The FRONTLINE Interviews

Anna Merlan

Journalist and Author

Anna Merlan is a journalist at VICE, focusing on subcultures and conspiracy. She is the author of Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.

Following are excerpts of an interview conducted by FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk on March 12, 2020. They have been edited for clarity.

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Anna Merlan

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On Alex Jones

Who is Alex Jones?How would you define what he does?

Alex Jones is a conspiracy peddler.He’s not a conspiracy consumer.He’s someone who’s made his money, who’s made his public name, who’s made his fortune, because he has made a fortune, off of the promotion of conspiracy theories, off of the promotion of this idea that there is a cover-up of elite evildoing.And that if you can uncover it, you yourself will be safer.You’ll be able to protect yourself.There is not a lot of hope in Alex Jones’ cosmology for a better world, or a more just society.A lot of what he focuses on is how individuals can better protect themselves from the evildoing of the elites.

So now, let’s go backwards to 9/11.Can you walk me through what Alex Jones said and did?

So a big element of Alex Jones’ show, and his theorizing generally, is that things are false flag attacks.That is, attacks perpetrated by the government, or elements within the government, to create fear, suspicion, division, or to bring us all under the sinister control of the new world order, or the one world government.And so that is how Jones made his name among right wing conspiracy theorists, by claiming that the Oklahoma City bombings were a false flag.

So with 9/11, he started guessing that it was a false flag attack, because that is his general way of doing things.But he’s not alone.That became a pretty sizeable feature in the discussion of 9/11 almost immediately.There was a lot of conspiracy theorizing about who perpetrated it, and why.

Why?

So in 9/11 conspiracy theorizing, there were two main schools of thought, which is, “let it happen on purpose,” and “made it happen on purpose.”So LIHOP and MIHOP.The “made it happen on purpose” school of thought, which is more where Alex Jones typically tends to fall, is the idea that the US government perpetrated the attacks themselves, either to consolidate their control, to justify invading oil-rich countries, or, you know, for some other reason.“Let it happen on purpose” basically holds that they had advance knowledge from intelligence services that the attacks were going to happen, and that they allowed them to happen anyway, for the same purpose, to, you know, consolidate control, to justify invading an oil-rich country for whatever other reason you want to point to.

The Role of Technology

After 9/11, technology is exploding.What are its effect on Jones, and its effect on the world of conspiracies?

So Alex Jones was one of the first people to correctly intuit that the web would be an amazing mechanism for growth for anyone who was hoping to run a self-styled media company.But it wasn’t just him.And we see that because of September 11th.September 11th was the first terrorist attack, and the first mass casualty event, that happened right around the same time that the advent of personal blogging platforms started to take place.And so those blogging platforms, and the sort of dawn of social media allowed people to share their own theories about what had happened, sort of talk to each other outside of the confines of things like letters to the editor.It allowed people to communicate, to form communities, to form their own theories, and to show them more freely, in ways that they really hadn't been able to before.

The Jones/Trump Relationship

What does [Donald] Trump get from it?And what does Jones get from it?

Trump was trying to appeal to any audience segment he possibly could.And it’s unclear to me how much he knew about Alex Jones.It’s very hard to say what Trump understands about the media ecosystem, or did at that time.But obviously, for Jones, this was a huge coup, getting a presidential candidate to sit down on his show.This was, I think, one of the first interviews that Trump did as a candidate, before people were even taking him seriously.

So, as his campaign started to gain steam, more and more people were paying attention to Alex Jones, and asking who he was, and where he fit into things.

And when you watch Trump and Jones talk, what does it tell you about both of them?

It would be pretty much impossible to watch that interview and not conclude that they are very similar in some ways.They're both very self-congratulatory.They’re given to really sweeping statements about the state of the world, and especially about the various forces of evil that overwhelm it.It’s a very sort of simple outline of the world, where there is this idea that there is sort of urgent evil in the world that needs to be taken down, and that only Trump, this one lone man, can possibly do it, because Trump was an outsider, and outside the political system, which Jones positioned to his audience as a positive.

Pizzagate

The idea of child sexual abuse or sexual abuse in general is not a new idea in the world of conspiracies.

No it’s not.The belief that evildoers are meeting in secret to abuse children is really old.Again, it is a big element of the blood libel, and it has asserted itself throughout history repeatedly.Pizzagate had a lot of elements in common with the satanic panic of the 1980s, which was again a belief that people were ritually abusing children in secret, in large groups, authority figures, kindergarten teachers, you know, trusted members of society were engaging in the abuse of children.

But it’s so on its face absurd.Why would people sign on and believe it?

It didn’t seem that absurd to a lot of people.You know, in my sort of work talking to people who were persuaded by the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a lot of them were people who were survivors of sexual violence, or they were people who were deeply religious, and believed in this sort of personification of the devil, and believed that evil was at work in the world.And that one of the ways that evil asserts itself is through the abuse and slaughter of innocents.And so for a lot of people, it was an extreme narrative, but it was not a narrative that was unbelievable.

So once it’s exposed as being just a pizza parlor, do the conspiracy theory believers walk away from it?

If people walked away from Pizzagate and decided they had been mistaken, we didn’t hear about it.Those people didn’t say anything publicly.I saw a couple things happen.Some people said, you know, that they believed that there were still children being held prisoner, but they had been moved, or killed, or disappeared in some other way.Other people sort of turned their attention towards a conspiracy theory that started to be called QAnon, which is kind of related to Pizzagate, but took on a slightly different tone.

So the underlying elements of Pizzagate are the idea of elite cover-ups, evil, ritual abuse, and those—a lot of those elements started to assert themselves again in QAnon, which became a much larger theory that was less easily pinned to one thing that could be discredited, like a slavery ring in the basement of a pizza parlor.

The Changing Nature of Conspiracies

How are conspiracy theories morphing?Is somebody like Jones gathering power, influence and whatever, by doing something different each time?Or is it a continuation of the same old structure of all the conspiracies that have been going on?

The basic thing that we can say about conspiracy theories is that they are a fundamental extension of our desire to hold powerful people to account, and to expose wrongdoing.And conspiracy theories, especially really extreme ones like Pizzagate are sort of twisted versions of doing that.This belief that there is a responsibility for those of us who are just commonplace, ordinary citizens, to expose high-level wrongdoing.

One thing that we do see sort of changing in conspiracy theories is that they have a longer half-life than they used to.Because conspiracy communities can find each other now on social media.They can find each other.They can fuse together.And they can sort of start taking each other in new directions.So I was keeping an eye on these online communities that were fundamentally oriented around Pizzagate.And I watched them change their focus.I watched them become more oriented towards QAnon conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories about Seth Rich.They sort of started to convince themselves that they all needed to go in a different direction as a group.And they were able to do that.

What has Alex Jones’ impact been on politics in America across the two decades?

It’s really hard to say what his impact is.Alex Jones is part of a bigger phenomenon, which is the impact of conspiracy theories on electoral politics.We know that conspiracy theories in America tend to wax and wane.They return and come to prominence at times of social upheaval, social change, big discussions about what we believe as a country.However, what people like Alex Jones and others showed us is that conspiracy theories are an effective political tool.They work.They help shape elections.They help shape public discussion.They help people decide what to believe.

And so we see it in our elections.We see it in our discussions about public health, about public wellbeing, about things like gun policy.Conspiracy theories work.

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