The founder and host of Infowars is named Alex Jones. You may know him as a conspiracy-theory peddler, an angry gun-toting maniac, a temple-throbbing screaming nutjob, or a friend of Donald Trump. He is all those things.
But he's also just acting. He said so himself in court. He's trying to win custody of his children, so he admitted that he is a "performance artist" and just "playing an entertaining character."
Of course his viewers and listeners never knew that, and they've been taking him seriously. Just ask the fellow nutbag who went with a gun to the pizza place in Washington because he believed Hillary was running a child-sex ring out of it. He got that info from Alex Jones. Or ask the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre. They've been dealing with nutpots who think they staged the whole thing to get people upset about guns...because the performance artist told them so. Our president even took him seriously. He called into the show and told him that he did a great show.
We are living in the snake oil era, and yet, half the country thinks the legitimate press is fake. Snake oil cannot win.