Last week many were introduced to Alex Jones by Megyn Kelly in a much hyped interview on her new NBC show. While revealing in its content, her interview did little to motivate the media to scrutinize Jones, Infowars, and the right-wing media as seriously as it deserves. Many still regard the Fox News juggernaut as the epicenter for right-wing media activity, and while Fox News hasn’t lost its prominent role among conservative outlets, it’s quickly being crowded out. Places like the Daily Caller and Infowars are quickly eating up Fox’s audiences, with little regard for the integrity of the stories that they push.
Initially, the Kelly-Jones interview was met with outrage from those saying it was irresponsible to give someone who pushed Pizzagate and Sandy Hook trutherism such a visible national media platform. Some argued that the interview provided Alex Jones with a way to legitimize his fringe views and broadcast it to an audience that he would never otherwise reach during his daily four-hour long Infowars broadcasts.
The ugly truth is that Alex Jones, along with many others in the pro-Trump media sphere, used the 2016 election as a catalyst to cultivate a very devoted, very Trumpian, following. People like Mike Cernovich, Bill Mitchell, Jack Posobiec, Paul Watson, and others have become viral social media stars for their punditry in the Trump era. They speak to Trump supporters in ways that Fox News never could: they’re combative, sometimes vulgar, and unapologetically taunt anyone perceived to be their enemy. If anyone left-of-center hates it, they love it.
It isn’t so much a support for Trump as it is the support for the culture that Trump represents: a cocktail of libertarianism, conservatism, and white masculine nationalism. The pro-Trump media sphere often pushes many of the same themes: viciously anti-immigrant, violently anti-Muslim, hostile towards socially liberal attitudes, and convinced of a global conspiracy to oppress anyone who shares their views. While this may sound foreign to anyone who thinks they understand the Republican Party, the sad news is that this is emerging as the predominant way of viewing the world among the party’s base of voters.
While to people like you and me, this is a batshit insane world to live in and often times is difficult to understand. It’s easy to look at pro-Trump media figures with intrigue and curiosity. As Jon Lovett remarked on a recent episode of Pod Save America, many in the media treat people like Alex Jones as insects to be examined, to study, and to scratch your head at. This is flat out the wrong way to view pro-Trump media.
Alex Jones and others like him have assumed a prominent role in steering the discourse in the pro-Trump media sphere. People like Bill Mitchell are often great harbingers for how current events will be viewed in the Trump lens, everything from the inauguration, the Muslim ban, the strike on Syria (even despite prior contradictions), to even most recently with #Faceliftgate. These are all messages that are reverberated throughout the pro-Trump media sphere and came sometimes influence talking points taken by the White House. Other figures in the pro-Trump media sphere often push the same message, and frequently the tone of those messages make their way onto Fox News via Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity. From there these talking points are seen by Trump supporters, and regurgitated to anyone who will listen.
As Charlie Warzel reported for Buzzfeed, Quantcast reported that Infowars.com pulled in 476 million views last year and Alexa measures almost 350,000 daily unique visitors. Those figures don’t measure how many people consume the conspiracy-laden reporting on YouTube and Twitter. If people were concerned with the audience Jones could reach on NBC, it doesn’t matter, he already has an enormous following on the Internet. With his messaging eventually reaching Fox News, the number of people touched by his way of thinking only grows exponentially.
Providing a model for other far-right media figures, people like Mike Cernovich and Bill Mitchell have taken up constantly live broadcasting to their followers. Building legitimacy and trust by not appearing in fancy studios or on large television networks, they allow for an intimate relationship with their viewers. They can say they’re not fake, phony, or being controlled by any corporate entities by speaking to their audiences from their car, or the grocery store, or even their bathroom. In a world where mainstream media is often met with skepticism, their projection of authenticity creates a trust that Fox News could never cultivate with their viewers. This relationship lets them say practically whatever they want, with little blowback from their devoted followers, and perhaps more sinisterly: their followers repeat what they say.
For as crazy and offensive as the pro-Trump media sphere is, don’t fall into the trap of easily dismissing them as lunatics — they have large devoted followings that will echo their message, and with the White House’s propensity to suck up any positive media coverage of their agenda, those messages often find their way into the Oval Office. It’s important to us on the left to take what these people say with a degree of seriousness, understanding that this is the world view many strong supporters of Trump subscribe to, and that it’s one that is permeating into the core base of the Republican Party.