Alex Jones, Lawfare, the Deep State, The Supreme Court, and Me
Why you'll see more lawsuits against independent media which is anything but independent.
Among the first things you do when you take over a country is to prop up the local conspiracy theorist. He has the power to undermine the very sense of truth itself.
Ideally, you’d want to control the country’s elite and even the king himself but that often proves too challenging and isn’t nearly as much fun as controlling the fool. After all, we know from Shakespeare that the fool is often the only one permitted to tell the truth. Kings have to lie, most of all to themselves.
To be a conspiracy theorist you need not invest heavily in a serious news gathering operation. You riff on things out there already in the so-called mainstream media. Sometimes the riffs riff on each other. This is how, I think, Q Anon proved so intractable—it built upon previously published conspiracy theories.
The problem in recent years has been that so many of the publications that are out there are backed by billionaires, some of whom have their own ties to foreign governments. I called these Billionaire Blogs. Some of these blogs are quite good. Carlos Slim once owned the New York Times. Rupert Murdoch, flush with $100 million from the Bank of China, owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Fox News. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And so on. Freedom of press belongs to those who own one. To be a press baron isn’t cheap, especially as the advertising market is being eroded by Google and Facebook. You want to make a small fortune in media? Arrive with a large one. Mort Zuckerman, the owner of the New York Daily News, always had ink in his veins but wanted to come in at the owner level rather than the scribbler one.
So there’s a race to the bottom and its in bottom feeding that the conspiracy theorists feast on the scraps. The necessity of the claim of publishing “all the news that’s fit to print” is that there is some news that isn’t fit to print. Who makes the decision of what ends up in the pages and what goes into the proverbial waste bin is a political choice. This is where the tabloids become powerful. Tabloids are the town square, done crassly and with an eye to the gutter. There is a power here. “Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.” Naturally both the intelligence community and organized crime avail themselves of the tabloids to shape public opinion, the crown jewel of the regime.
The stakes are high. “Our government rests in public opinion,” Abraham Lincoln once said. And how could it be otherwise (he explained in 1859), since “in a Government of the people, where the voice of all the men of the country, enter substantially into the execution, - or administration, rather - of the Government - in such a Government, what lies at the bottom of it all, is public opinion.” “Public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln told Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. "Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”
The conspiracy theorist knows this deeply. He knows that “your people are a beast” and so he caters to their vices. Not for nothing did Nick Denton, the proprietor of Gawker, refer to himself as a pornographer. Perhaps it was in jest but Gawker’s victims weren’t laughing. Marriages collapsed. Careers ended. Some contemplated suicide. That karma came for them and I was happy to be its handmaiden.
Alas, every so often the conspiracy theorist makes a mistake. He goes too far. He trips on the wrong taboo. This becomes “the fake because” which is used to get him. He is either banished or executed. His power and his money are stripped from him.
So it is with Alex Jones, a man with whom I am somewhat acquainted, having once appeared on his show to warn about the dangers of social media censorship. Nearly everything I predicted came to pass, incidentally, though you can’t watch the episode because it was censored by YouTube ironically enough.
I do not condone in anyway his remarks about Sandy Hook (or indeed a great many subjects) and I would be remiss if I pretended some great familiarity with his oeuvre (such as it is). Nor do I make any apologies for his boorish conduct. Or his participation in January 6th, and on, and on. What he did to those families was wrong.
How should we feel about how his counsel leaked his text messages to the opposing counsel? Was this an accident? Was it deliberate? It’s very hard to tell.
I did send him a text message the other day letting him know that I’d be praying for him and hoping that he might turn a corner in his life. Love the sinner, hate the media sin. Mercy is the mark of a great man. Though mercy isn’t always dispensed by social media or from juries…
How much is Jones controlled by foreign powers? Friends of mine who worked at Infowars say that Jones never allowed anyone to criticize Israel. There are interesting and weird ties to Russia and China too, much as there with his ally Roger Stone whose own foreign ties are being probed by federal prosecutors.
Alex Jones once invited me on his show with Roger Stone. Stone freaked out and started screaming about how I was a Fed or some such thing. (Stone once accused me of being involved in a murder of a man I never met.) Sheepishly and apologetically Alex Jones said that I couldn’t go on the same segment with Stone. I took in stride then and thank my lucky stars that there isn’t some clip on the Internet of your humble correspondent, sandwiched between Stone and Jones prattling on about the latest conspiracy.
Gore Vidal once said that he never turned down an opportunity to be on TV or have sex. I’m glad I’ve managed to dodge my fair share of both. On TV you are always one mistake away from screwing yourself.
In America, we redistribute resources through litigation, not through legislation. I believe that the deep state will continue to take out compromised media properties through litigation.
To some extent I already played a role here. I was something of an advisor to Thiel on the lawsuit against Gawker though I very much ran my own strategy. I ultimately settled for a seven figure pay out once Hulk Hogan and his sidekick, Peter Thiel, had bankrupted the tabloid.
Lucrative though this victory was, it was in a very real sense incomplete because the structure of the defamation industry persists and continues to victimize many people.
My lawsuit — Johnson v. Huffington Post — seeks to change the underlying economics of this defamation industry by making it easier for those who are harmed by it to sue in the areas where they were personally defamed.
Here’s the question before the Court.
Whether the panel majority of the Fifth Circuit correctly held that a national news organization’s website that harvests visitor location data to share with third parties for targeted marketing in a forum from which it derives substantial revenue does not subject that news organization to specific personal jurisdiction in that forum for a webpage on that site that contains an alleged libelous publication.
You can read the 84 page petition for a writ of certiorari. It’s pending before the Supreme Court and there’s a split in the circuits over this issue.
Look closely and you might see a way in which CDA 230 is overturned through the courts.
Shhhh!