Alex Jones Didn’t Just Spread Lies: He Helped the Right Wing Weaponize Them to Undermine American Democracy

How Republicans turned misinformation into a system for seizing power and reshaping reality, and the damage those lies are doing to our democracy…

Thom Hartmann | The Hartmann Report | April 1, 2026

I still remember the day, back in 2009, when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.

It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).

But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the right-wing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:

“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. 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.”

The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the nation.

When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.

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