Alex Jones Shows Why We Need a Trump Trial
We need justice — and catharsisGeorge DillardThe big, blustery man suddenly looked pretty small. With his hefty frame wedged into a suit, he was coughing and sweating profusely. He had turned a shade of pink that you usually only see in schoolchildren who have been caught red-handed. As the day went on, his eyes got wilder and wilder.
Alex Jones had finally entered a situation he couldn’t scramble out of, a zone he couldn’t flood with shit.
For decades, Jones has been able to say whatever he wants. He learned through experience that, if you say inflammatory things loudly enough and often enough, people will pay attention. In this particular case, he was on trial for repeatedly claiming, without evidence, that the murdered children in the Sandy Hook massacre weren’t real, and that their parents were “crisis actors.”
Jones has spent over 20 years spewing conspiracy theories to his audience. It’s made him a national figure, and many of his unhinged allegations — false flag operations, the deep state, crisis actors, shadowy plans by the government to imprison Americans — have found their way into the rhetoric of elected Republican politicians. His paranoid rants have poisoned our political discourse. They’ve also put a lot of money into his bank account — at times, more per day than a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School likely made in a decade — because they help to sell “Super Male Vitality” pills and bulletproof vests.
Maybe Jones actually believes all this stuff. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter, really, to what degree he’s evil and to what degree he’s stupid. His words and actions have had the effect they’ve had, and I have no desire to spend my time poking around among the cobwebs in Alex Jones’ brain to discern his true beliefs.
So what happens when a guy who has made a very lucrative living spewing immense quantities of hateful bullshit enters one of the very few places in American society where spewing bullshit can’t help you win?
After twenty years of ranting and raving with no filter, Jones found himself in a courtroom run by a no-nonsense judge. He still seemed to believe that he could say whatever he wanted in his broadcasts (he attacked the judge and the members of the jury while the trial was ongoing) and not have that come back to bite him hours or days later in the courtroom. In this, Jones was badly mistaken — his own lawyers had made the monumental mistake of sharing the contents of his phone with opposing counsel, and Jones found himself unable to squirm out of the reality of what he’d done.
When he tried to bluster and rant, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble shut him down. Jones seemed to think that ...
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