Danny Wallace meets Alex Jones – and delves into conspiracyland
In 2004, one up-and-coming young broadcaster (Danny Wallace) met another (Alex Jones). Their paths would diverge, of course. Wallace attained inoffensive Noughties stardom through making a documentary in which he founded his own micro-country, and through a book, Yes Man, that chronicled six months in which he said yes to almost everything, inspiring a Hollywood film starring Jim Carrey.
Jones, meanwhile, is perhaps the world’s most notorious conspiracy theorist, captivating millions of Americans with puce-faced rants in which he claims that the world is run by a “demonic high-tech tyranny” that manufactures disasters and crises in order to prepare the way for Satan.
Back in 2004, Jones was just a common-or-garden 9/11 truther. Wallace, making a documentary about conspiracy theories, had gone to interview him in Austin, Texas, chatting over sticky beef. In his new book, Somebody Told Me, Wallace recalls Jones pointing out the squint-and-you-might-see-it resemblance of some local skyscrapers’ glass windows to owl beaks – to Jones, a sign of the gathering strength of the Illuminati.
It’s people like Jones who are the subject of this new book, in which Wallace combines personal anecdote and interview-driven storytelling to relate “how the world started to believe anything”. And it certainly seems that we are, as a species, in dangerous epistemic waters. States pollute each other’s news outlets with falsehoods, while idiotic theories flourish on YouTube and social media.
Some of these theories, such as the idea that Vikings and dinosaurs live within the Earth, are laughable. Some, though still nonsense, have had a more destructive effect, fomenting vandalism (of 5G masts in the UK, for instance) and violence (at the US Capitol in January 2021). A recent survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans say they believe something along the lines of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits Donald Trump as the heroic fighter of a secret war against paedophile Satanists. (Jones believes this theory is itself a government psy-op, designed to distract from more sensible lunatics such as his good self.)
Wallace, a purveyor of generally light-hearted media, might seem an unlikely individual to take on this very serious topic. But he has skin in the game: he has himself been the subject of a conspiracy theory, and his family – specifically, his late father, an academic who spent decades studying the Communist state of East Germany – might, or might not, be the subject of an operation by Chinese intelligence.
This personal involvement, along with the quippy conversational style in which he writes, puts the book in the entertaining Wallace tradition. Intermingled with the stories, which include a saddening account of a marriage poisoned by conspiracy theories, there are intriguing insights from interviewees. Conspiracy theories get a tighter grip on people who are lonely (and the evidence suggests that Westerners, with our devotion to screens, are becoming ever lonelier). Women, apparently, are more susceptible to conspiracy theories that play on empathy (“Save the children from the evil government paedophiles!”), while men are more susceptible to calls to arms (“Fight the New World Order!”).
And things might get worse. Some of Wallace’s more dismaying passages – such as the one about the rise of AI girlfriends that insidiously turn men into sleeper agents – are enough to make one put down the book and glumly exhale.
Is this a complete academic treatment of the topics? Of course not. Wallace is not delivering a series of lectures; instead, he’s sitting you down at the pub and telling you what he’s learnt. I’d have liked to have heard more about the precise ways in which the design of social media and YouTube allows conspiracy theories to thrive or perish, and about the perilous tool that is censorship, but these are enormous, complex topics. I’d also have liked to have learnt more about the extent to which beliefs about conspiracy theories are lightly held. People say some mad stuff in surveys, but that’s not the same thing as acting as if it’s true.
One of the book’s highlights is when Wallace meets a former conspiracy theorist who once believed that he, Wallace, made that documentary in 2004, the one in which he interviewed Alex Jones, because he was being handsomely paid by “dark forces” to discredit truth-seekers. It was believed by conspiracy theorists that Wallace would continue to do the bidding of these dark forces until he was “bathing in [his] bath of money”. By recommending this book, I trust that I, too, will be entitled to a bath of money.
Somebody Told Me: One Man’s Unexpected Journey Down the Rabbit Hole of Lies, Trolls and Conspiracies is published by Ebury at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
