When Alex Jones announced the death of his Infowars business earlier this month, you had to strain to hear him because he kept slurring his words.
“We’re getting shut down,” Jones told fellow pro-Trump influencer Tim Pool on March 12. “We’ve beaten so many attacks. But now we’re shutting down in the middle of next month.”
For critics of Jones and the MAGA movement he had a hand in building, hearing him announce the end of his site might seem like cause for celebration. That would be dangerously naive. Jones’ influence is everywhere, as the U.S. finds itself roiled by the very conspiracy theories he turned into a multimillion-dollar business after starting Infowars on public access TV in 1999.
The ranks of officials around Trump are now partially composed of Jones-influenced conspiracists, governing on baseless stories about antifa, vaccines and shadowy cabals.
Open Elon Musk’s X and you will find people building on Jones’ legacy as a purveyor of brain-poisoning lies — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and countless smaller figures — as they apply Infowars’ conspiratorial lens to everything from the real assassination of Charlie Kirk to the fictionalized death of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Paranoid, often explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories now accompany almost every major news event, pushed by pundits and podcasters in the Jones mold, filling uncertainty with distortion, fear and rage.
Just look at the White House, currently inhabited by a man whose claims about fraud in the 2020 election were essentially fabricated. The ranks of officials around Trump are now partially composed of Jones-influenced conspiracists, governing on baseless stories about antifa, vaccines and shadowy cabals. The MAGA government fuels public mistrust through secrecy, while exploiting conspiratorial fiction to consolidate power.
In a sense, the vision created by Infowars won, so there’s little need for the site itself to exist anymore. As a culture-shaping, nutrition supplement-hawking brand, Infowars has been collapsing in slow motion since 2022, when a court found Jones responsible for more than $1 billion in damages for falsely claiming that grieving parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims were, in fact, “crisis actors.” Its eventual shutdown will mark the humiliating end of a steadily deteriorating empire.
Other first-generation, MAGA-associated platforms are fading as well. On the same day Jones made his announcement, the notorious website The Daily Stormer also said it would close, ending a decline that began after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, when tech companies began forbidding it from their platforms.
“This is the way of things. The world goes to war. The Daily Stormer shuts down,” the site’s editor, Andrew Anglin, wrote on March 12.
Like Infowars, The Daily Stormer helped propel Trump to victory in 2016 by mobilizing resentment-driven, conspiratorial voters around a single cause: electing Donald J. Trump. As with Infowars, lawsuits dogged its leader. And as with Infowars, the site eventually became unnecessary to the movement it helped create. Anglin’s once-taboo misogynistic, antisemitic and paranoid diatribes about “white genocide” have now been normalized throughout the contemporary conservative ecosystem.
VDARE, a “great replacement” conspiracy-focused anti-immigration website that influenced Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller, also announced it was folding under pressure from a New York investigation that became a lawsuit led by Attorney General Letitia James. Its founder, Peter Brimelow, made the announcement as attendees of the 2024 Republican National Convention held signs reading “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW,” scenes I document in my forthcoming book, “Strange People on the Hill.”
Only after Trump leaves the stage, and the MAGA movement fades with him, will Infowars truly be gone. The true danger of the MAGA movement — the systematic erosion of truth to empower a hateful, authoritarian ideology — cannot be addressed simply by shutting down websites or sidelining their proprietors. If it could, the decline of these sites would surely signal a decline of hateful, conspiratorial thinking rather than an acceleration of it. MAGA is a societal illness, one that America itself helped cultivate by prioritizing greed and self-interest over collective responsibility, shared reality and the basic common good. Jones himself glimpsed the emptiness of the Trump era and admitted it on camera in 2019 while filming a little-seen documentary. “It’s the truth, and I’m just going to say it. I wish I had never met Trump. I wish it had never happened. And it’s not the attacks I’ve been through. I’m so sick of Donald Trump, man. God, I’m sick of him,” he confessed. And yet, a little more than a year later, Jones helped inflame the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in the name of a conspiratorial lie propagated by Trump. Jones’ life and legacy will forever be tied to the mission of a man he resented but continued to peddle to his audience. Even after Infowars ends, Jones may remain active online, even in a state of reduced influence. He could broadcast independently on Elon Musk’s X, as Carlson did after losing his prime-time show on Fox News. But his life’s work — spreading false conspiracy theories and enabling bigoted lies — is already complete. His show helped Trump win the presidency twice. And only after Trump leaves the stage, and the MAGA movement fades with him, will Infowars truly be gone. In short: Infowars is dead. Long live Infowars.
Michael Edison Hayden
Michael Edison Hayden is a leading expert on far-right extremism in the United States. His debut book, "Strange People on the Hill" — a chronicle of a West Virginia town in the five years following a white nationalist group’s purchase of a local castle — will be published by Bold Type Books/Hachette on April 7, 2026. Hayden also co-hosts the podcast, "Posting Through It," with new episodes released every Monday and Thursday. 
