Like most populism, alt-right populism draws on the unsettling feeling of a danger emanating from intransparent structures of government. This is a perfectly reasonable feeling to have, but whereas with all other forms of populism, the source of the danger is eventually (incorrectly) pinpointed and rallied against, alt-right populism instead thrives on making the danger appear unnecessarily diffuse and complicated by introducing false, irrelevant, or misleading elements and connections, creating a deep well of lore into which one has to throw massive amounts of time to even view parts of the picture, and thus increasingly preventing escape by virtue of the sunk-cost fallacy.

Meanwhile, precisely because alt-right populism explicitly does not concentrate on any issue, its followers are easily persuaded to participate in even violent protests for or against anything whatsoever, and can be convinced to buy all kinds of snake oil on the market, just as long some connection can be made to the amorphous blob labelled the enemy.

For the populist, the flip side of the bargain is that much like Pygmalion with Galatea, the storyteller eventually begins to fall in love with their creation and begins to believe in it themself, whilst the conspiracy theory itself comes to life and develops a dynamic increasingly beyond their influence; which in my opinion is exactly the case with Alex Jones, who I think is in need of psychiatric attention and has lost control of his own life. I don’t see him recline on a sofa after the show, serenely sipping brandy and setting up a chessboard as, say, a cold sociopath like Tucker Carlson might do; instead I am fully convinced that the same bouts of mania and grotesquery that drive his show also possess him in private, and that perhaps, he is himself the victim of some of the MLM schemes he peddles.