The Madness of Believing summary

Owens was soon shown how stories were built: Headlines mattered more than substance. Sources were useful when they fit, ignored when they didn’t. The goal wasn’t to explore – it was to reinforce. Each piece was supposed to add weight to the larger, conspiratorial narrative that Jones was constantly shaping.

In Jones’s worldview, evil globalist cabals were the great threat. They were keeping people distracted and looking in the wrong direction by orchestrating false flag events, or elaborate hoaxes like 9/11 and school shootings that involved crisis actors. 

Owens was rising through the ranks at Infowars, earning Jones’s respect and gaining real influence. Yet as he climbed higher, a series of events made it hard to ignore the increasingly chaotic, all-consuming environment he’d landed in.

The first happened not long after the airplane incident. Jones sent a crew to Utah to film his iodine supplements being manufactured – and since they were in the area, he had another idea. There was a new NSA data center nearby. Jones wanted his team to walk straight up to it, cameras rolling, and start asking questions about government surveillance. Never mind the barbed wire fences or armed guards.

By his third year with Jones, Owens was clinging to some hopeful signs: Business was booming. He was earning a decent wage. Their facilities were looking sharper. And there was a new arrival – Buckley Hamman, Jones’s cousin – who set about giving everything a corporate polish. He talked about “structure” and “systems” like Infowars was a real business.

Sure enough, this rebrand attracted new attention. When Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited the studio, Jones was uncharacteristically nervous and visibly eager to impress. They didn’t agree on everything – Carlson pushed back on Jones’s 9/11 theories – but they aligned on bigger themes like distrust of institutions, media manipulation, and immigration. Jones wasn’t isolated anymore. He was connecting with people who could carry his same ideas into more mainstream spaces.

Owens seemed like a success story. He’d gone from being Alex Jones’s go-to cameraman and editor to earning a promotion to field producer. As 2016 crept on, getting closer to the November elections, the Infowars operation was looking more polished than ever. But in reality, it was just as unstable as it had always been.

One thing that was becoming more noticeable was Jones’s drinking. Jones had always kept vodka at the office. But these days, with his marriage falling apart, he was hitting the bottle hard. It resulted in dark moments, like Jones asking coworkers to punch him, then invariably turning violent himself. Owens watched confident men shrink in those moments, bending to their boss in ways that felt both voluntary and forced. It was a new kind of power play, one that was physical as much as emotional.

At the RNC in Cleveland, Owens ran into someone unexpected: Jon Ronson. He recognized Ronson from the old Alex Jones video, Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, where Ronson had been shadowing Jones for a BBC documentary about conspiracy theorists. Years later, Ronson was still interested in Jones’s career, so he gave Owens his contact information. 

Owens held onto it, but not to set up some meeting between him and Jones. He saw Ronson as something else: a light at the end of a dark tunnel. In the months after the Cleveland convention, he held on to Ronson’s number as things got worse. Jones had amplified another online rumor – this time about a supposed child sex ring operating under a Washington DC pizza joint, which resulted in an Infowars listener showing up to the restaurant with a rifle. The consequences were getting dire.

The one thing standing between Owens and his exit was the NDA he’d signed when he joined, the same one every Infowars employee signed. On Ronson’s advice, he booked an appointment with a lawyer back in Austin. The legal answer was the cautious one: stay quiet. But then the lawyer paused. As a fellow human being living in America, he said, “you have to do this.” 

Silence has its own cost. And Owens just hoped that cost was higher than whatever Jones would throw at him when the story came out. Fortunately, a friend helped him land an entry-level job managing a social media account. The pay cut was steep, but by then, the only thing that really mattered was leaving. He resigned the same day.