I gave some attention to Alex Jones so you don't have to
Elon Musk has reinstated conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to X, formerly known as Twitter. So Jones is free to say what he wants to a vast audience.
I agree with this decision. If terrorists and the like can post garbage on social media, why not Alex Jones? The protection of free speech granted by the Constitution was done so to protect those we disagree with the most.
It’s also worth noting that X is a private company. Musk can enable and disable accounts as he chooses. But I’m glad he allowed Jones to return so he can post all the micro messages he chooses.
I hope you support his right to say what he wants.
Now I hope to convince you to ignore Jones for the rest of his life.
This is not a good man, at all.
Alex Jones has been peddling conspiracy theories for a quarter-century. He has made a name for himself by going further and more extreme than even the most looney of conspiracy theorists.
The sheer lunacy of his theories, combined with the unhinged nature of his delivery, allowed him to attract a significant following on the site InfoWars.com.
I typically roll my eyes at crazy conspiracy theories and move on. One of his theories, however, made me camp out because I just couldn’t believe anyone would stoop so low. Then, I couldn’t believe anyone would grant him one ounce of credibility.
Almost exactly 11 years ago, a mentally unstable 20-year-old gathered enough ammo to burst into an elementary school and kill 20 kids between the ages of six and seven. He also shot and killed six adults and then himself.
I certainly remember people shaking their heads in disbelief, not wanting to imagine a person could actually kill kids like that. The whole world was shocked.
Jones didn’t believe it either. He told his viewers that the event was staged to lessen the lobbying efforts of the pro-gun crowd.
Jones hammered this over and over on his show. He mocked the parents who had to bury their children. He accused them of being stage actors planted by the gun control lobby to play the part of grieving parents.
He posted photos of people who looked similar to the parents as “evidence” that these people were shipped in to Sandy Hook for the role of their lives. As if 1,000 people in America don’t look just like Alex Jones, but why try to throw common sense into the nuttiest of nutty notions?
He then turned right around and said the parents’ behavior wasn’t consistent with grief, and pointed to one press conference in which a grieving parent (Robbie Parker) supposedly flashed a smile before walking to the podium to address the death of his daughter, Emilie.
“You know, after you lose your daughter, they put you on some antidepressants or something, but I thought those take a month to kick in. I mean, it’s like a look of absolute satisfaction, like he’s about to accept an Oscar,” Jones said on his show.
So I’m not sure which contradicting theory he wanted to push — either these are actors who are supposed to be convincing (that’s why they were brought in) or they’re actual parents told to play a part.
Then he hammered a clip from one of the television broadcasts in which there appeared to be a smudge at the top corner of one of the reports, which he used to claim that all of the media were simply reporting from in front of a green screen and all the pictures and video from Sandy Hook were artificial.
This, again, went on for days. The intellectual shallowness of this supposed theory is award winning in its stupidity.
Let this resonate for a moment …
Twenty school children between six and seven years old were gunned down by a lunatic who also shot and killed six adults. I cannot imagine a worse nightmare for a dad or mom, brother or sister.
Unless, a crazy man with a microphone and an audience tells the world that what you experienced never happened; that you’re either a crisis actor or you’ve been paid handsomely to go along with the narrative. It is unfathomable a human being would stoop to such, but that’s exactly what Jones did.
After the Jones rants, many of his crazed followers harassed the kids’ parents for weeks and months after the shooting.
So, many of the parents sued him for defamation. This is where Jones would be able to “prove” that his theory was true, that all he said for weeks on end actually went down that way. He could display to the whole world through the legal process that Sandy Hook was a hoax.
Of course that didn’t happen. Jones admitted through the lawsuits that he was wrong. He apologized a number of times, although it never appeared to me that any of the apologies were heartfelt in any way.
In a sworn deposition, Jones claimed he had a “form of psychosis” at the time that made him believe things that weren’t true.
Defamation lawsuits are hard to win. The Constitution and court precedent allow free speech broadly. But there are limits. In order to prove defamation, a plaintiff must convince a judge or jury that the defendant’s statements were made with a disregard for the truth that is not merely negligent, but reckless.
Conversely, truth is the ultimate defense in a defamation case. You can say extremely harsh things, as long as they’re true.
As a former journalist, I support the right to free speech and typically hope that defamation suits fail, lest it chill free speech further.
In this case, I hoped Jones would lose and that the financial judgments against him would be so steep that it would rival the gross domestic product of many countries.
He’s now on the hook for $1.49 billion in damages. It was the most slam-dunk case of defamation I’ve seen in my life.
The families have offered to settle for pennies on the dollar ($85 million over 10 years) but Jones continues to evade payment. He’s filed personal and business bankruptcy while still managing to spend a lot of money recently.
I’m not sure about his financial bankruptcy, but his statements indicate moral bankruptcy.
Why would anyone pay attention to anything this man says? Wouldn’t this be disqualifying as a general rule of common sense?
Jones’s supporters (and there are many) say that some of his theories have been proven true. They say he correctly predicted the 9/11 attack just a few months before it happened.
Tucker Carlson fawned over Jones about this in a recent interview on his X/Twitter show, amazed that he was able to predict the event before it happened. Many others point to this as a reason to continue following him even after repeated lunacies.
Below is a photo of the front page of the Dothan Eagle from December 19th, 1999.
The image is grainy but the front page story is about potential threats to the United States in the upcoming year. Andrew Small was a graphic artist for the Eagle at the time and he put together a graphic illustration to show one of the leading threats experts believed could happen.
It’s a photo of Osama Bin Laden, a commercial jet airplane and a passport.
This wasn’t something Alex Jones plucked out of nowhere. He wasn’t a misunderstood genius, or clairvoyant. This had been in the public conscience for quite some time, so much so that a graphic artist at the Dothan Eagle accurately illustrated it almost two years before it happened.
And Tucker Carlson? The man his followers say isn’t scared to ask the tough questions? I thought he was going to kiss Jones on the lips during the interview.
Carlson: How could you have called that?
Carlson: Makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Carlson: Nobody was thinking like that.
Oh, and when Jones addressed his Sandy Hook statements to Carlson?
Jones: I just, you know, questioned (Sandy Hook) a few times.
That is the statement of a man with zero self awareness.
Conservatives or fellow conspiracy theorists are afraid to criticize Jones.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald interviewed Jones in 2022. Greenwald became famous in journalist circles for being one of two journalists to break the story revealed by Edward Snowden, who copied NSA files and made them available to Greenwald and another about the massive surveillance program on Americans overseen by the NSA.
Jones believed he was justified in putting forth such an outrageous lie of epic proportions because the anti-gun lobby was using the tragedy at Sandy Hook to further its own ambitions. And that appeared to be a perfectly logical reason for Greenwald.
Greenwald: What is it you think caused you to do that? I mean, you referenced some things, and I identify with it myself, because people who lie for a living are telling you that you’re a liar, when people whose job it is to spread disinformation are accusing you of doing that, you kind of want to dig in a bit and not give an inch to people who you know aren’t criticizing you in good faith … have you thought about some of the psychological and cultural dynamics that led you to make some of those mistakes in Sandy Hook?
Jones: Think of this as like a 1,000-page book. Sandy Hook in my life is like a quarter-page. And I’m not putting down the kids that died or any of that stuff. It’s just like … I used to on the air take calls. So the callers all called and said ‘We don’t believe this. Look at this’…
So the reason for fabricating such an outrageous, incredibly hurtful lie was (a) other people that lie are accusing you of lying and sometimes you want to dig in and (b) people were saying hey, take a look at this.
It is OK to abandon the truth if doing so keeps the other side from gaining an advantage, and if doing so makes you a lot of money along the way.
Conservatives don’t need to trumpet Alex Jones. We should urge fellow conservatives to disregard him completely.
We’re using truth as a utility. We’ll hold onto it if it helps us but we’ll drop it in an instant if it doesn’t.
This should not be.
More conpiracy theory stuff: