Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticAt the start of “Alex’s War,” a documentary about Alex Jones, the infamous talk-news conspiracist guru of InfoWars is described by assorted media outlets as “a performance artist,” “paranoia porn,” and — in the words of John Oliver — “the Walter Cronkite of shrieking bat-shit guerrilla clowns.” All of which, of course, is accurate.
Yet none of it fully captures what an important figure Alex Jones has become, even as he’s been systematically deplatformed. (The deplatforming, of course, only helped his cause.
It shored up and even mythologized his image as The Man Speaking Truth to the Power That Doesn’t Want You to Hear Him.)A couple of decades ago, when he was on the rise as the ranting scourge of “globalism” and other evils, most of us dismissed Alex Jones as an outlier and a self-promoting blowhard who was ultimately a trivial voice shouting from the wilderness of his extreme beliefs.
There was no denying that he had the charisma of a right-wing fire-breather like Michael Savage. But the defining quality of Alex Jones was a willingness — more than that, a compulsion — to lend credibility to conspiratorial nonsense.
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