Why Alex Jones Decided To Support Donald Trump
For pretty much the entirely of Alex Jones’ broadcast career, one piece of his worldview has been painfully consistent: any politician that has a chance of winning the presidency is obviously a “Globalist,” and thus not someone to support.
He takes this conception from the book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, where Gary Allen writes about how Woodrow Wilson’s adviser Colonel House wanted to take over the primary process of both parties to ensure that no candidate that didn’t represent the interests of the “Globalists” (Allen calls them “insiders”) would ever have a chance to be elected. If that plan was being put together in 1918, clearly it had to have been in place by the time Alex got on air in 1995, so he’s pretty much spent his entire career railing against mainstream candidates.
Of course, in None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Allen fails to explain that these ideas from Colonel House came from a futuristic fictional novel House wrote called Philip Dru: Administrator, a novel that is set in the backdrop of a new Civil War between the Eastern and Western United States. To give some idea of whether or not the book’s plans were implemented, the book could be represented to be arguing for government ownership of all telephones, no re-elections for Presidents, and the abolition of labor as a commodity. Clearly, there is plenty in this book that has absolutely not come true.
But, Alex doesn’t concern himself with that. He takes Gary Allen’s word as gold, so he has steadfastly believed that every Republican and Democrat candidate for president has been controlled by his sworn enemies. He has always supported Ron Paul, and after he became too old to be considered an option by even his biggest supporters, Ron’s son Rand Paul. These are his guys, there is no two ways about it, so it struck the ear very strangely when he came out so passionately in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 election.
To say it was out of character would be a severe understatement, and every available explanation for his allegiance either lacked any proof (i.e. he’s being blackmailed) or seemed absurd on it’s face (i.e. he works for Russia). I needed to understand what had happened to Alex, what had made him throw in with this clearly deranged candidate, when he absolutely did not have to. So, I listened to every episode of his show from the day that Trump announced his candidacy until the point Alex Jones says “I support Trump,” and as I had suspected, the picture is not nearly as tidy as most people understand.
The Background
In the 2008 election, Alex Jones had gone hard for Ron Paul. He helped elevate and organize former Ron Paul boosters like the folks behind We Are Change, and definitely stayed on that bandwagon after Paul’s defeat. The same is true of Paul’s run in 2012. Alex was still very on-board with the “movement,” arguing that Paul was the only person who could free America from the bondage of slavery imposed by the Federal Reserve.
In 2008, Ron Paul got 5.71% of the vote in the Republican Primary, a bit over one-quarter of the votes that Mike Huckabee received as the 3rd place finisher. He carried on and received 15 votes at the Republican National Convention (John McCain received 2,343). He came in 8th at the Libertarian National Convention, only getting three more votes than Penn Jillette. All in all, it was not an impressive showing for someone who is supposed to be Alex’s conquering hero, but given the political landscape, it is not an outcome that could have come as a surprise..
The 2012 election was an entirely different story, but only because it was a story where Alex Jones got his hopes up unrealistically.
The first event of the election season was the 2011 Iowa Straw poll, which saw Ron Paul come in 2nd, with 27.7% of the vote. With the rise of the Tea Party having created the appearance of a real movement, these results gave Alex all he needed to assume that Paul’s time had come. It’s hard not to see why he would think that, based on the fact that he only came in behind Michele Bachmann, who only got 28.6% of the vote herself. That’s essentially a statistical tie.
What isn’t accounted for in the numbers is that Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican candidate, had announced at least two months in advance that his campaign was skipping all Straw Polls that election cycle, and focusing their attention on caucuses and primaries.
Building on that momentum, Ron Paul came in 2nd in the Iowa caucus, but other than that, Maine and Minnesota, he was roundly crushed by Mitt Romney actually trying. When it was all said and done, he walked away with 10.4% of the vote in the primaries, coming in 4th again, this time behind Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
This vote tally of 10.4% actually represents a growth over the 5.7% of the previous election, but in 2008, there was no point where one could conceivably paint Ron Paul as a favorite, so the inevitable 4th place finish stung much harder in 2012.
In January 2013, Ron Paul retired from Congress and it was clear that he was not going to run for president again. Alex was left without his “guy.” He’d spent years and years talking about how Ron Paul getting in office would solve so many problems (knowing full well that would never happen), and just like that his “if only X would happen, Y would be fixed” narrative was gone. Alex hadn’t built up any other viable heroes to fall back on, which left only Ron’s son Rand Paul to fill in as potential savior.
But Rand Paul is no Ron Paul. Ron had a career in the House going back to 1976 full of bigotry masquerading as libertarian principle. He had proven where he stood by his track-record, but Rand only got voted into the Senate in 2011. Plus, he was a Senator from Kentucky, which is nowhere near as appealing to Alex as a Representative from Texas. All in all, Rand was a massive downgrade to Alex, and although he supported him consistently from 2011 onward, you could tell that the passion wasn’t there like it was with his feelings for Ron.
As the 2016 election season began, and Rand Paul indicated he was following in his father’s footsteps, Alex did what you would predict he would, and supported Rand Paul vociferously. He knew that Rand had no chance of winning, which proved his thesis that Rand wasn’t controlled by the “Globalists,” and thus, he was someone worth supporting. It’s circular thinking, but that is how it works in the world of propaganda and conspiracy.
Enter Donald Trump
Donald Trump officially announced that he was running for president on June 16, 2015, and unsurprisingly, Alex Jones did not care at all. He doesn’t mention the announcement on the June 17th show, and there was far bigger news to cover on June 18th, in the aftermath of Dylann Roof’s racist murder spree at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.
Alex immediately launched into narratives about how the shooting was possibly a false flag and how whites have it bad too. He sent his only black on-camera employee Jakari Jackson to Charleston, in hopes that he would find a race war breaking out, but instead Jakari only found a community coming together and trying to heal. It was a shameful display on Alex’s part, but it has little to do with Alex’s pivot to Trump, so best not to get too deep into it here (if you’d like to hear more about this, we did an episode covering June 18th, 2015).
On that same episode, one of Alex’s guests was con-man and anti-Clinton propagandist Larry Nichols. At this point, Larry had been smearing the Clintons for 20 years, and he wasn’t about to stop now that Hillary was running for president. Larry told Alex that Hillary and Bill wanted to be the Kings of the World, and that Alex was the only person who could stop them.
Throughout the campaign season, Larry served an important role in Alex’s psycho-drama, fostering and reinforcing Alex’s messiah complex. Through the weeks and months, Larry would reappear and say the stupidest things and Alex would gobble it up. He told Alex that Obama was trying to turn the US into a caliphate, so he could be the ruler of all the Muslim world. He told Alex that Hillary was a witch, and belonged to a coven with the woman who created the sitcom Designing Women. But, through all of it, he played his part as the hologram of Leia Organa, telling Alex he was their only hope.
Alex begins to internalize this idea, and becomes insanely grandiose before the end of 2015. Larry reappears on the July 23rd episode and explains to Alex that Alex needs to help him build an army to save the world from Hillary, and on the next day’s show, Alex spends a large portion of the show talking about how, the night before, he’d had a 20-year long dream that he had decided was a prophecy:
Never one to let a good opportunity go to waste, Alex almost immediately used the horrors of this “prophetic dream” to help sell some of his products:
It’s important to remember that all of this rhetoric existed entirely to support the candidacy Rand Paul, who Alex was firmly behind at that point. He believes that Hillary is the devil and the world will end if she is elected, and that Jeb Bush is just as bad and will undoubtedly be the Republican candidate because, as he learned from Gary Allen, no candidate can win a primary unless they are controlled.
Alex does not even mention Trump running for president until July 3, 2015, and when he finally starts talking about him, it is not positive. His first take on it is that Trump is just pretending to run because he wants the publicity:
Alex believes that it is “Trump’s job” to pave the way for Jeb to be the nominee. That definitely isn’t a compliment, but it’s also not the most damning thing in the world. However, that same day, Alex explains that he knows that Trump is a front man for the mob:
In this clip, Alex has indicated that he knows not only that Trump is connected to the mob, but that the image that he is very rich is a lie. His instinct with Trump is not to support him, or to even denounce him, it is to say, “forget about this guy, he’s bad news and not even worth our time here.” That is certainly an interesting starting point when we know the end point is “I love this man, he can save the world, and I will gladly die for him.”
The Change
The change didn’t happen immediately, but came gradually. Insanely gradually.
In July, Alex Jones is literally espousing “Rand Paul or Bust…but maybe Ted Cruz is okay” as his position in the 2016 election. However, as Trump begins to make stump speeches, and his rhetoric is roundly denounced by the media for being overtly racist (because his rhetoric was overtly racist), Alex takes notice. His initial response is to put forth as his Trump position, summed up as “Trump is a shill and you cannot trust him, but he’s saying racist things that I like being introduced into the political mainstream, so we should use him being here as an opportunity to move the Overton Window.” He says as much on July 6, 2015:
You’ll notice that Alex even says in that clip that Jerome Corsi has told him that Trump is a shill. This is no small deal, considering that (as of this writing) Jerome Corsi is under investigation for his actions to support Trump in the election, and Corsi has consistently portrayed himself on InfoWars as a decades-long friend of Trump’s. If what Alex is saying is true, then there is a complete pole shift that happens in the community of extreme right wing propagandists in the end of 2015. It is not isolated to just Alex changing, it is a broader thing.
Alex’s position on Trump becomes very complicated in July, as he expresses a bit of shock that Trump is still even running. Alex continues to enjoy Trump’s demonizing and scapegoating of minorities, but also continues to hold fast to his belief that you cannot trust Donald Trump and that he is definitely a shill.
On that same day, July 12, Alex doubles down on his accusation that Donald Trump is part of the mob:
“With a name like Corleone, they come after you. With a name like Trump, they don’t.” Alex could not be making his position any clearer, and bizarrely, as more and more details about Trump’s businesses and his Foundation come out, the more it looks like Alex was right. It rarely happens that Alex is right about something, and it’s truly surreal that the thing he’s initially right about is the thing he pretends he doesn’t know in order to justify making a career defining mistake by supporting Trump.
Throughout July, Alex’s callers all echo his sentiment: Trump is a shill and you can’t trust him, but his rhetoric normalizes beliefs that you wouldn’t get away with expressing in public before, so that is a positive. None of them support Trump, they are all in with Rand Paul.
At the end of July, Alex goes on vacation, and when he returns on August 10th, his position has not evolved. The first Republican debate had just happened, which appears to have made a few things clear to Alex.
First, he is clearly beginning to realize that Trump is getting more popular, and Rand Paul is nowhere near popular. He sees Trump putting forth positions he wants Rand to make publicly (e.g. “Mexico isn’t sending us their best people” or claiming that vaccines give people autism), so his only way to justify it is to begin to get mad at Rand Paul. “If only Rand said the things Trump did, Rand would be popular,” Alex thinks.
Second, he knows that Trump is bad news. Between the accusations of being a Clinton Shill and being in the mob, there is something deep-seated that Alex knows that make it impossible for him to support Trump.
This is a really important point, and pretty strongly indicates that it was not rhetoric or positions that could have possibly won Alex Jones over. He was already on board with Trump’s rhetoric as early as July, but there was something that he knows that makes him unable to endorse Trump as a person. This was the hurdle he had to get over.
In the middle of August, things begin to change, and it is clear that someone is talking to him behind the scenes, but Alex is not completely sold on the matter.
On the August 16, 2015 episode, Alex shows clear signs of a change in his position:
One of the key things to point out in this clip is that Alex says that Trump has “four-plus billion dollars, tens of billions in other assets.” He previously had said that everyone thinks Trump is rich, but he really is not. This is a concrete, unexplained change in his position, and it’s not about policy positions, it is about Trump’s personal life.
This is key. Alex saying that Trump really is a billionaire is not just him saying Trump is rich, it indicates a denial of his previous position. If Trump really is this rich, then it stands to reason that Alex’s allegations that Trump was poor and just a front-man for the mob aren’t true. But Alex doesn’t present this information as, “I looked into it and it turns out I was wrong about Trump’s finances.” It is just the new line of rhetoric: Trump really is that rich and wants to save America because his businesses depend on people having money to spend.
The timing of this change could not be more suspicious. Roger Stone left the Trump campaign (or was fired, depending on who you ask) on August 8, 2015, saying “I resigned largely because I thought I was having no impact.” Through the entire dust-up, Roger maintained his support of the Trump candidacy, and would later say, “I’m really hopeful that his campaign will go back to those core issues that got him where he is today. If my going rogue is what lays out that path, so be it.” Roger made no mystery of the fact that he left the campaign because his particular set of skills (propaganda and dirty-tricks) would serve the Trump interests better if he wasn’t formally connected to the campaign. Then, within a week, Alex begins to change elements of his story about Donald Trump that seem like they would be the kind of information he wouldn’t gather from research, but the sort of thing he might get from talking to a friend of Trump’s.
This timing stinks to high-heaven, and this is not some wild-eyed connecting of dots that are completely unrelated. Roger has publicly taken credit for convincing Alex to support Trump and said, “he’s a valuable asset.”
It’s also important to note that Alex is not immediately on board here. He is cautiously treading into the waters, saying he’s “60-40 in favor” of Trump. This is precisely what one would expect to hear from Alex after someone like Roger Stone tries to persuade him that Trump is for real. Remember, at this point, the two are not good friends, they are just familiar with each other from meeting at a JFK convention in 2013, so Alex does not have any reason to trust him implicitly. He’s willing to cautiously entertain these ideas because he’s loving Trump’s bigoted rhetoric, and he recognizes that Rand Paul is going nowhere.
By the end of August, it is clear that Alex is in complete inner conflict. He still loves Rand Paul because he is related to Ron Paul, and a decade-plus of fighting for their family is hard to give up on overnight. But he also really hates Hillary. And he also loves the things Trump is saying:
And thus, Alex Jones enters a holding pattern, going through September 15:
He stays in this cycle of internal conflict for quite a while, constantly vacillating between his ingrained love of the Paul family and his growing frustration that Rand Paul won’t say the horrible things that Trump says, which happen to be the things that Alex is really into. It’s still a personal issue for Alex. He likes the things Trump is saying, but even though Roger is almost certainly telling him that Trump is actually rich and definitely a cool guy behind the scenes, Alex is not convinced.
In order for Alex Jones to get over this hurdle, there are two essential elements that will need to come into play: 1) Creating a narrative that Trump is fighting a secret war against the Clintons behind the scenes, and 2) Extreme desperation on Alex’s part. In the closing months of 2015, both of these elements come into Alex’s life and lead him down the worst possible path he could have chosen.
Creating The Narrative: Enter Steve Pieczenik
Steve Pieczenik is a long time guest of Alex’s. He’s been coming on the show and using his resume as a hostage negotiator with the State Department to convince Alex of all sorts of horrible things. He was one of the people who convinced him that Sandy Hook was a false flag (and has said so as recently as early 2017 on David Knight’s show), if that gives some sense of the sort of chaos Steve brings.
Steve’s main credential when he comes on the show is that he is an expert in “psych warfare” and has run a ton of psy-ops in the past. Alex is clear to explain that, while this is true, Steve would never run a psy-op on Alex or his audience.
You hate to hear something like that. Alex is basically saying, “he’s a murderer, but he would never murder us because we’re cool.” It’s a profound level of naivete that is just disappointing.
Two days earlier, on October 20, 2015, Steve had come on Alex’s show and revealed that he and a mysterious group of people, including “good people in intelligence,” had been working behind the scenes to get Trump elected:
This is the formal beginning of what will become the “Counter-Coup Narrative,” the story that Steve Pieczenik tells Alex to convince him that Trump is actually working for the good secret forces to stop a secret behind the scenes coup that the Clintons are trying to pull off, and that if Trump gets elected, the culprits of 9/11 will be brought to justice, along with the Clintons.
This is an essential piece of what you need to hook someone like Alex Jones. He thinks he’s living in a spy movie, so the best way to direct his actions is to write a spy movie around him, with not-so-subtle suggestions of what he should do, namely be a part of this uprising that is taking place, carried out by “patriots” behind the scenes.
To put it simply, this is an act of psych warfare.
Steve Pieczenik has lit the fuse of Alex’s messiah complex. The groundwork laid by Larry Nichols has paid off, and now Alex knows his role in the larger picture. He is to be the mouthpiece on air, keeping the “patriots” informed of the goings-on in the secret war against the secret Clinton-Coup. Alex doesn’t accept this role immediately, as it takes a while for that fuse to burn, but once Steve introduced this narrative to the show, there was no way for Alex to escape.
On November 9, 2015, Roger Stone appears on Alex’s show for the first time, and he is there as nothing more than a Trump pitch-man. He knows the things that are particular interests of Alex’s and plays him like a violin, saying things that are completely absurd, like that Trump plans to bring back the Gold Standard, something particularly appealing to a radio host whose show is syndicated by a gold salesman:
He knows that Alex has a gun fetish, so he tells him that Trump is always carrying a gun:
He makes his pitch perfectly clear: Only Trump can save America:
On December 5, 2015, Alex has an interview with Trump on his show where Trump famously tells Alex that he has a “great reputation,” and that they would be talking a lot in the future. Alex is a notorious star-fucker, so this obviously did a lot to sway him over to supporting Trump, but he still holds out hope that Rand can right the ship and that everything will be okay until December 16, when he flips the script:
Alex’s support of Rand Paul exists largely as an extension of his support of Ron Paul, and Rand is just a disappointment to Alex. No amount of persuasion would have ever gotten Alex to support Trump over Ron Paul, but Ron’s son is just not good enough. But another piece of the puzzle here is that Alex is realizing that he can’t influence Rand Paul. He’s been yelling on the air for him to “get hardcore” and start saying the things Trump is saying for months now, and Rand is not coming to the table. Meanwhile, Alex has Trump’s “former campaign head” Roger Stone coming on his show and hooking up an interview with Trump where he says that he and Alex will be working together in the future.
Conversely, he starts to get the idea in his head that he can influence Trump:
On that December 30, 2015 episode, Alex indicates that the only thing that was holding him back from supporting Trump is now gone, and he is now free to support his candidacy:
Something very important to remember here is that what has transpired could easily appear to be a situation where Alex gradually lost his taste for Rand Paul, and started to like Donald Trump more and more. There is an argument to be made there, but that argument is ultimately weak because it does not explain Alex changing his position from “Donald Trump is fake rich and is a front-man for the mob” to “Donald Trump is a legitimate businessman who has billions of dollars” right after Roger Stone left the Trump campaign to help from the outside by “going rogue.”
It also doesn’t explain why Roger Stone and Steve Pieczenik pretend to not know each other, but accidentally let slip on air that they are working together.
Coordination
Alex is a very proud man, and as such, he did his best to present the image that Trump was coming on his show because Alex’s show is just that important. He never mentioned that Roger Stone set up the interview, and there is no way that anyone who only had access to public information would have known that. To an external observer, Roger Stone was fired (or quit) from the Trump campaign in August but still hated Hillary, then three months later he happened to be in Austin, so he appeared on the Alex Jones Show. Thus, it stuck out when Steve Pieczenik showed up two days after Trump appeared on InfoWars and was fully aware that Roger set up the interview, something that the conversation makes very clear that Alex did not tell him.
If you listen carefully, Steve is very heavily implying that he does not know Roger Stone. He says that he’s “known of him” since the Reagan administration. Alex is caught a little bit off-guard, and gets halfway to realizing that these two men have been coming on his show and presenting themselves as not knowing each other, yet they are saying the same things to him. Alex gets so close to understanding what’s going on a little later in the conversation:
The “some other people” that Alex is wondering about at the end of that clip is categorically Roger.
Steve is doing his best to make sure that Alex does not realize that he knows Roger Stone because if he does, the charade has been ruined. Steve has been coming on Alex’s show and telling him about this Counter-Coup within the Intelligence Community against the Clintons for months now, and as Alex is clearly indicating, Roger has been telling him the same things off-air, but saying he has to keep it secret. If Alex knows that the two of them know each other, the game they are playing is obvious, but if they appear to be two completely unrelated entities, especially ones Alex respects, it seems like it just might be real.
By December 29th, when Steve returns, Alex has fully convinced himself that Steve and Roger were not working together to run a psy-op on him, but if you listen to Alex explain what happened to him off-air, it’s really hard to imagine reaching any other conclusion:
When Roger Stone appeared on Alex’s show on August 9, 2017 and tried to make Alex worried that he was going to be raided by the “Globalists” any day now, he revealed his membership in a group of Trump loyalists who call themselves “The 45 Group”:
On March 24, 2017, Steve Pieczenik made an appearance on Alex’s show to discuss how all right-thinking people needed to be opposed to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Steve believes him to be a neo-con, which he will not abide being anywhere near power after all the hard work he did to get Trump into office. In their exchange, he repeatedly makes mention of “The Group,” which he describes as “those of us who kept the revolution going”:
In other appearances, Steve has made clear that he and Roger are in the same “group.”
It is fully beside the point whether or not this 45 Group exists or is just some kind of verbal flourish both of these men use. Conversely, the reality that Steve Pieczenik and Roger Stone (and quite possibly other InfoWars “guests”) were working in a coordinated fashion to manipulate Alex Jones into supporting Trump in the 2016 election is inescapable. If it were not important for Steve and Roger to appear to not know each other, then there would be no reason for them to create that impression. If Steve was part of a group that recruited Trump to run for president, there is no way he wouldn’t know Roger well, since Roger has been trying to get Trump to run for president for at least 20 years.
Extreme Desperation
There is one further element in this that is left to be discussed, and that is Alex’s extreme desperation in the early-winter of 2015.
Alex Jones’ show is distributed by the Genesis Communications Network (GCN), which is owned by Ted Anderson. Ted Anderson is the owner of Midas Resources, a gold/silver retailer, who started GCN literally to serve as an advertising arm of Midas Resources. He said, “They’re partnership-type businesses; Midas Resources needs customers, Genesis Communications Network needs sponsors.”
A lot of Alex’s cash-flow is caught up in GCN, and it was even more so back in 2015.
Thus, it was probably a huge disaster when Ted Anderson lost his license to sell gold and silver on November 3, 2015. The action that would lead to his license being taken away by the state of Minnesota began on September 11, 2015, so that period of time becomes crucial to consider.
According the the filing, Midas Resources had “routinely failed without prior agreement to deliver bullion to its customers within 30 days of payment.” They had “misappropriated a customer's money and otherwise misrepresented terms of sale and delivery dates.” Ted know that when the case was ruled on, he was going to be in trouble, because he basically plead guilty to the charges by waiving his right to a hearing on the matter, and acknowledging that the ruling the Minnesota Department of Commerce handed down would be binding, and that “any civil penalties or judgments arising from this Stipulation and Consent Order are non dischargeable in any bankruptcy proceeding.”
Ted Anderson had been running a shady gold business for years, with Alex’s show as his main advertising campaign, and the shadiness of it finally caught up to him. The state of Minnesota revoked his license to sell bullion, and ruled that he was “prohibited from being an owner, officer, member, or shareholder of any entity that holds a bullion coin dealer registration in the State of Minnesota for two years.” They revoked Midas Resources’ bullion license and issued a cease and desist on them buying or selling precious metals.
But perhaps most importantly, they ruled that Midas Resources had to “pay full restitution to all customers within 12 months.” The terms of this are specifically laid out, and Midas had to pay $310,000 immediately, and then between $10K-$60K per month to pay restitution to the customers they had wronged. If that $60,000 a month number is the expectation to pay off customers in a year, that plus the $310,000 puts the hole Ted is in at just over a million dollars.
That wasn’t all. There was also a $100,000 civil penalty to the state of Minnesota, but that only came into effect if he failed to make his restitution as laid out. If he failed to make a month’s payment, the fine would be levied.
Ted was in a serious bind. He was out at least $310,000 immediately, and had a cease and desist order to stop him from doing the thing his business did.
And thus, it should come as no surprise that on September 16-17, 2015, Alex Jones held a marathon show, centered around a “Take Back Our Republic” Money Bomb, something he hadn’t done since October 18-19, 2012.
Alex was specifically trying to raise a million dollars, or almost exactly the amount Ted Anderson owed the customers who had brought action against him.
The implication here is pretty clear. Alex’s business arm was in serious financial trouble, so he did the only thing he could, trick his audience into giving him a bunch of money, while playing up the illusion that somehow this was about “Taking Back The Republic.” This is a pathetic level of cynicism on display, or the single craziest series of coincidences ever.
The final judgement in Ted Anderson’s case came down on November 3rd, and less than a week later, Roger Stone shows up on Alex’s show. These events were not connected, but they each played their critical parts in creating the Alex Jones that exists today.
From late-September, early-November 2015, Alex Jones knew that the comfortable “Support Ron Paul/Sell Ted Anderson’s Gold” scam he’d been running since 1999 was over and that fundamental changes had to be made if he was going to stay afloat. On the business front, his replaced “Selling Ted Anderson’s Gold” with “Selling Dr. Group’s Supplements.” On the political side, he replaced “Supporting Ron Paul” with “Idolizing Donald Trump.” Unfortunately, it appears that the latter decision was one he was tricked into making.
End Note: What About Russia?
Many people have suggested that Alex Jones was somehow paid by Russia, or even that he works for Russia, and that is what made him support Donald Trump. As someone who has spent countless hours contemplating Alex’s rhetoric, I find this suggestion absurd.
It is understandable why someone might want to consider this possibility since Alex is both very pro-Trump and very pro-Russia/pro-Putin. You can hear him speak about the latter here:
The problem with connecting the two is that there is no coherent timeline to make this theory work.
That clip was from September 29, 2015, before Alex had decided to support Trump. And his support of Russia isn’t limited to the 2016 election season.
As far back as 2008, Alex Jones has had a fairly consistent position that Russia and Vladimir Putin are the good guys, and the “Globalists” are the bad guys. On January 20, 2009, the day of Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Alex had someone fill in as host of his show so he could go be interviewed on Russia Today. The tendency of Alex to go out of his way to support Russia is a through-line of most of his career, and it is a mistake to look at this as being related to Trump or the 2016 election.
In order to make the argument work that Russia was in any way actively involved in Alex Jones’ transformation into being Trump’s propagandist, they would need to explain why he was praising Russia and Putin, and putting forth Russian propaganda narratives willingly for years before, and did not accept Trump easily, as you would expect him to were he taking orders.