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This week, The New York Times reported that Alex Jones, InfoWars founder and professional peddler of lies, is seeking more than $100,000 in court costs from the family of Noah Pozner, one of the 20 children who were murdered in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Jones is seeking that amount to recover the court costs involved with his legal defense: Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, Noah’s mother and father, sued Jones for defamation because of the conspiracy theories he spread about the Sandy Hook murders. Jones insisted that the kids’ deaths were a great hoax, a performance staged by gun-control activists backed by the American government. As a result of that, Noah Pozner’s family says, they have been stalked and subjected to death threats by Jones’s legions of epistemically gullible yet digitally savvy followers—a fact that has, doxxing by doxxing, forced them to move seven times over the past five years, ever farther away from the body of their slain son.

In her 2016 book The Confidence Game, an exploration of the minds and methods of con artists, Maria Konnikova argues that cons thrive, in particular, during times of transition—in the cultural chaos that typically results from the lurchings of economic and political shifts. That is because con artists are skilled above all, Konnikova notes, at “exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change.” Now, in this time of American upheaval—populism, the digital transition, the storms of a stifled planet—con artists like Alex Jones have been given a microphone. And, with it, a megaphone.



Here is a headline that CBS News ran on Thursday: “Alex Jones’s Lawyer Makes Case Against Sandy Hook Parents Who Claim Death Threats.” It’s a summary of events that makes clear, in its concision, the upside-down moralities of the Jones case, which involves an attempt to gloss over the lies Alex Jones has told with normalizing legal niceties: arguments that his conspiracy theories are merely “opinion,” and that they therefore constitute speech protected by the First Amendment. Arguments that the parents of Noah Pozner, by virtue of their involvement in Sandy Hook as a news event, are public figures, and therefore required to prove that Jones spread false claims as a result of actual malice, rather than mere confusion or callousness or negligence. Which is to say: arguments that suggest a tacit acknowledgement of how thoroughly lies have infiltrated the very systems that were developed, over time, to arbitrate truth in America. Arguments that engage in a great performance of equivalence: the lies on the one side of the table, the truths on the other. Arguments that participate, in that, in a somber metaphor for a time in which journalists are mocked as liars and threatened as the enemies of the people, and in which expertise is dismissed as elitism, and in which truth has been allowed to be treated not as the only thing that matters, but rather as a choice—an option that is often, being all fact and no heart, an imposition. Related Video