Where do you want to put Alex Jones?

How can you forget about someone you can't stop talking about...

Matt Drudge is the most important journalist of his generation. 

He took down a president from his living room. It had never been done before. A digital butterfly flits, a tsunami subsumes a political dynasty.

Sure, in the past journalists proved their worth by cultivating sources and following the paper trail. There’s still a place for that. But after Drudge it wasn’t in the headline department and headlines are what most people read.

Once he proved you could do so much with so little, Pandora’s Box was opened never to be closed again.

You don’t have to like it. It’s just the movement of time. But boy, time moves fast.

We can rail against modernity, but it arrives all the same. And when things change we need to update our morality to reflect it. 

And so we come to this: where do we, as a society, want to put Alex Jones? 

I say where specifically. In jail? Maybe a clear plastic prison like Magneto? 

In the poorhouse? Unable to pay for his Austin studio or wholesale testosterone pills for resale?

Or maybe we leave him alone? Speaking to those that want to hear him and no one else.

This is a newly relevant question as a judge ruled he is due to pay $45.2 million in a defamation case against parents of a child victim in the Sandy Hook massacre. It’s a case Jones didn’t even attempt to defend on first amendment grounds. His refusal to turn over materials led the judge to find him guilty before his trial even started. 

DECLARATION: WHILE THE AUTHOR FINDS ANY TEST OF AMERICA’S BEST IN THE WORLD FREE SPEECH LAWS TO BE WORRISOME, MALIGNING THE PARENTS OF A DEAD CHILD IS ODIOUS AT BEST AND JONES DIDN’T DEFEND HIMSELF IN GOOD FAITH. THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T A MAGIC PROTECTION SPELL. IF YOU “FUCK AROUND” YOU MIGHT JUST, AS JONES DID, “FIND OUT.” 

What I want to talk about is the trial itself, because it was revealing.

We loved it. 

I saw more video of Alex Jones in the last week on social media than I had in years prior. After he was banished from most polite internet society, Jones’ site InfoWars has been operating without the benefit of the great and powerful algorithm all content uses to find new viewers.

With the permission that we were watching Jones be punished, many covered it relentlessly via livestream, tweet threads, recaps, the whole spiel. 

So I ask again? Where do you want to put Alex Jones? 

Informally asking around in my orbit the answer is: far from here. Stripped of his power, money and influence. Maybe even Dr. Strange can make the world forget he ever existed like he did for Peter Parker in a movie where Parker was hounded by a reimagined J. Jonah Jameson aping the style and bravado of… Alex Jones. 

So let’s explore what that would realistically look like. Jones is already banned from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and all of the subsidiaries owned by those companies. He is now tens of millions in the hole which he will either pay or spend the rest of his life avoiding like OJ Simpson does with his civil penalties. 

What punishments, short of imprisonment or death, are left?

Jones is a weighted lure sinking to the bottom of our modern media morality. And that’s important, because things are changing fast. His precedent is the model for which we will subconsciously use to judge others who cross these lines in the future. Or rather if the lines he’s crossed deserved such punishment.

Based on the Jones feeding frenzy last week, I don’t think we are ready to quit him. 

Unlike other deplatformed bomb throwers like Milo Yiannopoulos who faded when their main platforms rejected them, Jones continues to operate at the edge of political discourse by way of sheer oddity and sweaty charisma.

For example, as he is on trial for such an ugly transgression my Twitter feed was littered with republishings of Jones parodies. 

Nick Lutsko (POTNUA) @NickLutsko

Let’s all sing along

It seems that the real desire is to leave Jones right where he is so that we can define ourselves in love or hatred of him. It doesn’t hurt that the same Google/Facebook/Twitter algorithms he’s denied still reward the Jones Discourse. 

The case to punish Jones further is often rooted in an idea I find awful and insulting. It goes a little something like this…

“It’s not that I love talking about Alex Jones,” says the person talking about Alex Jones. “It’s the people who take him seriously. If we don’t deny them this brain poison then our world will continue to spiral out of control.”

The soft bigotry of protecting the dumbs.

Of course, this should allow for exceptions, they continue. Like, for example, making fun of him for online engagement purposes. But we can handle that, because we are smart, unlike the dumbs we desperately need to protect from themselves. 

The reality is a hard one to learn in our modern morality: we control everything. 

There is no platform that can ban everyone you want. The same internet that made Matt Drudge more valuable than Bob Woodward has only one rule: if you pay attention, you reward. 

If we want to minimize, we ignore. Plenty of people have suffered the curse of “meh.” Like What’s His Name and the other guy. 

Of course, that means we can’t look over the proverbial fence and wonder what our digital neighbors are consuming and what it will do to them. We need to be secure in our belief that our message is our own and if we seek to proselytize that message it needs to be on its own merits. 

In our new morality, to mention the devil is to worship him.