The Loudest Man in the Room

An Austin public-access television studio, 1995. Anyone could book the cameras. The signal reached whoever happened to be on the channel. Alexander Emerick Jones walked in at twenty-one, two years of Austin Community College behind him and a Rockwall, Texas childhood in which his father, a dentist, had told him the Federal Reserve was a private cartel. He had been born in Dallas on February 11, 1974. The show was The Final Edition, and by November of that year he was broadcasting the Y2K conspiracy.

He registered InfoWars.com in 1999 and built it into the largest conspiracy-news platform of the early twenty-first century. Daniel Asher tracks the September 11 truther turn of 2001, the 2007 documentary Endgame, and the talk-radio empire of the 2010s; by 2016 the site drew two million unique monthly visitors and the show ran on more than 150 affiliate stations. Then the alliance with the Donald Trump campaign that year, and the 2017 Megyn Kelly interview on NBC that carried his Sandy Hook denialism to a wider audience.

For more than a decade Jones pushed the false claim that the December 14, 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had been staged. In a single twenty-four-hour period in 2018, Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube removed him. The 26 victims' families sued for defamation. He was found liable in Connecticut and in Texas, and the 2022 judgments totalled $1.49 billion. He filed for Chapter 11 in 2023. Asher follows the long bankruptcy-court fight over the sale of InfoWars as far as the Onion bid of November 2024.

What emerges is a portrait of the most consequential American conspiracy broadcaster of the twenty-first century, and of the $1.49 billion judgment the Sandy Hook families have built to test what an American court can do to him.