A former video editor and field producer for Alex Jones’s Infowars has said his work for the notorious conspiracy theorist was “nonsense” and “lies”, but he kept at it for four years in his 20s because the far-right media company’s founder was a magnetic presence and it earned him good money.

Josh Owens made those revealing remarks in an NPR interview published on Tuesday promoting his new memoir about once having been an employee of Jones and Infowars – a conversation that also detailed the hand he said he had in fabricating a video of an operative of the Islamic State (IS) terror group sneaking into the US from Mexico immediately after a beheading.

“In Jones’s world, it was all about making things look cinematic,” Owens, who left Infowars in 2017, said to NPR. Likening the aesthetic to that seen in pieces by Vice News, he continued: “We would go out there, we would shoot videos … like we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on.

“But it was nonsense. It was lies.”