“There’s no way the Trump people would have reached out to me a year and a half ago, if he wasn’t aware of the work,” Jones would tell me later in the week. “He’s been what you call a ‘closet conspiracy theorist’ for 50 years. I think he’s been a chameleon in the system, and now he sees the time to strike.”
When I pressed for details about the Trump outreach, Jones clammed up. (Trump guested on his radio show last December, but hasn’t been a regular.) But aside from the kinship of their conspiratorial world views, the human conduit between he and Trump is clear enough: Roger Stone, Jones’s friend and frequent Infowars guest, is the former Nixon dirty-trickster-turned-Trump confidant and unofficial campaign adviser.
Over the past several months, Jones and his company have emerged as key wingmen in Trump’s strike formation, amplifying the campaign’s themes and weaponizing Trump’s attacks on “Crooked Hillary.” Jones’s team hatched and promoted the “Hillary for Prison” design meme that went wildfire and now dominates Trump campaign culture, from parking-lot merch to convention-floor chants. (In 2009, Infowars’s meme division also released the “Obama Joker” into the Tea Party scene, adding a haunting modern image to what had been a sea of Gadsden flags.)
A pioneer in the use of targeted searches to manipulate Google algorithms, Jones has enlisted his audience to send “Hillary for Prison” to the top of Google’s U.S. search list, sometimes beating out competition like “Brexit” and “Pokemon Go.” For the general election, Jones is planning to fly the phrase over cities from coast to coast. But based on the number of T-shirts on view this week in Cleveland, who needs airplanes? At Monday’s rally, Stone noted with amused awe the sea of “Hillary for Prison” apparel stretched out before him. “Just look at them all,” he marveled.
