Former Alex Jones employee says: 'It was nonsense, it was lies' by Dave Davies

 

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.