Saturday, July 6, 2019

Alex Jones’ Downfall Was Completely Avoidable


Alex Jones has been in the fight of his life both from his defamation lawsuits and his constant de-platforming by social media companies. This is all rooted in one thing: attacking victims of violent crime. More specifically, the Sandy Hook massacre victims’ families.
Jones for a long time claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and didn’t happen. Jones has marked the parents as being actors. This would mean the parents of the dead children engaged in fraud in faking their children’s deaths. This has resulted in death threats against the parents and constant terrorism forcing them to move several times. Today Jones says he no longer holds these beliefs and blames pushing them on his show was due to a form of psychosis. That’s what he said in his deposition in defamation lawsuits.

Jones has no one to blame but himself for all these troubles he’s in. Because it was completely avoidable. Jones had a steady career starting with the Clinton administration building up to his signature triumph being the leader of the 9/11 was an inside job movement. He would accuse all sorts of government officials of mass murder, child sacrifice, and fraud with mass casualty events. This resulted in plenty of DVD documentaries and Internet traffic to his website.

Jones was in his prime with the election of Barack Obama. There was a whole cesspool of Internet conspiracies and content for him to work with. But during that time he decided to go from targeting government officials with his conspiracy theories to private citizens. I’ve already talked about how Jones tended to avoid getting private citizens in his extraordinary claims because that could lead to defamation lawsuits. Government officials don’t have the same protection and can be defamed all Jones wants.

Now it all begs the question. Why would Jones go down such a vulnerable path in going after private citizens and more specifically ones that are the victims of violent crime? It couldn’t be that Jones thought he was getting repetitive and boring because with every presidential administration there is a new wave of conspiracy theories to market on. Although he did believe he was going to be put out of business if Romney won the presidential election in 2012. Jones likes to pick conspiracy theories to talk about based on what’s trending on the Internet. It could’ve been as simple as him taking a shot in the dark and picking the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories to talk about. 

But where did he think this was going to go? This was the start of a new conspiracy phenomenon called “crisis actors”.  This would accuse the victims caught up in a mass shooting or terrorist attack of being actors to sensationalize these tragic events because the event did not happen or wasn’t as horrible as the media was portraying. We’re talking fake blood, fake amputees, fake deaths, and everything. Was Jones expecting to be the leader of the crisis actor movement just like he was the leader of the 9/11 truth movement? He would have to have a long-term plan because almost all of these mass casualty events have one thing in common. Almost all the victims are private citizens and not government officials. So the legal repercussions could stack up. During the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing Jones did not accuse the victims in the Murrah federal building of being fake or actors. But of course he did accuse the government of orchestrating that event so no legal trouble for him there.

Jones was doing just fine up until this point. He had a YouTube channel, Twitter, and Facebook page with millions of followers. The social media companies were profiting off conspiracy theories with engaging content and especially with YouTube. Their algorithm makes sure you keep watching videos and conspiracy theory videos are ripe for that. It wasn’t until Sandy Hook parents started to get death threats and harassment that the social media companies begin to take notice. Not wanting anything to do with the spread of Jones and his message they removed him from their platforms. And it wasn’t just Sandy Hook. Pizzagate also resulted in a shooting by an Alex Jones fan. Jones apologized for spreading pizzagate in order to avoid a lawsuit.

People often ask: what’s the harm in believing in conspiracy theories? What I would say is that the real danger we face is civil discourse. How are we supposed to share a reality when the other side is chasing ghosts instead of working to help solve the worlds problems. In that case these companies did not care about nothing but their profits. But when it got to the point where people were actually getting hurt, this was a PR disaster that had to be dealt with appropriately.

These companies didn’t care when Jones was defaming public officials including the Obama administration. So that also undermines the claim that Facebook and YouTube are out to get conservatives. It’s when he started to the defame private citizens that it started to be a problem. And this problem for Jones was completely avoidable. He just had to stick to talking about public officials. If he just stuck to that probably all his social media profiles would be up today.


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