Donald Trump gave rightwing media provocateurs Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones a shoutout this week, calling them “Low IQs”, “stupid people”, and “LOSERS”.

Jones hit back, saying Trump was “committing political suicide on purpose” and had made a deal to sabotage the midterms. America, Jones said, “is now under the control of a foreign government” and encouraged followers “to fly their flags upside down, because our nation is in distress!”

Yet another crazy week in the fractured Maga mediasphere awash with extremism, lies, rants and conspiracy theories. Josh Owens, a former video editor and field producer for Jones’s Infowars, is happy to be out of it all.

Owens worked for Jones for four years, from 2013 to 2017, going out on assignments to find evidence of high radiation levels in California after the Fukushima nuclear accident, to Ferguson, Missouri to cover the BLM protests, to retrieve Cliven Bundy’s cattle in Nevada, to dine with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, fabricating a video of an operative of the Islamic State terror group sneaking into the US, and more besides.

In a fascinating new book, The Madness of Believing, Owens writes that “Jones’s instinctual desire to distance himself from the mainstream led us to unusual and sometimes dark places”.

The Madness of Believing by Josh Owens. Photograph: Grand Central Publishing

That might be an understatement.

In an interview with the Guardian last week, Owens described the punishing work amplifying conspiracy theories for a hard-charging boss who – according to his book – drove a Dodge Charger Hellcat at high speed, imitated Glenn Danzig’s Mother with its lyric, “Tell your children not to hear my words, what they mean, what they say”, behaved like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan, and drank copious amounts of vodka.

“I didn’t enjoy the anxiety-inducing trips, regardless of whether there was anything to find or not. It was just gut-wrenching because it was constant chaos,” he says. “In a sense it was one of the most exciting times of my life. But that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I might be able to say it was little more fun if people weren’t harmed by the rhetoric.”

Owens is of course referring to Jones’s lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which left 20 children and six educators dead, was a hoax to force Americans to accept gun control. Jones now faces a defamation judgment of $1.5bn in damages.

The ruling demanded the sale of Infowars, which was purchased out of bankruptcy in 2024 by the satirical news site the Onion. However, a bankruptcy later rejected the winning bid and it remains in limbo. Yet far from silencing Jones, he broadcasts on, battling for the Maga soul against the Maga king himself.

The Madness of Believing joins a number of books, including Melania and Me by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, that act as a spirit-cleansing exercise for those close to the heart of the Maga-verse but who now have regrets. Working for Jones, Owens says, “affected me immensely. I entered that world as a person I now don’t recognize at all. I wanted to write about that world from a first-hand perspective and what it takes to get out.”

“Maybe my story can provide some sense of hope that some people can turn around. I was a firm believer in a lot of the things and contributed to it in my own way. But I was deradicalized with the help of other people,” he adds.

In the book, Owens describes a boss who “was a pure expression of self-centered freedom, a defiant assertion of his own whims, seemingly unconcerned with how his actions affected others, and on occasion, even himself”. But also capable of introspection and generosity, handing over his Rolex to an employee and asking: “Am I that terrible of a person?”

Jones promoted conspiracy theories that have in years since become relatively mainstream. “All throughout history,” he liked to say, “spanning back into the mists of the beginnings of civilization, we see world leaders, from the empires of old, from the Aztec kings and priests to Babylonian leaders, to ancient Rome, engaging in twisted behavior.”

But conspiracy theories beget conspiracy theories. Owens writes: “For Jones, every tragedy, every disaster, every horrific act of violence, whether it be mass shootings or terrorist attacks, was framed as a false flag. But what made the constant invocation so insidious was how it bypassed critical thinking and replaced it with paranoia.”

At the 2016 peak of The Alex Jones Show, Jones claimed he reached 5 million listeners daily, with video streams exceeding 80 million a month. That coincided with the first-term election of Trump, who had flattered Jones during an appearance on the show. “Your reputation is amazing,” Trump said.

If Jones took his lead from 1980s radio shock-jocks, among them Howard Stern and Don Imus, he made the emerging digital realm of the internet and social media broadcasting his own.

“None of those people had the cultural capital Jones has, and I don’t think anyone else has since in his space,” Owens says. “But now that’s almost mainstream. You’ve got Trump, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens … the craziest ideas are no longer on the fringe.

But Owens believes that greater competition in what was his exclusive sphere has pushed him beyond where he might have previously ventured. “He’s got more overt, more extreme and more hateful. But the seeds were always there.”

The question arises with Jones, and with other Magasphere voices: how much do they influence their audiences or their audiences inform them? Owens believes Jones is highly sensitive to callers and comments online. Jones did not, for instance, talk about the Pizzagate, Democrats-eat-babies conspiracy until callers accused him of trying to cover it up.

“In a lot of ways he’s following the culture, or at least the culture he sees as viable,” Owens says, and acknowledges that Jones is savvy in not targeting people who are not in the public eye. “Jones acts like he’s off the cuff and speaking from an emotional place but he knows what he’s doing.”

But not savvy enough to avoid the Sandy Hook hit to his business.

“He reaped the consequences in a pretty unprecedented way but it hasn’t stopped him. When he was deplatformed from social media, most people thought, OK, well, he’s gone. Problem solved.

“But he hasn’t gone – he’s still broadcasting his show, he’s still selling products, his still making money. Even if he loses Infowars he has a back-up studio, server and company that he says cannot be touched by the courts, all ready to go. He may not be unscathed but he hasn’t gone.”