ALT-RIGHT, ALT-RIGHT, ALT-RIGHT
Austin’s rise as the misinformation capital of the world.
On Oct. 27, 2020, Joe Rogan invited one of the most incendiary media personalities in the country onto his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. A once obscure laughingstock of a public-access television host, Alex Jones was thrown off all major social media platforms in 2018 for violating hate speech policies and repeatedly promoting violence. Yet Rogan likes “to just ask questions,” so he exposed his 11 million loyal Spotify listeners to Jones.
Lest the collective memory forget the world events swirling in the news at the time, a worldwide pandemic had shut down the planet. The Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on this day, filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. And a presidential election loomed a week away that held the fate of democracy in its balance.
Alex Jones: Let me show you what I came here with in my notes. I have right here in my notes, the carbon conspiracy. And that is specifically what I wanted to get into here with you in my notes because this is everything.
Joe Rogan: Are you a climate change denier?
Alex Jones: Well see, imagine … imagine how that’s, how they use that term, right? “Are you a climate change denier?” It’s like a 9/11 denier, right? No, the towers got blown up. Our government had prior warning, and it had been funding al-Qaeda and all that came out later in Senate reports and the 28 pages.
Joe Rogan: Let’s not go there just now ’cause we’re gonna go down a rabbit hole.
Alex Jones: Okay. What are you? What is, what is, what is, what is Joe Rogan made up out of?
Joe Rogan: Carbon. Carbon-based life form. We are literally stardust. That’s a song, right?
Alex Jones: Exactly. What are trees made out of?
Joe Rogan: Ummm, tree stuff?
And on and on it goes – for over three exhausting hours.
What connects these media personalities is more than their shared compulsive indulgence in conspiracy theories. Both Jones and Rogan call the Lone Star State home. And both reside here in our capital.
After the 2020 Census, Austin became the fastest growing major metropolitan city in the United States. Although it hasn’t quite cracked the top 10 of most populous cities in the country, Austin’s nipping at the heels at number 11. The people who flock here do so with rabid enthusiasm.
“Austin is a place people choose to be, you know, just very deliberately choose to be. And of any place I’ve ever been, it had so much more of a sense of itself,” opined Sarah Bird, a novelist, screenwriter and journalist living in Austin since 1973. “From the first moment I was here, there was a real strong identity.”
Naturally, that identity has shifted as the years passed. Many have written, and many, many others have grumbled, that Austin isn’t what it used to be. The fear of outsiders coming in and changing “their” city has plagued locals for decades, so much so that the Austin Independent Business Alliance adopted the slogan Keep Austin Weird in 2002 to support small businesses and promote Austin’s cultural identity, which was idealized as an Eden for the liberal-minded.
But the dawn of a new era is here. The arrival of the tech-bro brings new norms and values at odds with the Austin of old. Looking back, this cultural evolution almost seems inevitable, especially when examining our most controversial public figures. Home to Jones and Rogan, and now Elon Musk, Austin was destined to become the misinformation capital of the world.
Gone to Texas
Austin’s identity as a Lone Star State oddity has roots in the city’s earliest days. During the 1840s-1850s, “there were more printing presses in Austin than churches, which separated Austin from every other community in Texas at this time,” revealed Joe Nick Patoski, acclaimed writer, historian, and author of the recent gonzo history book, Austin to ATX. “This place was not built on faith, but it was built on facts, on words and journalism and things like that. That was more powerful.
“If you’re a creative person, filmmaker, musician, author, this was a place where you could be certain to do your own work, forge your own path, not follow everybody else,” he added.
In physics, a phenomenon known as Brownian motion observes the random motion of particles after colliding with surrounding molecules. That’s how Sarah Bird describes the vibrancy here, the unique frequency in which Austin exits unto itself.
“You’d go out to Soap Creek Saloon or these places where they’re selling Lone Stars for $1, and people are dancing and forming bands and doing stuff,” Bird said of Austin when she arrived in the early 70s. “It was just such a sense of the possible, a much more magnified sense of the possible than certainly where I’d come from.”
Nevertheless, the circumstances to create such a unique blue oasis collided in a very particular way. Patoski dubbed the technical term for this anomaly “the three-pillar stool.”
The state government. The University of Texas. And the music scene.
“Once the university gets established [in 1883], anyone that’s the least bit different, which in many communities in Texas means anyone that’s a thinker, this is safe harbor,” Patoski said. “You come here to pursue your education. And by virtue of being the state university, you have outside influences. You have professors and outside ideas coming in.”
Austin’s music scene sprouted when a group of Germans sought a local venue for their singing club. So in 1866 they created Scholz Garten, now the oldest business in town, “for the purpose of singing, making music, and drinking beer,” Patoski said. Over time, the romanticism of making music and drinking beer wove itself into the fabric of the city, attracting hippies and rednecks alike not just from across the state but from all over the country.
“For everybody who was half a bubble off the plumb, they came here and created a rich, vibrant community that was not consciously trying to be weird,” Bird said. “It was just, you know, mostly led by the people that didn’t fit in elsewhere.”
Spoon and Michael Dell make strange bedfellows, but the fuck-it-I-can-do-this attitude necessary to start a band in a garage flows from the same entrepreneurial spirit it takes to start a tech company in a dorm room.
“This is a place where all roads converge,” said Evan Smith, CEO of The Texas Tribune. “There’s a kind of a community of entrepreneurs here, and there’s support for investment in technology and early-stage software companies. People come here to build things.”
Tech giants may have come for the barbecue, but they stayed for the tax breaks. Austin is now one of the largest tech hubs in the country thanks to companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google, alongside a number of well-funded venture capital firms. There’s also a burgeoning group of companies working the murky world of crypto, and Austin is no stranger to con artists preying on the misinformed or schemers turning politics into big bucks. Few have succeeded like the king of Infowars himself.
Culture Vultures
Alex Jones arrived in Austin from Dallas as a fresh-faced 17-year-old in 1991, the same year Richard Linklater’s Slacker revolutionized indie filmmaking with its ensemble of social outcasts who pontificate about, among other things, how the government controls the media, JFK and moon landing conspiracies, and Madonna’s pap smear. To an impressionable young man, this brave new world was fertile ground in which to cultivate a career as a conspiracy theorist. A decade after his arrival, Jones landed a role in Linklater’s mind-melding animated movie Waking Life. Playing “Man in Car with PA,” Jones drove a car while screaming into a megaphone connected to speakers on the roof as he rolled through the streets of Austin.
“We have got to realize that we are being conditioned on a mass scale,” Jones rails on screen, his face literally animating red as he works himself up into a frenzy. “Start challenging this corporate slave state. The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery; not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control. It’s going to be the age of humankind standing up for something pure and something right. What a bunch of garbage!”
In the ’90s, Jones hosted a public-access TV show before making the jump to radio in 1996. Readers of The Austin Chronicle voted him “Best Austin Talk Radio Host” in 1999. Perhaps they took the fake news fanatic seriously, or maybe they couldn’t switch the station away from such an entertaining sideshow. Probably a little of Column A and a little of Column B, according to Charlie Sotelo, head of SXSW Comedy.
“Early on, before when he was still just a mess of a broadcaster, the only entertainment value was watching him fall apart when people would call him and mess with him on air,” Sotelo said. “It was just really funny to watch him lose his shit, you know, trying to hang up quicker and trying to come up with some clever thing to win whatever exchange it was.”
Sotelo punched Alex Jones in the face in 1997 in the parking lot of the Austin cable-access studio.
“It was clear at the time that he was a toxic presence back when everyone just dismissed him as some idiot who was just saying the wildest, dumbest thing that nobody could believe or take seriously,” Sotelo said. “And then very slowly over the years, you would hear people start saying things like, ‘But he does get a lot of good information.’ Or, ‘He does know something. He is right about a lot of stuff.’
“As he became more of a presence in Austin, he just started getting taken seriously. And it was like, you could just tell that it wasn’t going to end well. And, you know, it’s slow cooked for 15 years.”
Jones launched InfoWars in 1999. From the perch of its marquee program The Alex Jones Show, which boasts an audience of up to 1.4 million, the host inflicted his damage. Most notably, he claimed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “giant hoax.” Jones used this tragedy, and the endless misery of others, to sell diet supplements and doomsday prepper gear.
Earlier this year, Jones agreed to be interviewed for this article. “I’m about to leave town ’til next Thursday, but I would definitely like to talk to you,” he said. “You got my number. Let’s stay in touch, okay?” After repeated attempts to schedule, he texted back 10 days later: “It will be a while ’til I know a time.”
That time never came. Perhaps because Jones was busy fighting legal battles on several fronts. In August, a jury in Austin awarded the parents of a Sandy Hook victim $45.2 million, on top of an earlier $4.1 million verdict. Two months later, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion to the Sandy Hook victims’ families by a Connecticut court. After the verdict was handed down, Jones remained defiant on InfoWars.
“We’re not scared, and we’re not going away, and we’re not going to stop. And literally for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep [the Sandy Hook families] in court for years. I can appeal this stuff,” Jones fumed. “[The verdict] is a joke, so please go to [the website] … and get all the great products that are there that keep us on air. … Flood us with donations.”
The Sandy Hook families have filed another lawsuit against Jones, claiming he illegally transferred millions of dollars into shell companies in order to hide his assets after they filed their initial defamation lawsuit. In response, InfoWars filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, Jones also found himself under investigation by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol for his role in the insurrection. He requested prosecutorial immunity in exchange for his willingness to cooperate with the committee. When that wasn’t granted, he sat for questions and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. All there is to do now is wait as the slow wheels of justice turn. In the meantime, Jones continues to hawk faux health supplements from his InfoWars empire.
Joe Rogan, the stand-up comic turned podcast host, claims Jones is the “most misunderstood guy on the planet.” Despite being banned from all major social media platforms, Jones still makes intermittent appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience, which commands an audience of 11 million loyal listeners.
Rogan made Austin his permanent home in 2020 during the pandemic in part because he felt COVID restrictions in California were too strict, and he hated paying Golden State income taxes.
“When you look at the traffic, when you look at the economic despair, when you look at the homelessness problem that’s accelerated radically over the last six, seven, 10 years, I think there are too many people here,” Rogan complained without any irony on his podcast when he announced his move to Texas.
Rogan’s move certainly generated its fair share of mostly positive media coverage. However, the shift in that coverage took a hard right turn when Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum. They could have him or Joe Rogan, not both.
Young refused to have his music on the same platform as Rogan, who spread COVID misinformation on his podcast. Rogan’s lucrative deal for Spotify is worth $100 million, although new reports suggest the deal could be worth up to $200 million. To no one’s surprise, Spotify chose Rogan over Young.
The negative coverage of Rogan snowballed when a video surfaced compiling every time he used a racial epithet applied to Black people. That used to be a career killer, but somehow, Rogan managed to escape relatively unscathed. The debate raged about what responsibility Spotify held in providing a platform for Rogan, but in the end, they stood by their golden boy.
With the obligatory Instagram apology video in his rearview, Rogan’s desire to expand roots in Austin never waned. He attempted to buy the One World Theatre with plans to revitalize it as a comedy club. When that deal fell through, he found a new home for his vision, the historic Ritz Theater on Sixth Street, which currently stands vacant after the Alamo Drafthouse’s flagship location closed last year due to the pandemic.
If Austin truly is the “seat of future empire,” as the second President of the Republic of Texas Mirabeau B. Lamar famously exclaimed, the 800-pound Tesla in the room can no longer be ignored. Elon Musk relocated here from California around the same time Rogan did, making Austin home to the richest man in the world.
Not only does Musk own the visionary companies Tesla and Space-X, he recently agreed to honor his original $44 billion bid to buy Twitter and take the social media giant private after a lengthy public legal battle. He has vowed to lift former President Donald Trump’s permanent ban from the platform.
“[Elon Musk] is now Austin’s cultural icon. He’s replaced Willie Nelson,” lamented Sarah Bird.
Musk seems to be all-in on Texas. In April 2022, he unveiled his new Tesla Gigafactory, the largest of its kind in the country, at a truly bizarre kick-off party called Cyber Rodeo. Resembling a third-rate Roy Orbison impersonator, he bounded on stage in dark sunglasses and a black 10-gallon hat. Tesla followed up by filing to trademark a Lone Star State-shaped logo for “Texas Roundup,” which some have speculated will be the name of its annual shareholder meeting.
“I call them cultural vultures,” Patoski seethed. “They’re leeches, basically. They come in, and they’re leeching off the culture that was built here.”
Actually, the traffic here does suck
A recent poll conducted by the Axios-Generation Lab Next Cities Index on where college students want to move, this beloved city did not appear among the top 15 cities for Democrats. Governor Rick Perry famously christened Austin “the blueberry in the tomato soup,” a liberal stronghold in a deep red state. But perhaps Austin, one of the most economically segregated cities in the country, isn’t as liberal as it thinks it is.
In 2019, Austin’s left-leaning City Council lifted a 23-year-old ban on public encampments, which was widely considered a boldly progressive attempt to address homelessness. Two years later, voters reversed course, overwhelmingly approving a ballot initiative to reinstate the ban. Apparently liberalism does have its limits.
The District of Columbia recently announced a program to provide up to $200k to first-time home buyers to combat a red-hot housing market. The effort is particularly designed to ensure Black residents aren’t pushed out of town. Austin’s down payment assistance program only offers up to $40k, yet the median listed home price in Washington, D.C. is $610,800 while Austin’s is $649,900.
While the city hands out tax breaks to lure some of the richest companies in the world, the hippies, slackers, and artists that have been the heartbeat of the city for decades can’t afford to live here anymore. With a community that’s 70% white, the lack of diversity may actually be accelerating, in part because of the growth of the tech industry, said Lila Valencia, the city of Austin demographer.
“In the state of Texas, and even around the country, populations of color really drove growth this last decade. In Texas, just about 5% of the growth that we experienced between 2010 and 2020 came from non-Hispanic white population. In Austin, they contributed 40% to our total growth in our city,” Valencia said.
For the first time in 230 years there has been a decline in the United States in the number of people who identify as non-Hispanic white. “It’s really unique that we’re seeing such a strong growth of this community here in the city of Austin,” Valencia said.
There has always been a streak of libertarianism running through Austin’s leftist political culture in no small part because of Alex Jones. The tech-bros invading the city have appropriated that too, and the city will forever be changed because of it.
“I think Austin is small ‘L’ liberal,” said Evan Smith. “It’s not about political liberalism. It’s about cultural liberalism. It’s about an openness and open-mindedness.”
Ironically, Austin’s liberalism and open-mindedness gave space for Alex Jones to exist. He’s a unique creation of Austin’s own making.
“To me, Alex Jones was just another weirdo keeping it weird,” said Michael Hall, a Texas Monthly writer. “I know he got big and famous for all kinds of crazy reasons, but I mean, to me, how he started, he was just another slacker.”
Jones is here to stay. Unless, the Feds haul him away to prison, in which case, don’t let the megaphone hit him on the way out of town. Until then, Austin will have to reap what it has
sown. Joe Rogan is now telling his listeners to “vote Republican.” And Elon Musk recently labeled Democrats “the party of division and hate,” prompting Politico to declare, “Elon Musk has become the villain liberals always imagined him to be.”
Before Musk moved to Texas, Rogan interviewed him on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2018.
Joe Rogan: There’s something about Texas that’s very enticing because [it’s free]. It is dangerous. But it’s also free.
Elon Musk: Right. Yeah, I kind of like Texas, actually.
Joe Rogan: Well, I prefer it over places that are more restrictive but more liberal because you could always be liberal. Like, just because things are free and just because you have a certain amount of right wing-type characters, it doesn’t mean you have to be that way. You know, and honestly, there’s a lot of those people that are pretty fucking open-minded and let you do whatever you want to do. As long as you don’t bother them.
Elon Musk: Right. Yeah, exactly.
When the world used to look at Austin, it saw Willie Nelson smoking pot or Matthew McConaughey dancing naked with bongo drums. Now, the city is defined by the personalities of Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. New hometown mascots with rabid global followings.
Never before has Austin had to contend with outsized forces with such economic and cultural influence. The explosiveness of these elements creates a tension between the old guard and the new that has yet to be resolved. Yet despite Austin’s radical sea change, the city is nothing if not consistent.
Austin knows how to keep it weird.
