Alex Jones and the Horrific Lie

 

Breaking: Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been found guilty by default in all of the Sandy Hook defamation suits — granting the families of 10 Sandy Hook shooting victims four sweeping victories.https://t.co/nBSFLNwuul

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 15, 2021

The Sandy Hook mass murder took place December 14, 2012.  It doesn't even feel that long ago. I remember the thing that broke me about it was thinking about all those little kids that close to Christmas and how that was going to be the anniversary for some families--thinking about their little kids and the presents they never got to open. Just every damn year. It should be unthinkable, but it wasn't unbelievable, because post-Columbine, mass shootings just kept happening. West Nickel Mines. Red Lake. Virginia Tech. 

But Alex Jones told a horrific lie about the Sandy Hook families. He said that the mass shooting never took place and they were crisis actors. What these families have gone through was extraordinary.  They suffered a horrific tragedy, and were persecuted for it on the basis of absolute liars and scoundrels saying their tragedy was a lie. 

Their loss of their children was called a lie. Can you imagine the horror? Wishing your kid was alive and you could hold them and being called a fake and threatened by online assholes who just didn't want to believe the objective truth of your life? 

Like me, like a normal person, the US president at the time, Barack Obama, cried talking about that loss, and was pilloried by conservatives for having normal human feelings. Alex Jones lied about that event and was rewarded by interviews with 2016 GOP candidate Trump and a continued listenership of extremely dumb people who never noticed that he was always wrong and also selling them stuff. He's a chubby little dude in his forties who looks sixty and sells vitamins because obviously. Look at him! Such vigor! Such angry abusive ex-husband who shouldn't have custody energy! Such eventually gonna help do an insurrection for clicks and clout kind of guy. Sure. Who doesn't want that? 

Yet he still has fans. He's a disgusting caricature of the worst kind of bloodsucker--but he's been made a mostly acceptable part of conservative media because of the Trump connection and because no one over on that side seems to give a shit about right and wrong anymore. They can't stake their vampires, stop their zombies, even acknowledge the monsters on their side are monsters. 

What Alex Jones has used his platform to do has been monstrous. He demonized people suffering a great loss, the kind that stays with one for life. Whatever financial price he pays (it won't ever be right) isn't enough. Had he decency, he would stop broadcasting lies. Had his listeners decency, they would stop wanting to hear them. 

But we don't live in the world where the people who like Alex Jones get why he's a scumbag, and we don't live in a world where scumbags naturally repent. So I hope he loses his ability to do his stupid show because it's a financial hardship and his followers go do something else. Fucking snort bathsalts and wrestle alligators. I don't know if I even care. 

I do, though. How did anyone get so warped as to call the families of murder victims out as liars and treat them so horrifically because of lies any critical thinking would have easily disposed of? This inability to think first, this lulling by platformed liars--we need to tell the people they must truly think about the things they think about. But like leading a horse to water--how do we make them think?