Angry in America: Inside Alex Jones' World

Radio host taps into dark national mood to build independent media empire.

ByABC News
October 2, 2010, 5:26 PM

Sept. 2, 2010— -- To Alex Jones, the world is a very dark place.

"Good old Uncle Sam will stage attacks ... that's how they keep the slaves in line," the libertarian radio host says during a rant on his show. "We have to wake up and face the fact that we have a criminal government."

Jones, who sits at the helm of an independent media empire, is arguably the nation's premiere purveyor of what could be called paranoia porn.

"World government means world tyranny run by a scientific dictatorship of control freaks that want to carry out forced population reduction," he explained.

The criminal government is just one of many conspiracy theories Jones espouses -- although he thinks that term belittles his reporting. He also believes that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center were an inside job, that President Barack Obama is an "unconstitutional criminal" and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) runs concentration camps.

"They [FEMA] have designation sports stadiums," he said matter-of-factly, "They have designated fields, they have designated closed down prisoner of war camps for the American people during a civil uprising."

You can count on Jones to push the envelope. Take his stance on the government poisoning the water. "I have all the other government documents where the government proposes -- or government think tanks propose -- poisoning the water to dumb down the population to make them more easy to manage," Jones said.

People who monitor hate groups say they're extremely worried about Jones' growing influence. His six-day-a-week radio show and webcast reach an estimated one million people a day. On YouTube and elsewhere, Jones estimates 200 million people have seen his various documentaries, like "The Fall of the Republic," "Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement" and "The Obama Deception."

In 2002, Richard McAslin, allegedly a Jones listener, snuck into a men's club in California that Jones has called, "a haven for the global elite," carrying a rifle, a handgun, a cross-bow and a sword. Last summer, another Jones fan -- a mother of three on Long Island, N.Y., named Nancy Genovese -- was arrested for allegedly taking pictures of an Air National Guard base with firearms in her car. The charges were later dropped.

Jones' critics say that by floating his highly-charged ideas at a time when the nation is already very angry and anxious, he's upping the odds for unbalanced people to do stupid things.

"I've got to report the information I see and what I believe is happening," he said. "I have a responsibility to put out."

When asked if he's worried about possibly-deranged people who listen to his show taking violent action, he went on the defensive.

"I knew when you guys called that this would be the crux of your interview and that's fine because the government is going to stage more terror attacks like it did in 1995, like it did in 2001 and try to blame it on the American people," he said.