“I’m an X-Files Kid… you know what I mean? I’m a late-90s conspiracy guy. Man, conspiracy culture used to be fun. It used to not be so malicious and cruel. Area 51, Fish-Human hybrids… Roswell. I mean, it was kind of fluffy in it’s own way. It didn’t really hit, it didn’t really matter at the end of the day what’s at Area 51. It was a mystery box we could all have fun with. And there was a time when Alex Jones was hilarious, we just all kind of watched him in his early days. But the day he started commanding… I’ll tell ya, it goes hand in hand with those damn supplements…” — Mark Bankston, trial attorney in Heslin v. Jones.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to see if I could fix my YouTube suggestion algorithm to see if it could start recommending videos I might actually like instead of constantly trying to force-feed me right wing garbage. As it had been frequently observed to do. I deleted fifteen years of viewing history, deleted nearly all the accumulated interest keywords I just hadn’t been paying attention to, and finally consciously curated my at that moment kind of massive follow list. A lot of experimental, noise and witch house musicians that had pivoted to right-wing culture war content while I wasn’t looking. A lot of hack-a-day, circuit-bending and retro-gaming channels that had pivoted to right-wing culture war content while I wasn’t looking. A lot of movie summary and review channels that had… you get the idea.

And then I noticed I was following an old Alex Jones-associated Youtube channel, that I probably clicked follow on somewhere in the mid-00s. And you might be thinking ”what, why?” So let me get this out of the way.

I’m from Central Texas.

Alex Jones on Austin Community Access Television, Halloween 1997.

There’s a generally accepted sweet spot window of time in the late 90s when Austin public access television just fucking ruled. Maybe it was all the drugs, the late 90s was a generally accepted sweet spot for scoring excellent drugs as well. But you could turn on any channel between 10–15 on your cable box and something watchable was happening. There was that fundamentalist preacher who wore a toilet seat around his neck. There was the yodeling Austrian accordion player. Austin cross-dressing political activist legend Leslie Cochran had a show. Some nights you could call up a guy in clown makeup and tell him to punch himself in the face and he might even do it.

It was in the middle of all this chaos where Alex Jones first appeared. And he eventually just became a fixture of the Austin subculture. He appeared (and some could say got his break) in two Richard Linklater movies: first a several minute rambling sequence in the psychedelic existential film Waking Life, and then incorporated into the aesthetic and plot of the Philip K Dick story A Scanner Darkly as a protestor attacked by police.

You’ll hear a lot from Austinites that Jones was just “that guy we tuned in to laugh at.” The gay frogs guy. Austin KLBJ rock radio DJ Charlie Hodge would play clips of Alex Jones during his mid-day “Half-Time Show” in the late-00s. I used to talk a lot about him in my old blogs as well, and so yeah you wind up with me clicking “Follow” on his Youtube profile and thinking nothing of it for well over a decade afterwards.

But this isn’t an article about Alex Jones, at least not entirely, and I’m not sure I would even say that he is the main reason conspiracy culture evolved into this prevailing dangerous force in post-Trump America. That said, I’m not quite done with him yet either.

I’m quickly realizing this subject may not be able to be tackled in one essay, but I can at least present a reasonable outline. And to get at the roots of how conspiracy culture got the way it is now, you gotta go way back. Before Alex Jones was even born. At the very least, to the 1960s.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson, Illustration by John Thompson

Now there are elements of what became modern right-wing conspiracy culture that were already in play in the 1960s. The John Birch Society started in 1958, William Guy Carr’s “Rothschild/Illuminati” theories had been around since the 1940s, and the anti-fluoridation movement started in the mid-1950s. A lot of these were relics of the Red Scare, and were quickly fading from cultural cache after a disgraced and Congressionally censured Joseph McCarthy drank himself to death.

But then came the Kennedy Assassination, and the 1960s counterculture, revelations about MK-ULTRA, and COINTELPRO. I think we can basically skip over this part, it’s been written about extensively and we still have three more decades before we can loop back to The X-Files and Alex Jones.

The important part is that these sort of “guys in black suits with sunglasses sternly manipulating and silencing anyone in the way of the bigger puppet masters” had become part of the based-on-a-true-story public dialog. Robert Anton Wilson dropped the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy, which hyped up counterculture pamphlet/religious document The Principia Discordia. Philip K Dick recounted his own experiences with COINTELPRO in books like A Scanner Darkly (later to feature Alex Jones in a film) and the VALIS Trilogy. The 60s and 70s were full of this kind of stuff. The Manchurian Candidate. The Prisoner. Dr. Strangelove. Paul Is Dead.

In particular, Wilson’s ILLUMINATUS! is worth pausing for a second to take note of. This is despite being it a frequently disorienting read. The prose simultaneously apes the writing style of James Joyce while also parodying the writing style of Ayn Rand, for instance, making some passages nearly inscrutable unless you have a deep knowledge of both. The interesting part, however is the thesis, where it attempts the daunting task of asking “what if *EVERY* conspiracy theory (as recorded and published in the 1970s) was true at the same time?” This same question would later be explored in Grant Morrison’s 90s comic/graphic novel series The Invisibles, and Wilson himself would revisit and expand upon the idea on several sequel (Schrodinger’s Cat), prequel (The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles) and other additions to the literary universe of ILLUMINATUS! the rest of his life.

This had the unusual side-effect of platforming the most insane, far-out reactionary right wing esoteric conspiracy theories from the realm of AM radio and mimeographed newsletters to the pages of Playboy Magazine. Now William Guy Carr’s fringe history theories of the Illuminati were on bookshelves back when Dan Brown was still in elementary school learning where nouns and verbs go in a sentence.

(There’s also something to be said about Robert Anton Wilson’s lassiez-faire libertarianism and how it bled into the narrative of his books and thus the attitudes of the fanbase which left the project open to its own subset of right-wing entryism potential. The same way you find in New Age, alternative medicine, psychedelia and occult spaces. So you wind up with the 21st Century Wire, which itself was founded by ex-Infowars/Alex Jones staff, feigning at documenting the merging of Discordianism and Alt-Right.)

“I’ll tell ya, it goes hand in hand with those damn supplements…”

(shit is only going to get weirder and the links are only gonna get more tangled, folks)

The 1980s added some new, important ingredients to the mix.
1) Donald Trump.
2) The Satanic Panic.
3) REX84, which Alex Jones’ updated as “FEMA camps” in his shows.
4) The rise of the Moral Majority religious right movement.

Even in the 1980s, future-president was no stranger to conspiracy theories about disease, or long-haired alternative medicine peddlers, even as he was selling himself as a New York liberal. This liberal image would nearly instantly dissolve after the election of Barack Obama, switching party affiliation to Republican in 2009, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

MINISTRY, “N.W.O,” music video, 1992.

The late 80s and early 90s went hard with scandals that shattered the unearned “Morning In America” confidence in American exceptionalism the Reagan years had promised, and became instant conspiracy fodder. Iran-Contra. Bush’s “New World Order” speech. Ruby Ridge. The LA Riots. The Waco Massacre.

This was the socio-political environment in which the X-Files was greenlit. It provided a contrast to the more traditional existing police procedurals, while also cribbing from recent off-kilter successes in the detective noir genre like Twin Peaks and Silence Of The Lambs. It pioneered the monster-of-the week format, keeping the show fresh with new wacky creatures and conspiracies every week. It had an episode with my friends in the Jim Rose Circus where heavily-tattooed sideshow performer Enigma was implied to have eaten a slimy murder fetus. It was a good time.

The X-Files expanded into spinoff The Lone Gunmen and not-quite-spinoff sort-of-in-the-same-universe Millenium. It led to a mid 1990s boom of fun films and television shows about secret worlds hidden behind our own like Men In Black, Dark Skies, Stargate (and Stargate SG-1) and even The Matrix.

This was the era when conspiracy culture was “fun.” When it was “fluffy in its own way.” Sandy Hook lawyer Mark Bankston seemed to think so, and as some one that was also a teenager in the 90s, I probably thought so too. But was it really?

“It didn’t really hit, it didn’t really matter at the end of the day what’s at Area 51.”

Among those “fun” conspiracy films was a Richard Donner flick called Conspiracy Theory, starring Mel Gibson as a taxi driver who believed he was in on an elaborate conspiracy of secret societies out to get him. Not long afterward Gibson was revealed to genuinely believe some very disturbing things. Joel Schumacher’s complicated film Falling Down, which touched on the rising 90s right-wing militia movment, itself became an inspiration to that same movement. As founder of the Proud Boys, currently embroiled in controversy regarding the Jan 6 insurrection, leader Gavin McInnes frequently dressed as main character D-FENS from Falling Down in public appearances.

The 90s is also the era where David Icke gained traction with his barely disguised antisemitic “Reptilians” theories, now a staple of the QAnon/Pizzagate crowd. It was the era of alt-publisher Feral House, which published eccentric but harmless “Kooks” but also far-right conspiracy theorists like James Shelby Downard and open Neo-Nazis (Feral House publishing has drastically changed focus since the passing of founder Adam Parfrey in 2018, but we are talking about the 90s right now). It was also the golden age of Art Bell’s radio show, frequently lauded as a direct influence on Alex Jones’ on-air performances.

As I mentioned before, and often can’t seem to shut up about, I grew up in Central Texas. The Waco-Temple-Killeen “Hill Country.” Waco, as in the Waco Massacre. Killeen, the location of the Luby’s Massacre, and later two mass shootings on Army base Fort Hood. And also where Alex Jones, who like myself and future prosecuting lawyer Mark Bankston was also a teenager in the 90s, was himself growing up.

The late 90s is also when George W Bush was the governor of Texas, seated in the governors mansion in Austin. It would be an understatement to say that Alex Jones was not a fan of Dubya. And for what it’s worth, Jones was not swayed by the post-9/11 “Freedom Fries” jingoism that warmed up a lot of reluctant Americans to supporting Bush’s presidency, even inviting guests to his show calling for Bush’s impeachment. He was a was a frequent feature of the anti-Iraq War and even the Occupy movements in Austin, albeit to promote his own brand through “Bush Did 9/11” chants and other such conspiracies.

Makes you wonder what the world would be like if this guy had been the breakout of Austin Public Access.

Of course, it would be pretty easy to point to the fallout of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack as the point where conspiracy culture got nasty. If not the immediate aftermath of 9/11, then possibly the aftermath of controversial “9/11 Truther” documentary Loose Change, itself funded by right-wing conspiracy theorist Phillip Jayhan who has been espousing a theory about a cabal of high-ranking celebrity and political Satanists kidnapping children for rituals for decades (a theory which should sound all too familiar now).

But even then, in the 00s, conspiracy culture still hadn’t reached anywhere near the sort of saturation point we see today. This despite 9/11 Trutherism on its way to becoming the most popular American conspiracy theory of all time, believed in whole or in part by an astonishing 54.3% of Americans as of 2016, compared to the JFK assassination cover-up coming in second at 49.6% and X-Files-style alien abductions coming in at 42.6%.

It can (and has) been said that Trump’s presidency was the conspiracy theory presidency. His connection to QAnon, the “big-tent” everything bagel of conspiracies, is well established. As is his connection to many conspiracy theories crafted to cultivate his rabidly devoted fanbase of reactionaries. He even declassified hundreds of UFO documents while in office. But you can pinpoint one conspiracy in particular that was his springboard into politics and could be considered one of if not the turning point in conspiracy culture that created this terrifying modern movement.

It’s a point of contention whether president Barack Obama’s 2011 roast of reality television star/figurehead of the “Birther” movement Donald Trump led to his 2016 presidential run. Trump denies it. Obama himself is not so sure. However former-cronies of Trump like Roger Stone seemed pretty convinced.

Birtherism was one of many movements, like the Tea Party, that sprung up around the election of Barack Obama. An election that itself was plagued with tons of increasingly insane and unprecedented conspiracy theories. Remember when that lady carved a “B” into her face, but accidentally did it backwards? The claims that Obama was a Muslim and that Black Panthers were patrolling voter booths all over the country? Many of these conspiracies were promoted by Trump himself. Many also gained ground on 4chan, future home of QAnon, which was just beginning to emerge as a radicalization vector in the late-00s.

There really isn’t space for, nor do I have the expertise to, get into the ins-and-outs of all the various radicalization vectors that led to the modern right wing factions with a current stranglehold on social media, pop culture and politics. There’s not even enough space to fully get into how conspiracy culture intertwined with this entryism into increasingly pervasive modern reactionary thought. I just found myself haunted by the words of the Sandy Hook lawyer Mark Bankston in the Channel 5 interview with Andrew Callaghan about what had changed between 90s “X-Files” conspiracy culture and now.

So when did it change? 2001? 2008? 2012 with the Sandy Hook Stuff? 2016 with Pizzagate/QAnon?

Maybe it was just always bad.