show on public access television in Austin. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by Timothy McVeigh as a response to Waco, led Jones to accuse the federal government of causing it. He didn't believe McVeigh and Terry Nichols were responsible. In 1998, Jones organized a campaign to build a new Branch Davidian church as a memorial, often discussing it on his show, and claimed David Koresh and his followers were peaceful people murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Jones began his broadcasting career on public access cable in Austin. In 1996, he moved to radio with a show called *The Final Edition* on KJFK (98.9 FM). Influenced by radio host William Cooper, who called into his early programs, Jones started broadcasting about the New World Order conspiracy. Ron Paul, while running for Congress, appeared on his show several times. In 1999, Jones tied for "Best Austin Talk Radio Host" in an *Austin Chronicle* reader poll but was fired from KJFK later that year for refusing to broaden his topics; the station said his views made it hard to sell ads.

In 1999, Jones and his wife Kelly founded the website InfoWars, initially as a mail-order outlet for conspiracy videos. He used it to release films like *America Destroyed by Design* and *America Wake Up Or Waco*. Over time, InfoWars became a prominent fake news site promoting conspiracy theories. He also founded Banned.Video, which provided a platform for white nationalists and neo-Nazis and served as an entry point to their ideology.

Jones has alleged that the U.S. government concealed or falsified information about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Parkland high school shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the September 11 attacks. He has claimed that governments and large businesses collude to create a globalist "New World Order" through manufactured economic crises, surveillance technology, and inside-job terror attacks. A longtime critic of both Republican and Democratic foreign and security policy, Jones supported Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid and continued to back him as a savior from a criminal bipartisan cabal, though he fell out with Trump over airstrikes against the Assad regime. He staunchly supported Trump's re-election and the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. On January 6, 2021, Jones spoke at the rally in Lafayette Square Park that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. In 2026, he again fell out with Trump over the Iran War, criticizing it as contrary to the "America First" message.

In October 2022, juries in Connecticut and Texas awarded a total of $1.487 billion in damages from Jones to a first responder and families of Sandy Hook victims, based on his defamatory falsehoods about the shooting. The plaintiffs alleged that his lies led to years of threats and harassment. On December 2, 2022, Jones filed for personal bankruptcy. After three years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal without comment.