Alex Jones Had a REALLY Bad Day Today

Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been on trial this week as a jury determines the monetary damages he owes to families caused incalculable harm by his lies about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012. This is the first of at least three similar damages trials he’ll have to face after losing multiple defamation cases.

Jones took the stand for the first time Tuesday and it didn’t go well. The judge admonished him for chewing gum, he sounded like he was doing live infomercials for the jury whenever he talked about his company and the products it sells—it was just a weird, bad day for him all around.

Things got so much worse on Wednesday, though, when Jones took the stand again and the plaintiffs’ lawyers let him know that they knew he’d been lying under oath and that they had proof. In fact, they had his entire phone history from the last two years—something he clearly was not aware of.

Just want to add that Alex Jones' latent cough came back in full force when his own texts, which he didn't know the Sandy Hook parents' lawyers had access to, appeared on a screen in the court room and he was asked to read one.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 3, 2022

It makes sense that Jones was so surprised, since apparently the contents of his phone were sent to the plaintiffs’ attorneys by mistake.

Alex Jones, seconds after being told that his lawyer mistakenly send a huge cache of texts to Sandy Hook families’ attorney:

“This is your Perry Mason moment” pic.twitter.com/f6byn6N6VA

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) August 3, 2022

Jones had been specifically asked if he had any text messages regarding Sandy Hook on his phone and he said no. That was a lie. Jones also apparently didn’t provide any emails to attorneys during the discovery period because he said he didn’t use email. Also a lie!

What this case comes down to is essentially the difference between mis- and dis-information. Did Alex Jones know he was lying when he called the Sandy Hook shooting a “hoax” and a “false flag” and accused parents of murdered children of being hired “crisis actors” or did he genuinely believe those statements, as deranged as they were?

So much of the Alex Jones trial will come down to whether or not he knew he was lying, and whether or not that matters. This gets at the heart of the conceptual difference between mis- & disinformation, and I think this trial will expose the flaws in that conceptualization.

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) August 2, 2022

This bombshell of a text and email dump shows that Jones was still spreading those lies after privately admitting that he knew they were false, which seems to leave no doubt as to the answer to that question. As NBC News writes, “Jones has since apologized, claiming that he has not personally published nor signed off on Sandy Hook conspiracy theories for years. New texts revealed by [attorney Mark] Bankston on Wednesday appeared to show Jones signing off on more Sandy Hook conspiracy theories five years after the tragedy.”

In addition to the texts and emails about Sandy Hook, the phone dump reveals that Jones is not “broke” or “bankrupt” as he tried to convince the jury. Vice writes that “Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which is not the same thing as Jones personally being broke or bankrupt. Bankston told Jones that data from the phone showed that Infowars was making $100,000 to $200,000 a day in 2018, even after he began being deplatformed from major social media sites, and occasionally  made up to $800,00 a day.”

It’s hard to comprehend just how bad Wednesday was for Jones. On top of all of this, he was also asked to explain an Infowars segment from last week where Jones insulted the very jury sitting in front of him. Bankston played a clip of Jones’s show where he said many of the jurors “don’t know what planet they are on” because they live in “blue city bubbles.”

Bankston also played a clip where a picture of the judge of the case was engulfed in flames as a narrator said she works with Child Protective Services, “which has been exposed for human trafficking and working with pedophiles.”

He was proven to have lied under oath multiple times, he insulted his own jury, and he accused his judge of supporting pedophilia—all in one day. At this point, I think Alex Jones might only exist to give us perspective about our own lives and choices, and to show us that we could be doing much worse.

(image: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)