We’re All Alex Jones Now

"The truth is out there," The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.

There’s a famous joke that gets at where we suddenly find ourselves:

A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God greets him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”

The man asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”

God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.”

The man pauses. “Shit. This goes higher up than I thought.”

That’s the country now. Not just the guy in the joke—all of us, drowning in what I’d call X-Files politics: a shallow understanding of first principles, a deep distrust of every institution, and a general paranoia in which the lack of evidence is proof. “The truth is out there,” The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.

In fairness to the conspiracy-minded, most of this stuff has some basis in reality. There really was an island with a shrine where young girls were served up to the most powerful men in the world. The Boy Scouts really was full of pedos. There really are grooming gangs in the UK.

All the ugly truths escaped containment, and every conspiracy theorist could point at them and say see, we were right all along. Add to that the blatant “don’t believe your lying eyes” levels of propaganda that have occurred in the last decade. Racism is the real virus. Mostly peaceful protests. Russiagate. Very fine people on both sides. Politicians, institutions, and their media mouthpieces got caught lying enough times that “trust the science” became a punchline.

The Establishment collapsed. The Void opened, and it filled with half-truths.

It used to be that there was about one person in your friend group who was the conspiracy theorist. They were usually the stoner (I actually think mass weed use and a nation of marijuana addicts has contributed to this phenomenon, but that’s another piece entirely.) The village idiot in your friend group/family chat kept you up to date on the most recent developments with the lizard people, government surveillance, and how the moon is a hollowed out spaceship.

This isn’t a left/right thing. This is an everyone thing, as we saw in the aftermath of the White House Correspondents Dinner incident when STAGED started trending on X. Everyone is running the playbook now. The mainstream right. The mainstream left. The comedians. The podcasters. The whole influencer class.

We’re all Alex Jones now.

What I always hated most about the Trump years is that he gave us permission to be the worst versions of ourselves. But it’s also his super power. He’s revealed how full of shit and self-serving we can be. The comedians who had him on are now crying he betrayed them. Is he your boyfriend? They got conned by a con man. They saw their mostly male audience was with Trump and they followed—not the other way around. The influencers who spent years saying #MeToo went too far are suddenly very concerned about justice for the Epstein girls. The same people who platformed Andrew Tate. The folks who defended Harvey Weinstein just to be contrarian. These people did not suddenly develop a deep concern for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. They see a way to get attention, money, and clicks.

Trump is right to call them out on their bullshit moral crusade about Epstein. Everyone is full of shit. Including him.

This isn’t hypocrisy in the old sense, because hypocrisy requires a shared standard of truth. And these influencers won’t admit to sharing truth, to there being some basic reality to which we all belong and against which our theories and speculations must be tested—in fact, their whole gig is that you’re a dope if you try. So this is what you get.

It’s a new business model, and the model doesn’t run without The Void. The grift economy isn’t a bug of post-truth politics. It’s the product. The idiots aren’t useful despite the collapse of shared reality. They’re useful because of it. Their relevance requires that nothing can be verified or falsified.

Who benefits when nothing is true? Every influencer, comedian, podcaster, and politician in this story. Trump. The people feigning outrage about Epstein. The ones pretending to be betrayed. Their careers depend on The Void. They are The Void’s contractors.

Pick a tribe, you get a villain and a vibe. The right has the deep state. The left has the oligarchs. The wellness moms have seed oils. The podcast bros have the Epstein class. Everyone has the Zionists. We’re all on the same broken feed, performing a certainty nobody has, competing for the same thin slice of attention. Everyone is sure. Nobody is right.

The rabbit hole isn’t a subculture anymore. It is THE culture. Look at your own feed. Count the things you’ve shared this year without reading. Count the people you’ve written off over a post. Count the times you’ve felt righteous this week and ask when righteousness got this cheap. Nobody here gets to stand outside of this, either. I’m writing a take about takes. You’re reading one.

You can’t fix this system. But you can starve it. Attention is the only currency this economy runs on—it’s what every name in this essay needs to stay relevant. It’s also the one thing no one can take from you without your consent.

The truth is nowhere. And when nothing is true, all the idiots remain useful.

Starve them.