TV Review —Frontline’s “United States of Conspiracy” Doesn’t Tell Us Anything We Don’t Already Know

Let me start by saying I am a big fan of Frontline. Huge. There is not and has never been a better documentary series. The closest is 60 Minutes, but Frontline’s shortest episodes are three times the length of the average 60 Minutes segment — and often longer — allowing for a deeper dive into the issue at hand. Frontline’s Money, Power and Wall Street, for example, devotes four hours to 2007–’08 global financial crisis, examining everything from the industry deregulation that enabled it to the cozy relationship between government and Big Business that allowed nearly all the responsible parties to go on their merry way — and does so in a manner thorough enough to please financial experts, yet with sufficient clarity for laypersons to understand the whole clusterfuck. (And as if that isn’t enough, they’ve got a webpage full of additional one-off documentaries and other material on the subject.)

It’s that consistent history of compelling reportage that makes “United States of Conspiracy” (originally broadcast in July 2020 but updated this month) such an oddity. Focusing on how Alex Jones, with help from Roger Stone (or vice versa), “rewr[ote] the playbook on American politics” by way of harnessing the horsepower of conspiracy theories, the Frontline team fail to deliver new information or angles on Mr. InfoWars or the conspiracy theory landscape.

After opening with Election Night 2016, as Roger Stone sits with Jones live on the InfoWars set while the American populace elects Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, Frontline takes us back to the 1990s for a cursory review of Jones’s early career as a minor radio and late-night cable-access TV personality in Austin, Texas, where his small, right-wing audience (along with Austinites who would, according to Austin-based journalist Jonathan Tilove, “sit home and get high in the middle of the night and watch this crazy guy vent about crazy stuff”) ate up his combination of machismo and sounding the alarm of anti-government conspiracy theories. (Even Ann Coulter says Jones was “not my cup of tea.”)

Then came 9/11, which Jones seized on as a “false flag” operation (as he had done with the 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombings), a move that got him dropped from two-thirds of the roughly 100 radio stations syndicating his radio show. But rather than ease up, Jones put the pedal to the metal, making ever more increasingly outrageous and unsupported claims (political scientist Nancy Rosenblum calls it “conspiracy without the theory”). The crazier the better, and Jones was soon in demand as a guest on even mainstream shows such as The View.

But we already know this, just as we know about the products he shills (supplements, survivalist gear, “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirts — “the exemplar of a conspiracy entrepreneur,” says Rosenblum) and his dogged harassment of the parents of Sandy Hook murder victims. The closest we get to anything we may not have heard before is a few former InfoWars staffers talking of how they tried to get Jones to back off the Sandy Hook stuff (which serves mostly to make us want to punch them in the face, since they were enabling him up to this point), and his then-wife Kelly, who divorced after finding his Sandy Hook prevarications a bridge too far.

This is one of the many times Frontline drops the ball. With Jones’s ex-wife sitting down for an interview, shouldn’t we get an intimate look at someone so opportunistically amoral and/or insane? Instead, we end up with less than a minute’s worth of material: he became an increasingly conspicuous consumer as the money poured in; he was excited by the traction his Sandy Hook comments were getting. That’s it.

The meat (such as it is) of “United States of Conspiracy” is Jones’s inroads with the Republican establishment by way of Stone, whose savvy you almost have to admire despite his despicableness. Seemingly understanding exactly what kind of people — and how numerous – comprised Jones’s audience, Stone made his first appearance on InfoWars in early 2015, and over the course of the next year was a frequent guest. Naturally, Candidate Trump followed, and suddenly Trump was publicly echoing Jones’s canards: Ted Cruz’s father played a role in JFK assassination, Obama and Clinton founded ISIS, etc. “I’ll tell ya,” Jones says giddily, “it’s surreal to talk about issues here on air and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”

But, again, we know this, just as know that Edgar Maddison Welch drove to Washington D.C. based on Jones’s claims that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor and started shooting up the place before realizing there wasn’t even a basement in the place. (The best line of “United States of Conspiracy” is a reading from Welch’s later statement to the New York Times: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”) And if you’ve followed the news more recently, you know that in a 2019 deposition for a defamation lawsuit brought by Sandy Hook parents, in his own defense Jones claims that a form of psychosis caused him to believe that more or less everything in life was staged.

Between its original 2020 broadcast and the just-released version, conspiracy theory has added two new songs to its greatest hits — COVID and the 2020 presidential election — so presumably the “update” of “United States of Conspiracy” is the short coda linking these two bits of collective madness to the popularization of conspiracy theorizing in which Jones has been so instrumental. But if you’ve not been living under a rock, you already knew this, too, so it’s hard to see what “United States of Conspiracy” can add to the conversation in general or to your knowledge base in particular.

Although “United States of Conspiracy” is only 53 minutes in length, you might be better served using that time to watch the first episode of HBO’s Q: Into the Storm, a six-part exploration of the subterranean fora where the QAnon movement was born and thrived. Although no-one’s going to mistake the somewhat gonzo approach of director/producer Cullen Hoback and co. with the Frontline methodology, their dive into conspiracy culture locates the kind of buried treasure for which “United States of Conspiracy” doesn’t even appear to search.

Frontline has done far better in the past and undoubtedly will do far better in the future. But I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

Want to see for yourself? Visit “United States of Conspiracy”.