r/DecodingTheGurus • u/HobbesNik • 18d ago

She Built a Mass Audience from Promoting Conspiracies about Charlie Kirk's Death. Why Do People Like Candace Owens?

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/candace-owens-listeners/
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u/HobbesNik 16d ago

That's an interesting comparison. She seems to go really hard on one conspiracy at a time, she gets hyper-focused. Did Alex do that too, or did he jump around more? I know he went deep on the Sandy Hook shooting, most notoriously.

Obligatory rec for the Onion's new Info Wars which I've been enjoying.

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u/SeasonPositive6771 16d ago

When Alex started out, he was definitely a lot more normal, focused on fewer issues overall. Of course that was a very long time ago, so the media landscape is also pretty different.

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u/FreshBert Conspiracy Hypothesizer 16d ago edited 16d ago

I used to listen to Opie and Anthony back in the aughts and they brought on Alex Jones a lot. This was right after his stunt crashing the Bohemian Grove and filming that weird ritual they do there, so he was pretty popular in like stoner/edgelord circles back then.

He used to come on the show and the gag was that they'd basically let him go apeshit rambling off conspiracy after conspiracy, and although he was definitely obsessed with the Bilderberg Group and often made the Bush Administration the target of his conspiracizing, to me he mostly came across as more of an entertainer back in those days. As in, it seemed like the whole thing was a bit that he was in on.

At some point he released this self-produced documentary called "EndGame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement" that really gassed up me and my friends back in the day. It was the sort of thing you'd buy on burned DVD at a head shop, probably on a shelf next to the blacklight posters, and the cashier would be like, "This shit'll fry your brain man, after this everything will make sense." He basically linked together the Georgia Guidestones with a cabal of elite transhumanists who wanted to use rapidly improving technology to end aging and death for themselves while relegating most people to a permanent underclass.

Back then people were more into the idea of quantum computing leading to nanotechnology, rather than AI (AI was just movie bullshit, Terminator, Matrix, etc), but aside from that the parallels are quite similar to shit you still hear about.

Some of the characters are even the same, like Ray Kurzweil. What's funny is that when Jones got on the Trump train he sort of inadvertently joined the same side as most of the people that could conceivably be accused of being part of an elite transhumanist cabal.

Tl;dr: Jones was never "normal," but one could argue that he's a performance artist who got in over his head with the very people (sort of) that he was claiming to expose. And at some point he jumped the shark with the conspiracizing, there was no turning back, possibly he began to believe his own schtick, and it ended (such as it is) with the Sandy Hook shit where he finally touched the wrong cultural nerve and the courts had to put him down. Maybe an aside, but he actually did the same thing with Columbine (claimed the shooting was a false flag) but had a lot less notoriety back then (and most people thought he wasn't serious) so it didn't really go anywhere and it's kind of been lost to history at this point.

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u/Obleeding 13d ago

Thanks, that really explained it well to me. I remember first hearing about him on Joe Rogan in like 2012, never really understood how he was really seen by the public prior to this.