Alex Jones’ Legal Spanking is a Boost for the Truth - Horowitz

Alex Jones’ Legal Spanking is a Boost for the Truth - Horowitz

Moments as poignant, dramatic and satisfying as Scarlett Lewis, the mom of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, one of the 20 children who were gunned down at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, speaking directly last week from the witness stand to an uncomfortable and squirming Alex Jones usually only happen in the movies or in our imaginations.

 

In plain understated tones that only made the moment more powerful, Scarlett Lewis told Mr. Jones, who had called Sandy Hook a “hoax “and the parents “crisis actors,” what the lies he shamelessly and repeatedly proclaimed to the millions of people who follow him on Infowars about her and the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School had cost her, the other impacted families who had lost children, and the nation. "I wanted to tell you to your face. ... I am a mother, first and foremost, and I know you're a father, Ms. Lewis plaintively said. “And my son existed… Jesse was real. I am a real mom, ...I know you know that, and that's the problem." 

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 From the witness stand, Scarlett Lewis summed up what was at stake in this trial and in the broader assault on truth that Jones exemplifies: "Truth – truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on and we have to agree on that to have a civil society. Sandy Hook is a hard truth."

 

For while Alex Jones may be the most egregious purveyor of deliberate falsehoods, he, unfortunately, has plenty of company. Mr. Jones is part of a thriving right-wing media universe that is unmoored from truth and reality.  With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, these far-right media outlets, such as Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and The Gateway Pundit, moved from the fringes to the mainstream.  Supercharged by Mr. Trump and increasingly amplified by other Republican politicians, Jones, Steve Bannon and the others, who well-know that what they are telling their viewers, listeners and readers is not true, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in creating an alternative reality that a significant segment of our society now embraces.  They did and continue to do so in order to advance their nativist and authoritarian political goals.

 

Up until the verdict in this trial, they have been able to laugh all the way to the bank while doing it.  This profiting off-telling explosive lies to their audience was accurately described as the “monetization of misinformation and lies” in the attorney for the parents’ summation for the jury. That is why this jury verdict is more than justice delivered in this one case: it is a blow for truth.  The nearly $50 million of total damages awarded in this first of three trials for damages that Alex Jones faces sends a strong message that at some point there is a price to pay for reckless lies.  As important as the monetary award was, Jones was forced to admit under oath that what he had been saying all of these years was simply not true.

 

Defamation suits, of course, are not the answer for most of the damaging conspiracy theories and just plain untruths that have injected poison into our body politic. Alex Jones was also all in, along with Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and roughly the same casts of characters, on the “birther lie” in which they all falsely claimed without any evidence that Barack Obama was not born in the country and was, therefore, an illegitimate president, persuading 7-in-10 Republicans to at least have doubts about his birthplace, according to a 2016 NBC News/ Survey Monkey poll.  This is the racist lie that fueled Donald Trump’s initial rise in the Republican party- one that he only reluctantly repudiated in the 2016 Presidential campaign when the political cost of insisting on this fiction became too high.

 

Along the same lines, Alex Jones was one of the chief amplifiers of the “Big Lie” and one of the main organizers of the January 6 rally. The right-wing media echo chamber has stuck with Donald Trump as he continues to falsely insist that he won the 2020 Presidential election despite producing no credible evidence and being told he was wrong by his own Attorney General and campaign manager.  A majority of Republicans believe this flat-out and damaging falsehood.

 

These are just the highlights of a daily assault on the truth that undermines the reasoned debate and discourse that is essential to a healthy democracy. As Jonathan Rauch has pointed out, Alex Jones, Donald Trump and the rest are employing a disinformation technique “perfected ”by the Russians, dubbed a “firehose of falsehood”   This is  an  “information-warfare method, marked by high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fiction.” 

 

This method succeeds not only by persuading a segment of society to depart from a grasp on reality, but also by creating sufficient doubt among some of the rest of us about whether we can discern truth from fiction. As Barack Obama put it in a 2020 interview in The Atlantic, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition, the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”

 

Alex Jones’ comeuppance is an important victory for truth.  But the war to put reality and truth back at the center of our politics is far from won.