Mr. Jones and Me

Is the Alex Jones joke over? Or is it still on the rest of us?

The man, the myth-maker, Alex Jones

In my former incarnation as a serial profile writer, I developed a high tolerance - and sometimes even an affinity - for rogues, creeps, and colorful liars. Which is why it makes sense that I’d get along with Alex Jones, if only for an evening. Since, when it comes to those designations, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist easily pulls the hat trick.

In such instances, the relationship does not spring from a yen for true companionship. It is a transactional arrangement, albeit, a deeply interesting and human one born of emotional neediness on the part of both parties. The performing monkey (the subject) gets a fresh set of ears (mine) in which to spin their fabulist tales – a primal need that any performing monkey has. It’s a requirement as essential as food or shelter. Meanwhile, during hours of interviews, often conducted under the tongue-loosening influence of grape’n’grain, I’d try to push them into more uncomfortable terrain, in which they might have to do the unthinkable, like say, tell me something true.  I, on the other hand, would benefit from having a 3-D technicolor person filling my material sack, who I could then write up in all their rococo glory, dumping my findings on my editor’s desk, seeking their approval. Which is just as deep a primal itch for all writers. (They’re performing monkeys, too.)

Mind you, I have never actually profiled Alex Jones. I just “interviewed” him during a chance encounter. But while watching his recent defamation trial, in which he is rightly being put on the rack by the parents of Sandy Hook school-shooting victims whom Jones has habitually suggested were crisis actors in an elaborate government–hatched plot to confiscate our guns (more on that in a bit),  I flashed back to a night I spent in his company six years ago. Which in political time, and with all that has transpired since, might as well have been a half-century past.

It was the night before the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland kicked off, the one that would nominate Cheeto Jesus to take over the Republican Party, and later, the country, giving us whatever we live in now, since Trump’s effects have long outlasted the official end of his presidency. A bunch of journalism friends and I packed into an upscale Italian haunt, overlooking The Mistake by the Lake’s riverine pride’n’joy, the Cuyahoga -  a water body once so filthy with pollutants that it caught fire at least 13 times.

Since the city was overcrowded with politicians, conventioneers, and all the media needed to harvest their observational clichés, most eateries were jammed, and the wait-times on receiving actual nourishment were ungodly. I showed up to the restaurant, and 45 minutes later, after placing my order, I still didn’t have a bread stick to show for it. Though the taxed waitstaff kept refilling our glasses, which helped numb the pain.

A friend who’d invited us all had also invited Alex Jones for shits’n’giggles. Sure enough, Jones blew in late, like a Texas tornado, aggressively taking a seat right beside me.  Hot damn! At last, a worthy distraction while I was waiting for my veal. With his garrulous bluster and gravel-pit voice, he reminded me of the professional wrestlers I used to watch during childhood back on World Class Championship Wrestling, while living as a military brat in San Antonio. Though Jones was friendly enough, as with those Friday-night brutes, it felt like at any time he might lose his cool and reach for the brass knuckles in his trunks, or try to hit you with a chair while you weren’t looking.  We were immediately off to the conversational races.  After all, how often do you get to sit next to the sage who can explain why everything from 9/11 to the Oklahoma Murrah Building bombing was an inside job?  I don’t remember exactly at what point it happened. Maybe when I was spinning him up, asking him to explain whether the NSA was behind chupacabras snatching our children on the southern border.  (He assured me that he was a “moderate conspiracy theorist” these days, and while he used to be wrong around 30 percent of the time, he’d whittled that down to about five percent.)

But for whatever reason – maybe the kitchen staff really hated the Deep State – Jones received his food before any of us, despite having ordered nearly an hour later.  He fell on his pasta bowl like he hadn’t eaten in days.  I asked him what he’d ordered.  He took a pause from shoveling food into his mouth and looked at his meal as if considering its identity for the first time. “Noodles and meat,” he said.  It was a good populist answer. It would’ve felt off if he’d said, “Bucatini alla Bolognese.”

“You want some?” he generously offered.  “No, I’m fine,” I told him. “C’mon! Have some!” he insisted.  “Really, I’m okay,” I said, waving him off.  The same way Jones can never take no for an answer – which is maybe why he, and sometimes he alone, is on to the government controlling the weather, or why Bill Gates is a eugenicist trying to wipe out minorities, or why the Boston marathon bombing was yet another inside job  - he insisted I have a bite. “I know, let’s play airplane!” Jones exclaimed. And then he did it. He twirled a fork-full of “noodles and meat,” then held it high in the air, then made the sound of whirring airplane engines while he steered the fork directly into my maw, force-feeding me like I was a two-year old child. “Kind of like he does to his audience,” one of my tablemates later suggested.

Mr. Jones and me, 2016. In the bottom panel, I did not force him to cry. He’s just a sweaty man. Photo credit: Betsy Rothstein

It was a nice gesture. I was hungry as hell.  And yet, I still felt dirty and discombobulated. Good practice for the next six years of what was to come.

Flash forward to the present.  While much of America was preoccupied this week, waiting to see if China fired the starter pistol on World War III due to Nancy Pelosi’s field trip to Taiwan, my thoughts turned once again to my old dining companion who is on trial for defamation in Austin  - one of three damages trials he faces in the coming months, after a judge has already found him liable by default for not complying with discovery requests. The parents of Sandy Hook victims, it turns out,  take serious issue with Jones’s on-air suggestions that the whole thing was a big put-on.  Another inside-job government-concocted production to mind-warp the citizenry.  With America having grown conspiracy-minded beyond recognition in the years since Jones played airplane in that restaurant, what once felt like b-roll comic-relief fringe culture is now the actual culture.

While I didn’t watch all of the trial coverage, I did read enough of the diligent reporting of the New York Times’s Elizabeth Williamson, Mediaite, and others to feel like I caught the whole thing.  In typical Jones fashion, the spectacle turned out to be such a mash-up of tragedy and farce that there’s zero point in laying it out in chronological and orderly fashion. It’s better served as a hodgepodge information dump:

Jones put his company into bankruptcy days beforehand, trying to shield his earnings from a potential vengeful jury……Six-year-old victim Jesse Lewis’s father, Neil Heslin, who held his son’s body with a bullet-hole in his head (Jones called this into question on-air), testified that thanks to Jones’s cockamamie fabrications, he’d suffered everything from threats to gunfire directed at his house……..Jones still, just this week, suggested Heslin was “slow” and “on the spectrum”…..The judge in the case, who Jones had portrayed as being pedophile-complicit, had to repeatedly upbraid Jones not to lie in court…….Jones was caught outright perjuring himself when opposing counsel revealed that Jones’s attorneys had errantly sent them two-years- worth of Jones’s text messages, revealing that he had discussed Sandy Hook by text when he’d testified that he hadn’t.

On and on the carousel of ridiculousness spun. And yet to me, the moment that stuck, that suggested everything unfolding before us was more important than merely serving as another low-comedy punchline, came when Jesse’s mother, Scarlett Lewis, took the stand. A resolute, yet seemingly compassionate person, Lewis still wore the wounds of real injuries. First, from having her son murdered. Second, from having her loss called into doubt by Jones. Lewis fixed her gaze on Jones in the courtroom, and addressed him directly. I’m going to quote from her at length, because she said something that I think is worth hearing. (Take your pick - either the video, or the transcription that follows it. It’s the same.):

I wanted to tell you to your face, because I wanted you to know, that I am a mother first and foremost. And I know that you’re a father. And my son existed. You’re still on your show today trying to say that I’m…..implying, that I’m an actress. That I’m Deep State.  You have, this week.  And I don’t understand. 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, hard truth. Nobody would want to ever believe that 26 kids could be murdered. Nobody would ever want to believe that. I understand people not wanting to believe that, actually. I don’t want to believe it.  But I’ve since that day dedicated my life to keeping kids safe. It’s our responsibility.  I used to think it was the school’s responsibility.  It’s actually OUR responsibility. And I’ve dedicated my life to that, and having a quarter of Americans doubt that Sandy Hook happened, or doubt the facts around Sandy Hook  is not conducive to keeping our kids safe.  It’s not! And it’s our responsibility to keep our kids safe.  This happened over ten years ago, we’ve had over 350 school shootings since then , we have to keep our kids safe. Jesse was real. I am a real mom……There’s records of Jesse’s  birth. Of me. I have a history. And there’s nothing that you could’ve found.  Because it doesn’t exist, that I’m Deep State. It’s just not true.  I know you know that. That’s the problem.  I know you know that.  And you keep saying it.  You keep saying it. Why? Why? For money? Because you’ve made a lot of money while you’ve said it.………I know you believe me. And yet, you’re gonna leave this courthouse, and you’re gonna say it again. On your show.  You’re saying no. {Jones was shaking his head, no.}You just did it.

Since her son’s death, Lewis has started an organization she calls the Choose Love Movement.  The simple formula of which she distills as: COURAGE + GRATITUDE + FORGIVENESS + COMPASSION-IN-ACTION = Choosing Love.  It started as a no-cost program for schools, and has expanded into programs for home, work, and the like. The idea came to her when she spied a chalkboard in her house, scribbled on by her first-grade son right before he’d been killed. (He reportedly told nine other kids to run as his life was being extinguished, and they were spared.) On it, he’d written, “Norturting Helinn Love.” He meant, “nurturing, healing, love,” she surmised. The words were misspelled phonetically. Which was understandable. He was only six.  

She told Jones, in court, that she forgave him, but that she couldn’t believe it had come to this, that he’d forced her to punish him for repeating the falsehoods which so many believed.  As Jones himself had grown hoarse on the stand, Lewis came his way after testimony, handing him a bottle of water. A simple gesture that spoke volumes about the kind of person she presumably is.

Jones, for his part, now says he believes the Sandy Hook shooting was 100 percent real. That the parents lost kids, not crisis actors. “I think Sandy Hook happened and I think it is a terrible event and I think we need to protect our children from mentally ill psychopaths,” he now says, clearly excluding himself from the latter. Maybe he does now believe this, and maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he never believed any of his original fabrications in the first place, and it was all shtick-for-dollars.  But staring down the barrel of a potential $150 million judgment does have a way of concentrating the mind, and sobering up even those who live intoxicated on their own falsehoods.

Jones claims that even a $2 million judgment would sink his media empire. (His lawyer suggested that if the jury finds damages, they award $8 to Jesse’s parents, or one dollar for every charge against Jones.)  This is doubtful, since internal documents revealed he grossed as much as $800,000 per day, for everything from his conspiracy publications to quack dietary supplements like “Super Male Vitality” and “Lung Cleanse Plus Spray.”

As Heslin’s lawyer said in closing arguments:  “Speech is free, but you have to pay for your lies.” It was a good line. But I’m not sure it’s entirely true.  After all, look around in what’s become Alex Jones’s America:  At the president who insists that the election he lost was stolen, and who backs candidates nationwide who are pretending the same. At the Supreme Court Justice who pretends she can’t define what a biological woman is.  At the nearly 50 percent  of Protestant ministers who now claim that they regularly hear conspiracy theories from their congregants. Even if Alex Jones gets soaked by a jury, who is going to pay for all the ongoing lies?

We all will, is my guess.

Bonus track:  My favorite Alex Jones slow-jam, his demented rants reimagined as an indie folk song by Nick Lutsko:

Double bonus track:  Hate to be Captain Obvious, but had to shoehorn it in, due to my forced headline. Counting Crows doing an acoustic version of “Mr. Jones” on Howard Stern………Mr. Jones and me/Tell each other fairytales…….