Infowars magnate Alex Jones is America’s foremost 9-11 truther. 

His conspiracy theory about elites running a child trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor inspired a fan to bring a rifle into the restaurant and fire it off, he sponsored an election denial rally in that city on January 6, 2021, and he has repeatedly described terrorist attacks and mass shootings as “false flags” perpetrated by the U.S. government or other shadowy forces. 

His assets are about to be sold off to pay damages to the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School victims over his claims that the mass shooting was “a giant hoax.” Earlier this month, he warned his audience of an imminent “alien invasion” by “satanic interdimensional forces.”

But last Monday, Carlson welcomed Jones onto the stage at a stop on his national tour — and into the mainstream of the MAGA movement. 

The former Fox News star applauded the nation’s most prominent conspiracy theorist as “the most extraordinary person” he’d ever met, claimed that Jones had been “vindicated on everything,” and mocked the notion that Jones is “controversial,” “radical,” or “dangerous.” 

Jones received a “rockstar welcome on-stage to roaring applause from the audience,” Mediaite reported. 

Carlson had been bringing Jones closer into his circle for years. He went on Infowars several times in 2015 and 2016, and over the run of his Fox show his Jones commentary gradually evolved from criticism of social media platforms for banning Jones’ content to full-throated defenses of the content itself. Jones appeared on Carlson’s independent show in December 2023, trading wild claims across the latter’s table.

Jones’ onstage appearance came just days after Carlson showed off his ascendancy within the Republican Party by hosting Vance on the tour. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts also appeared earlier this month.

Carlson is at the center of an anti-Fox, anti-establishment faction of the right-wing media and Republican Party. 

Carlson’s tour booked some of the more traditional players in the alliance, including GOP politicians like Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), MAGA strategists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Kevin Roberts, and former Fox personalities like Dan Bongino, Glenn Beck, and Megyn Kelly. 

But it also incorporates figures like Jones and Kennedy Jr. who were previously consigned to the fringes of American politics. MAGA keyboard warriors, hardcore bigots, and deranged loons are welcomed on Carlson’s show for cozy interviews that allow them to reach and influence his large online audience.

Carlson’s effort to bring extremists into the mainstream right dates back to his time at Fox, when he worked to sanitize fringe figures and launder their views to his audience. But after being forced off the air and hanging out his own shingle, anything even resembling guardrails is off, as a review of his guest list shows.

Darryl Cooper

Carlson introduced Darryl Cooper, the right-wing host of the history podcast Martyr Made, by describing him as “the most important historian in the United States” for a September edition of The Tucker Carlson Show. Cooper, who has demonstrated “a strange fondness for Adolf Hitler,” then told Carlson’s audience that legitimate German grievances are treated too unsympathetically by historians of World War II, that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the conflict’s “chief villain,” and that Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front were due to incompetence, not malice.

Larry Sinclair

Larry Sinclair had “a 27-year criminal record, with a specialty in crimes involving deceit” and “an outstanding warrant” for forgery when he claimed without substantiation in 2008 that he had crack-fueled gay sex with a young Barack Obama. Carlson claimed in August 2023 that Sinclair’s story “is clearly true” and hosted him to regurgitate the tale the following month. Carlson told viewers that Sinclair’s account was “credible” and that news outlets were wrong to dismiss it at the time.

Candace Owens

In November 2023, Carlson offered then-Daily Wire podcaster Candace Owens a friendly platform to air her grievances with its founder, Ben Shapiro, and to criticize wealthy Jewish Americans for purportedly funding “white genocide” on college campuses. Owens used her Daily Wire show to promote antisemitic tropes over the next several months before leaving the outlet in March and starting her own podcast, which she has used to promote Holocaust denial and defend the antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Jack Posobiec

Jack Posobiec is an election-denying pro-Trump troll who has reportedly collaborated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He is perhaps best-known for his role in promoting the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which held that a D.C. pizza parlor served as the nexus for a child trafficking operation. Carlson hosted Posobiec on his show in July to speculate that President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 election was a “coup” and promote his book, an antidemocratic screed describing leftists as subhuman. Posobiec was also a guest at the same tour event as Jones. 

Steve Sailer

When Carlson hosted the writer Steve Sailer for an interview in June, he told Sailer that “everybody I know on both sides has read you for years,” adding that his guest is “not crazy,” and “not a bigot,” but a “social scientist” and “a numbers guy.” Sailer’s writing appears on websites like VDare, Taki’s Magazine, and The Unz Review which are infamous for publishing racist content; his work has been characterized as “scientific racism,” marshaling social science data behind gutter claims like his 2005 statement that Black Americans “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.”

Naomi Wolf

Carlson presented Naomi Wolf to his audience in April as “one of the most famous liberal intellectuals in America” until “she questioned lockdowns and the Covid vax” and became a pariah. In reality, Wolf began drawing critical attention for her deranged social media posts in 2014 and was publicly humiliated in 2019 when a radio interviewer explained to her that a central premise of her latest book was false. (Carlson said of Wolf following the latter incident, “You and I were raised to believe that she was really impressive, but she’s really not.”) Her unhinged, dystopian COVID-19 commentary included the claim that Apple had developed a new technology allowing the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time.” The week before her appearance on Carlson’s show, she posted that a solar eclipse and earthquakes could indicate that there are “multiple dimensions on our Earth” and that we are approaching “the end.”

Roseanne Barr

Roseanne Barr is a full-fledged QANon conspiracy theorist with a long record of deranged and bigoted commentary; ABC canceled her sitcom in 2018 in response to her racist tweet about former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Carlson promoted her as “a very deep person” who “they” are trying to “shut up” for a March interview on his show and hosted her at one of his tour events on September 24, during which she claimed elites “eat babies” and are “full-on vampires” who “love the taste of human flesh and they drink human blood.”

Jake Chansley

In March, Carlson gave a softball interview to Jake Chansley, who is known as the “QAnon Shaman” and became a symbol of the January 6 insurrection after storming the U.S. Capitol while carrying a spear and wearing lurid facepaint and a horned helmet.

@Catturd2

It is perhaps a sign of the total intellectual bankruptcy of the MAGA movement that one of its influential figures is a social media shitposter whose pseudonym references feline feces. In January, Carlson hosted the man behind the X account “@Catturd2,” introducing him as someone who writes “true things” and makes the elites “maddest.”