How Alex Jones won

One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this:

I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’!

I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast!

I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force!

This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like!

This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am!

Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns. They may even have been accelerants.

In 2018, a bunch of nervous Silicon Valleyites overestimated their control of the web and deplatformed Jones. Today, he’s back on Twitter with 4.4 million followers. Pressure is mounting to reinstate his YouTube channel. His app was recently allowed on the Apple Store again. It’s currently ranked 13th in the news section – higher than Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the AP, NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and CNN. His shows pull in millions of streams every week. He’s not fringe. I’m watching InfoWars as I write this. His guest is Senator Tommy Tuberville.

All you really need, Jones has proven, is a mic and an internet connection. In fact, he’s proven that only having a mic and an internet connection might be better than having, say, a primetime slot on Fox. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – hosts of the first and third most popular news podcasts in the country, respectively – certainly learned this lesson from Jones. So did Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon.

Jones also changed what these voices dare speak about. Owens is obsessed with proving that Brigitte Macron was born a man, Carlson with UFOs and 9/11 trutherism – such topics would fit right into a Jones segment, but would have been unthinkable subjects for the biggest names in media to cover a few years ago. Carlson just brought Jones onto his broadcast for an episode titled “Alex Jones Warns of the Globalist Death Cult Fueling the Next Civil War and Rise of the Antichrist.”

More important than that, however, is that Jones has shifted the way regular Americans think, even those who’ve never listened to him. It’s totally unsurprising to go to a party and hear someone say the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles – a theory that he’s been incubating for decades.

“Globalism” has become a dirty word; populism is in; no one likes Bill Gates; Christian nationalism is on the upswing. Jones has been screaming for all this for the past two decades. He was doing so when no one else with a major platform would. Everyone – on the left and the right – has a pet conspiracy these days, because the average American thinks a lot more like Alex Jones than most people are willing to admit.

Still, he’s nuts. For every one thing he gets right – for example, that George Soros is flooding the country with bad prosecutors – he gets 99 things wrong, such as his theory that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an inside job. Given his nuttiness, journalists have a hard time accounting for his popularity. This is because journalists, as a rule, tend to lack imagination.

A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines biblical diction with sci-fi bunkum

There’s a discomfiting but simple explanation for Jones’s popularity: he is America’s greatest living orator. (Sorry, Obama.) His Texas voice growls like a souped-up semitruck engine; his monologues burn with Christian fire and swinging fists; you can smell the whiskey on his breath and hear him fire Colt .45s skyward before raising his arms and proclaiming, “Praise Jesus, amen!”

This puts him in the same tradition as Whitman, Cotton Mather and William Jennings Bryan. A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines King James biblical diction with science-fiction bunkum. “Get behind me Satan!” he yells into the microphone during a sermonette on the New World Order before describing interdimensional systems beyond our imagination and declaring that “Humanity is going interstellar!”

Soothsaying and calls to repentance spill from him as if against his own will – the Large Hadron Collider opened a portal to hell; death-worshipping, third-world hordes will fall upon the American promised; the Devil is building a machine to impersonate God; men must stop watching football. It’s all very prophetic-sounding.

Sometimes he adopts the persona of Jeremiah weeping over his people. “People are ugly now,” he laments. “They’re stupid. Their IQs are dropping. They’re dying all around us. I feel like a failure. God, if I ruled the planet, I’d feel like I ruled a pile of cockroaches or something. I mean, who the hell would want to rule this?”

But most of the time, his prophesying is a rallying call against the forces of evil in his cosmology: Democrats, globalists, Justin Bieber. His monologues are often uploaded to Instagram and TikTok and backed by rousing music. One such speech sees him shouting, “I’m so full of life and so full of resistance to these murdering pedophiles who want to get in the way of God’s plan! And let me tell you, I’ve been taken up to the third heaven. I’ve been jacked into the big plan. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and I can’t even compute all of it, it’s so fantastical.”

He goes on, “Anybody that tries to get in the way of the incredible plan the big guy’s got for us has got me pissed and I’m just begging to stay on the team man. Just put me in the game coach, whatever you say coach, I know I’m weak, I know I’m pathetic. Man, you’re amazing. I’m so lucky you made me. What do I need to do boss!?” Then he starts panting like a dog and growls, “I’m like a hunting dog man, just take me out of the house, just turn me on them!”

For a religion-starved population – which American zoomers and millennials certainly are – this is water in the desert. (Is the water safe to drink? That’s another question.) Jones’s audience skews young. It’s composed largely of people who grew up in a secular world. Most of these young people probably didn’t go to church growing up, and if they did, they were exposed to the milquetoast Protestantism so common across the country. But it’s human nature to want a prophet, and a few decades of secularization can’t change that. For these listeners, hearing Jones for the first time must be like hearing thunder for the first time. Pollsters insist that America’s young men are turning back to religion. That’s a hopeful idea. But what if Alex Jones is the nation’s highest prophet?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.