659 Minutes With... Alex Lee Moyer

Platforming a platformer of the deplatformed.

- By Simon Van Zuylen-Wood

IT'S NOON IN AUSTIN, fully 100 degrees out, and the documentarian Alex Lee Moyer is sitting in a downtown hotel a few hours before the premiere of her new film. Alex's War is an access-driven portrait of the muscle-bound conspiracist Alex Jones, and yesterday Moyer traded places with her subject, appearing on his Infowars show to plug it. "Every time there was a commercial break, they were really trying to push his boner pills," she says. "He's like, 'The globalists are trying to ruin the American family. That's why it's more important than ever to have children." Having spent months recording Jones, Moyer mimics his hoarse, manic drawl with affection.

Moyer's own expression is generally deadpan, and at times it's hard to tell if she's masking worry or ennui. Promoting Alex's War had taken on a circular quality with various media and technology institutions seeming unsure about whether to platform a movie about a deplatformed individual. The film's production company has claimed that Deadline declined to cover Alex's War because of its "approach" to a "prickly" topic and that major social networks limited its ability to advertise. The specter of censorship has elevated the film's status on the right, while its taboo quality has raised its cachet among a segment of the dissident left. The premiere was set to be a blockbuster anti-Establishment crossover event capped by a discussion between the two Alexes, moderated by the journalist Glenn Greenwald.