'It was lies': New book reveals Alex Jones dressed reporter as ISIS to fake beheading
A new book by a former employee of Alex Jones claimed the conspiracy theorist once faked a beheading by disguising a reporter as a member of ISIS.
In his book, The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones' Conspiracy Machine, Josh Owens recalled spending four years as a video editor at Infowars.
"In Jones' world, it was all about making things look cinematic," Owens noted, according to a report from NPR. "We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. ... But it was nonsense, it was lies."
Owens said in one instance, Jones had wanted to capitalize on right-wing claims that ISIS had a training base across the border in Juarez, Mexico.
After finding no evidence of ISIS, Owens and the Infowars team were ordered to dress a reporter in ISIS garb. They went on to film the reporter crossing a fake border, carrying a severed-head prop.
"We just happened to find a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande," Owens remembered. "We said we were on the border. The reporter I was with simulated the beheading, walked across, and that's what we posted."
The video of the fictional beheading would eventually get millions of views on social media, Owens said.
The author stated that he would later regret working for Jones after meeting a Muslim woman with a young girl on a flight.
"I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn't do anything. There's no reason for suspicion; it's just racism," he observed. "It's not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently."
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