“Make no mistake. Our culture is under attack and if we don’t turn away for five minutes from the football games, from the bread and circus, we are doomed to a 100 percent tax rate,” Alex Jones says to the camera in America: Destroyed by Design, his first documentary, produced in 1998.

Over the next eighteen years, Jones found himself riding the wave of a cult fandom willing to entertain any theory — no matter how outlandish — he might have. Now America’s best-known conspiracy theorist, Jones was only twenty-four years old when he created America: Destroyed by Design.

He made the film while he worked at a public-access television station in Austin, Texas, producing his Infowars program three nights a week in addition to his three-hour weekday radio show. Jones was well on his way to becoming a major cultural figure.