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| First tonight, our report on the incendiary radio host, Alex Jones. | |
| For years, Jones has been spreading conspiracy theories, claiming, for instance, that elements of the U.S. government allowed the 9 /11 attacks to happen and that the horrific Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. | |
| Some thought we shouldn't broadcast this interview because his baseless allegations aren't just offensive, they're dangerous. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| Alex Jones isn't going away. | |
| Over the years, his YouTube channel has racked up 1.3 billion views. | |
| He has millions of listeners and the ear of our current president. | |
| We begin our report with his reaction to the recent terrorist attack in Manchester, England. | |
| Alex Jones was nearly 5,000 miles away from Manchester, England when a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a concert less than four weeks ago. | |
| Despite the distance and with few facts known, Jones did what he often does, jumped mouth-first into controversy. | |
| A big bomb goes off at a pop star's rock concert bombing a bunch of liberal trendies. | |
| You said it was a bunch of liberal trendies who were killed, the same people who are promoting open borders. | |
| Bringing Islamists in. | |
| Yes. | |
| In response to which many people looked at the victims, many of whom were 15, 14. I know, I'm sorry I didn't blow them up. | |
| I know, but I did something bad, though. | |
| No, that you would suggest that an eight-year-old, right? | |
| There was Safi Rose Rousseau, eight years old, that she was a liberal trendy. | |
| Because that's what you said about the victims, is what has people upset. | |
| No, no. | |
| The media misrepresenting and clipping that the way you did. | |
| I got home at like 6 o 'clock, heard about it. | |
| The ages of the victims weren't even known, but they were saying it was jihadi. | |
| And I said, how crazy is it that liberal trinnies are now the victims? | |
| And then I started going and looking. | |
| Of course, if there's kids being killed by Muslims, I'm not saying that it That pattern, reckless accusation followed by equivocations and excuses, is classic Alex Jones. | |
| He has spent nearly two decades on the fringe, shouting his conspiracy theories into any microphone he could get in front of. | |
| Here he is on Austin Community Television in 2001. | |
| He and his company Infowars have been steadily gaining followers for years, producing radio shows and webcasts, which reach millions a month. | |
| But Jones' influence hit new heights when he attracted a very famous fan, then presidential candidate Donald Trump. | |
| I just want to finish by saying your reputation is amazing. | |
| In December 2015, Mr. Trump appeared on Jones' radio program, offering praise and promises. | |
| I will not let you down. | |
| You will be very, very impressed, I hope. | |
| And I think we'll be speaking a lot better. | |
| Separately, both men had supported the false statement that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen. | |
| Donald Trump is surging. | |
| And they've had more in common since. | |
| I agree with Trump on that. | |
| He agrees with me. | |
| He's following Alex on coal. | |
| He's following Alex on guns. | |
| He's following Alex on borders. | |
| The 2016 campaign was good for Infowars. | |
| Its YouTube monthly views reached 83 million in November 2016, more than five times higher than the previous November. | |
| And when Mr. Trump won, Alex Jones found himself with access to the seat of power. | |
| Infowars got a temporary White House press pass for the first time, and Jones says Mr. Trump called him after the election to thank him for his help. | |
| You have said that it's surreal to say something on Infowars and then hear it come out of the president of the United States mouth a couple of days later. | |
| I mean, that has happened. | |
| But, um. | |
| I mean, I know Trump watches and sees the clips and things. | |
| We did find indications of that. | |
| On July 22, 2015, Infowars put up this video. | |
| Claiming it showed drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border, although we don't know what it actually shows. | |
| We actually witnessed a drug smuggling operation from Mexico into the U.S. Three days later, Mr. Trump gave this speech in Iowa. | |
| Big story. | |
| It's all over the place now. | |
| Guys swimming across and big bags of stuff. | |
| It's drugs. | |
| Swimming across the river. | |
| This was InfoWars previewing the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. | |
| I think she's going to show up on drugs, though. | |
| She's going to be locked up. | |
| And Mr. Trump's take not long after. | |
| We should take a drug test because I don't know what's going on with her. | |
| Donald Trump ally and frequent InfoWars guest Roger Stone underscored the connection between Jones and the Trump campaign in a tweet last spring. | |
| It read: MSM elites don't see that Alex Jones and Infowars reach millions of Donald Trump supporters and helped make the Trump revolution. | |
| While Jones has boasted of his contact with the president on his radio show, he downplayed it in his interview with us, claiming the mainstream media, or MSM, has exaggerated their connection. | |
| I think my influence on Trump is way, way lower than what MSM has said. | |
| What kind of access do you have? | |
| He's just called sometimes and talked about politics or thanked me, stuff like that. | |
| Would you describe yourself as friends? | |
| No. | |
| Friendly? | |
| Sure. | |
| And how many times has he called you? | |
| I don't want to get into all that. | |
| What is it, do you think, about Alex Jones that President Trump finds so amazing? | |
| That's a scary question. | |
| Charlie Sykes is a conservative writer and contributor to NBC News. | |
| He's been critical of President Trump. | |
| Obviously, there's a conspiratorial turn in the president's thinking and his imagination, and those darker impulses are fed into by Alex Jones. | |
| Jones speaks to his listeners for hours a day, six days a week. | |
| His rants can be vulgar and hate-filled, like this one directed at a member of Congress. | |
| Schiff looks like the archetype, archetypal c*****, and there's something about this fairy hopping around, bossing everybody around, trying to intimidate people like me and you. | |
| I want to tell Congressman Schiff and all the rest of them, you want to sit here and say that I'm a c***** Russian? | |
| You get in my face with that, I'll beat your c***** ass, you son of a**. | |
| He grew up the oldest child of a dentist and a homemaker and went to high school in Austin, Texas. | |
| I read a lot of history books when I was a kid, and I also had family that was educated. | |
| So, I mean, I just knew how things actually worked versus what the news was saying sometimes. | |
| After a brief stint in community college, Jones found his calling at Public Access TV in Austin. | |
| He went into business for himself, founding InfoWars in 1999. | |
| Many doubted his prospects, but he's now worth millions. | |
| I'm Alex Jones, your host. | |
| InfoWars makes most of its money by selling products, like male supplements. | |
| It has just come off of me. | |
| And soon there'll be nothing left. | |
| The main pitchman? | |
| Jones himself. | |
| I mean, it costs $45, $50 million a year to run this. | |
| How much money is being made? | |
| Well, the money that's made is pretty much put back into things. | |
| Jones uses that money to spread his message, a message that has caused enormous pain. | |
| What he has done is he has injected this sort of toxic paranoia. | |
| Into the mainstream of conservative thought in a way that would have been inconceivable a couple of decades ago. | |
| We're talking about somebody who traffics in some of the sickest, most offensive types of theories. | |
| At the top of that list is Jones' outrageous statement that the slaughter of innocent children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, one of the darkest chapters in American history, was a hoax. | |
| I buried my son. | |
| I held my son with a bullet hole through his head. | |
| Neil Hesslin's son, Jesse, just six years old, was murdered, along with 19 of his classmates and six adults, on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. | |
| I dropped him off in 904. | |
| That's when we dropped him off at school with his book bag. | |
| Hours later, I was... | |
| Alex Jones repeatedly claimed that the shooting never happened. | |
| Here he is on Infowars in December 2014. | |
| But it took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake. | |
| How do you deal with a total hoax? | |
| It took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake. | |
| I did deep research, and my gosh, it just pretty much didn't happen. | |
| At that point, and I do think there's some cover-up and some manipulation, that is pretty much what I believe. | |
| but then I was also going in devil's advocate, but then we know there's mass shootings and these things happen. | |
| Right? | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| If you wrongly went out there and said it was a hoax, that's wrong. | |
| But what I already answered your question was, listeners and other people are covering this. | |
| I didn't create that story. | |
| But Alex, the parents, one after the other, devastated the dead bodies that the coroner And they've blocked all that and they won't release any of it? | |
| That's unprecedented? | |
| All of the parents decided to come out and lie about their dead children? | |
| I didn't say that. | |
| What happened to the children? | |
| I will sit there on the air and look at every position and play devil's advocate. | |
| Was that devil's advocate? | |
| The whole thing is a giant hoax. | |
| The whole thing was fake. | |
| Yes, because I remember in... | |
| I've watched the footage, and it looks like a drill. | |
| When you say parents faked their children's death, people get very angry. | |
| Oh, I know, but they don't get angry about the half million dead Iraqis from the sanctions, or they don't get angry about all the illegals pouring in. | |
| No, no, it's not a dodge. | |
| The media never covers all the evil wars it's promoted. | |
| That doesn't excuse what you did and said about Newtown. | |
| Here's the difference. | |
| Here's the difference. | |
| I looked at all the angles of Newtown, and I made my statements long before the media even picked up on it. | |
| In our interview, we asked Jones numerous times what he now believes, and he never completely disavowed his previous statements. | |
| I tend to believe that children probably did die there. | |
| But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side, I can see how other people believe that nobody died there. | |
| Of course, there is no evidence on the other side. | |
| After President Trump took office, the Newtown Board of Education wrote to him, imploring the president to try to stop Jones and other hoaxers like him, saying Jones continues to spread hate and lies towards our town. | |
| Almost four months later, according to the board chairman, the president has yet to respond. | |
| The lies about Sandy Hook have had real-world consequences. | |
| Just this month, a Florida woman was sentenced to five months in prison for sending death threats to a Sandy Hook parent. | |
| Her defense attorney says she was primarily motivated by Infowars. | |
| Other victims' family members have been harassed or threatened, too. | |
| The families say that Jones' words have caused lasting pain, and they fear the harassment will continue. | |
| You know, it's disrespectful to me, or in fact, I did lose my son, and the 26 other families lost somebody, and I take that very personal. | |
| You know this piece is going to air on Father's Day? | |
| Correct. | |
| What is your message to him? | |
| I think he's blessed to have his children, to spend the day with, to speak to. | |
| I don't have that. | |
| The consequences of Jones's actions are not limited to Sandy Hook. | |
| Pizzagate, as it's called, is a rabbit hole that is horrifying to go down. | |
| In 2016, Jones promoted a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. | |
| InfoWars claimed a child's sex ring was being run by Democrats out of a number of businesses and specifically pointed to a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. | |
| You've got to go to InfoWars.com and actually see the photos and videos inside these places. | |
| Jones encouraged his listeners to investigate the case themselves. | |
| And one did, bringing a semi-automatic rifle to the shop and firing several rounds. | |
| No one was hurt, and the shooter was arrested. | |
| The pizza shop owner wrote a letter asking Jones to apologize. | |
| Facing the possibility of a lawsuit, he did. | |
| We regret any negative impact our commentaries may have had on Mr. Alifana's comic ping pong or its employees. | |
| Another apology came just this spring. | |
| Chobani Yogurt sued Jones after InfoWars fanned the lie that Chobani employees committed a sexual assault in Idaho. | |
| On behalf of InfoWars, I regret that we mischaracterized Chobani. | |
| You misstated facts about Chobani and its owner, which you could have found out if you just had a reporter do a little shoe-leather reporting, pick up the phone, call, check out the facts. | |
| You never would have had to retract that or apologize. | |
| This is my statement on that. | |
| We know that that was basically a PR event. | |
| And what happens is you've got a year of reporting on the reported sexual assault. | |
| All of which has nothing to do with Chobani. | |
| Yeah, I know you're not going to let me get it out, are you? | |
| I'm going to let you get it out. | |
| I just want to make sure the record's straight because I don't want to smear the man. | |
| You are the one who said that you were wrong. | |
| Well, that's because they chose to go after me, and so I simply pointed out that we were reporting other people's reports that were not entirely accurate, and for that we were sorry, because it was true. | |
| You don't sound very sorry. | |
| Well, the media said stuff about the settlement that wasn't true. | |
| But you said things about Chobani and its owner that were not true. | |
| Are you sorry? | |
| I'm going to tell you again, the media really was upset that they said that there was a hoax. | |
| It's not the media. | |
| You. | |
| Are you sorry? | |
| And so what they did, so what the media did, and we know it was the media, and we have the PIs and the law firms, and we're working on it right now, let's just say Chobani was real happy to get out of that lawsuit. | |
| But the lawsuit makes clear Infowars was the only media outlet to report the lie that forced Jones to apologize. | |
| And with that apology, Chobani considers the matter closed. | |
| Do you think of yourself as a journalist? | |
| I have some journalists that work for me, and I do journalistic work, and I've broken a lot of big stories, and I understand the basics of it. | |
| I need to find the line of London thing. | |
| In the Infowars studio, there's no script. | |
| Instead, it's a freewheeling spin through piles of articles straight off the internet. | |
| 95% of what we cover is looking at a news article and then, you know, discussing it. | |
| Well, you know, if you just look at an article and discuss it, it's garbage in, garbage out, right? | |
| If you haven't ascertained the veracity of that article, and it's all BS, and then you spend two hours talking about it, then you've put out a bunch of misinformation. | |
| I'm just trying to figure out what the vetting process is. | |
| I mean, we all get Hillary was 15 points ahead. | |
| I mean, we all get mainstream media has got a big problem. | |
| The Infowars staffers we met have free reign to cover whatever they like with virtually no oversight. | |
| We spoke with some of Jones' employees, including Owen Schroyer. | |
| How do you, on a day-to-day basis, figure out what you're going to do? | |
| I wake up. | |
| I look at the news. | |
| I pray. | |
| I rarely get directives from Alex or my boss. | |
| They pretty much just leave it up to me. | |
| Is that what you consider yourself to be, a journalist? | |
| You know, I don't like calling it that. | |
| I'm just a human. | |
| I'm just a human that's looking for truth. | |
| So I'm trying to reach out and be what the people want. | |
| When you say people, who do you mean? | |
| The deplorables. | |
| The flyover country. | |
| The forgotten American. | |
| We're going to get to work immediately for the American people. | |
| With the election of Donald Trump, Alex Jones has plans to expand Infowars. | |
| More studios, more shows, more employees, more influence. | |
| I said the night he won, I said the war has just begun. | |
| So this is, we've just got a beachhead, and so that's just the start of the war for me. | |
| And Alex Jones goes into battle with a powerful ally. | |
| Just two weeks ago, the Trump-Pence campaign emailed this message to supporters. |
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