Fighting (for) truth? Alex Jones, the WHO and the legitimation of conspiracy discourse

This chapter provides a critical examination of Alex Jones’s conspiracy rhetoric concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of the World Health Organization (WHO). It explores the array of communicative and discursive strategies employed by Jones to legitimize his narrative and portray it as “truth”. This analysis is based on the premise that conspiracy theories function as fully fledged, self-sustaining discourses that claim legitimacy as (socially constructed) truth, countering the official narratives propagated by mainstream media and political institutions. To elucidate this phenomenon, this chapter introduces the concept of “epistemic masquerade”, which characterizes the manner in which conspiracies are enacted as discourse, camouflaging themselves as truth and gaining legitimacy through specific masking and manipulative techniques at both visual and linguistic levels.