On December 14, 2012, a teenager from the city of Newtown in the United States killed his mother, with four bullets to the head. He leaves the corpse on his bed, still in pajamas. The young man breaks into the school in Sandy Hook, then he kills 26 people, including 20 children. All of America is in shock, except Alex Jones. Millions of Americans follow the shows and chronicles of this flourishing business Texan, born in 1974 in Dallas. For him, the massacre is only a staging of the lobby of opponents to the carrying of arms.
For years, this former journalist, founder of InfoWars, one of the most prosperous disinformation sites on the planet, proclaimed his “truth”, with complete impunity: “the Sandy Hook massacre is synthetic, completely bogus. Survivors and parents tearful are actors”. The concerned end up filing a complaint, in 2018. On August 6, the founder of the InfoWars website was ordered to pay 45 million dollars to the plaintiffs. An unprecedented sum, which opens the door to new financial sanctions for the propagators of “fake news”.
At the announcement of the verdict, Alex Jones turns red, shouts at the political trial, without ever leaving his posture as a “free” and “whistleblower” man. To see the armor of this accelerator of “fake news” and crazy conspiracy theories become millionaire fall, you have to go back a few days earlier. On August 3, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers explained that he received all of the accused’s telephone exchanges, following an error. Stupor. Jones the intrepid, follower of telegenic bloodshed and outrageous accusations is silent, and becomes livid. His text messages are more sensitive than his hoard.
“One of the greatest disinformation entrepreneurs”
In 20 years of career, this curator has risen to the head of an empire of fakes. Enough to feed an important address book. Americans discovered him at the beginning of the Internet, on Infowars.com, a site he created in 1999, after being fired from the television show he was presenting. He screams that 9/11 was the work of the US government. His audience takes off. He reiterates, denounces the existence of “colonies of slave children on Mars”, that “Michelle Obama is a man”, or that vaccines against Covid-19 fall under “gene therapy”. The advent of social networks, then the questions around the Coronavirus complete its success.
Meanwhile, Alex Jones’ articles link to his online stores, where he sells “Covid-19 toothpaste”, “IQ-boosting pills” and “apocalypse survival kits”. According to revelations from the HuffingtonpostInfoWars has brewed 165 million dollars in turnover, from 2015 to 2018. “He is the pope of conspiracy, and certainly one of the biggest disinformation entrepreneurs. It paved the way for the monetization of this kind of product and pushed it to its climax,” says Tristan Mendès France, associate lecturer at the University of Paris, specialist in digital cultures.
Until being in the small papers of Donald Trump, who like him, was banned from major social networks. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Alex Jones was in communication with Donald Trump’s collaborators when he was still in the White House. Even though they stop in 2020, the exchanges were forwarded to the January 6, 2021 commission, which is investigating the invasion of the Capitol. That day, Alex Jones harangued Trump supporters on the spot, ready to overthrow American democracy because they were convinced that Joe Biden and the Democrats would have rigged the election.
A crusading fanatic
The commission of inquiry of January 6 must in particular verify whether the tycoon of intox could play a political role within the Trump administration. During his 2016 campaign, the latter had sworn to him that he would “not let him down”, describing his “reputation” as “extraordinary”. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, recently called Jones “one of the greatest political thinkers of our time.” At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the summer school for American conservatives, some pro-Trump elected officials denounced “political persecution”. “There is a real ideological proximity between the two camps”, sums up Tristan Mendès France.
How political is Jones’ work? “He’s an isolationist, gun advocate, close to white supremacists without overtly joining them. There isn’t a hot topic that isn’t interpreted by Jones as a conspiracy of the left, of the feral state or the globalists”, indicates Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch and member of the Bronner commission responsible for combating the dissemination of false information in France. “His economic motivations seem to me to be inseparable from the vision of the world he defends and from his political and ideological inclinations.
During his trial, Alex Jones finally admitted that the children of Sandy Hook were indeed dead. One of the defenders of the family of the victims of the massacre called the contractor “patient zero of the inability of American society to separate the true from the false”. For these lawyers, his trial was an opportunity “to lessen the toxicity of an individual destroying the fabric of American society”. The disinformation pioneer is the subject of a series of ongoing legal proceedings, which could cost him his business.
What to definitely bring down this propagator of fake news? “His best years are behind him, but he left a deep mark on the American conspiracy subculture. It would be wrong to bury him,” warns Rudy Reichstadt. “His trial is a kind of precedent, which could pave the way for awareness of the money generated by the most abject disinformation”, adds Tristan Mendès France. Among the proposals of the Bronner commission submitted to Emmanuel Macron in January 2022 was the idea of giving associations that fight against disinformation the right to bring civil action, in the event of damage inflicted by false information.