Former InfoWars employee not-so-fondly recalls shooting guns and office punch-ups with Alex Jones
InfoWars, the unhinged, conspiracy-focused “news” site run by the consistently level-headed reverse-minotaur Alex Jones, has always seemed like a shitty place to work. Whether it’s having to produce footage of Jones roaring his morally reprehensible Sandy Hook opinions, taking work orders from a guy who wants you to know Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton smell like demons, or figuring out how in god’s name to create effective sales pitches for supplements whose testimonials are delivered by a man with the physique and personality of a half-shaved, badly sunburned baby bear, nothing seems all that appealing about punching in at Jones’ bullshit factory for a living.
It isn’t all that surprising, then, that a newly published New York Times Magazine article by former employee Josh Owens about his old gig doesn’t exactly resemble a glowing Glassdoor job review.
Owens’ look back at his time working for Jones is absolutely stuffed with disturbing and wild stories, but most remarkable among them are his recollections of events like times when they would all head “to a private ranch outside Austin to shoot guns.” He recalls one trip in 2014 when Jones arrived later on and “after eating a few handfuls of jalapeño chips…picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in my direction.” Owens remembers that “the bullet hit the ground about 10 feet away from me” and, after one employee got mad about their boss nearly killing Owens, Jones apparently claimed he’d “intentionally fired the gun as a joke.”
Amidst other tales of awful stuff—like an assignment to “visit Muslim-majority communities throughout the United States to investigate what Jones instructed us to call ‘the American Caliphate’”—Owens recalls one particularly vivid example of InfoWars’ office culture. “Late one night, after an extended live broadcast, Jones walked into my office shirtless,” he writes. “This was normal; he removed his shirt frequently around us.” Jones drank some vodka, put on a different shirt, then returned to the office and asked one of Owens co-workers to hit him.