Poster for Alex’s War, Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary about Alex Jones.
There are two publicly available displays making headlines right now about Infowars host Alex Jones, America’s best-known conspiracy monger.
One is the Alex Lee Moyer documentary Alex’s War, a one-sided portrayal so friendly Jones himself is eager to promote it. Variety (7/30/22) noted that it offers no “mediating voices,” and “never overtly takes Jones to task.” It doesn’t “show you a thing about his personal life, or anything about his business of using politics to sell health supplements.” It is “so free of judgment,” the review concludes, “an Alex Jones fan could probably watch it and think, ‘He slays!’”
Dan Friesen, co-host of the Infowars-dissecting Knowledge Fight podcast, told Slate (8/3/22) that Alex’s War was “an almost comatose approach to making a film.” He summed it up:
There’s a person who’s lying—Alex Jones—who’s the main subject of the documentary. And he’s the only source of information about himself, and he’s lying. And the film gives you no reason to suspect that he’s lying.
The film’s faint attempts to provide any critical balance to Jones’ statements, Friesen said, were “not meaningful at all”: “flashes of out-of-context headlines you can’t read, and then the clip of Obama joking about Alex saying he smelled like sulfur.”
Cathartic and illuminating
New York Times (8/3/22): “Infowars falsely linked the judge to pedophilia and human trafficking; in another, Mr. Jones questioned the intelligence of the jurors in the case, implying that his political enemies had handpicked ‘blue-collar’ people who ‘don’t know what planet they’re on.'”
The other, more balanced and revelatory showcase is the Texas trial related to Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting. His false claims that the massacre was a hoax led to intense harassment of the parents of the dead children, whom Jones smeared as “crisis actors.” The jury awarded the parents $45 million in punitive damages (MSNBC, 8/5/22), and the world was treated to Jones learning under cross-examination that his text messages had fallen into the hands of the parents’ attorney, showing he had withheld evidence and opening up possible perjury charges against him (New York Times, 8/3/22).
The ordeal has been both cathartic and illuminating for the rest of society, which mostly sees Jones as a crackpot. Before the jury revealed its award to the parents, Jones put his media company into bankruptcy (Wall Street Journal, 8/1/22). He was already found liable in a similar Connecticut case (NPR, 11/16/21).
Jones’ empire of lies is often embraced with a sense of ridicule; there’s a whimsical quality to his rants about government chemicals turning frogs gay (New Statesman, 3/20/17) and promises to eat his neighbors (The Wrap, 5/1/20)—akin to Weekly World News headlines at the grocery store check-out aisle proclaiming the existence of Bat Boy (Mental Floss, 8/7/20).
And that circus-like quality has been good for Jones’ bank account. We learned this year that Jones took in $165 million selling supplements and other prepper gear (Rolling Stone, 1/7/22), and at the trial one economist estimated that Jones and his business “are worth up to $270 million” (LA Times, 8/5/22).
The phone disclosures from the trial reportedly show that there were “several days in 2018 in which Infowars made over $800,000 per day” (NBC, 8/3/22). In fact, in Jones’ divorce court proceedings, his lawyer stated that Jones is nothing like the character he plays in his act (NBC, 4/17/17), assuring us that he is less a hallucinating madman than an old-school vaudevillian who cares about one thing: sales.
The Sandy Hook case changed things, largely because his repeated fabrications so obviously rubbed salt in the wounds of grieving parents. He mobilized his audience to torment the victims of carnage, as if they were foot soldiers of the message from which Jones profits but his viewers do not (AP, 8/1/22). Both the recent trial coverage, and the new movie, remind us that none of that could exist without helpers.
‘Tricky to distinguish’
HuffPost (via Yahoo News, 7/29/22): “It’s something else…to not only hear the damage that you’re doing to people outside of your zone, but to actually laugh about it.”
No radio or television show operates without dedicated staff, and during the trial Infowars producer Daria Karpova “ingratiated herself with the jury by remarking sympathetically that it’s very stressful being Alex Jones, because people tell horrible lies about him” (Above the Law, 7/29/22)—a claim that can either be read as classic chutzpah or an almost paternalistic loyalty to Jones.
One former Infowars employee revealed at the recent trial that he was “laughed at after repeatedly warning staff to stop publishing falsehoods about Sandy Hook,” indicating the complicity of the rest of the staff (HuffPost, 7/29/22). Jones wasn’t even alone in promoting the lies about the Sandy Hook parents on air–Infowars contributor Owen Shroyer, who testified in the recent trial, had also gone on Infowars to help bash the grieving parents (Austin American-Statesman, 7/29/22).
The films director, in coming out with positive spin for Jones, makes one wonder what she’s attempting to accomplish. Moyer’s previous documentary, TFW No GF, an exploration of the reactionary “incel” community (short for “involuntarily celibate”), suggests that she has some interest in the source of alt-right subcultures. Variety (5/6/20) described TFW No GF as a frenetic attempt to capture these online provocateurs’ essence, calling it “consistently difficult to watch, both in style and content,” adding the “film feels like a sloppy PowerPoint presentation, intercutting juddery-looking drone shots and Dramamine-demanding vérité footage with a barrage of screenshots.”
But this confusion leaves it unclear whether she’s a fellow traveler or an outside journalist. “Moyers meets her subjects on their own turf, constructing such a complex portrait, it can be tricky to distinguish where she stands,” Variety said.
Racking up clicks
Glenn Greenwald interviewing Alex Lee Moyer and Alex Jones at the premiere of Moyer’s film in Austin.
Reports about the Austin premiere of the Jones film do suggest where this film stands, however. Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald was so starstruck in his on-stage interview with Jones (Boing Boing, 7/26/22) that he said Jones’ admission that he was wrong about Sandy Hook showed “the soulful Alex Jones,” when Jones had, in fact, been pressed to do so because of litigation. Such sycophancy should perhaps be unsurprising, given that Greenwald started his career as a lawyer for a white nationalist (New York Times, 3/9/05) and has ended up as a second banana on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (Salon, 5/24/22), a venue also known for far-right conspiracy theorizing (Washington Post, 7/20/22). But because Greenwald long focused his journalistic career on exposing state secrets, including helping Edward Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13), his chummy pairing with Jones gives Infowars’ conspiracy-mongering an unearned air of honest questioning of government narratives.
Also at the film’s Austin premiere, according to New York (7/29/22), were a number of luminaries of the alt-right and post-left media circuit, including Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare. She was reportedly joined by her partner Eli Keszler, an “experimental percussionist and sound artist” (Pitchfork, 10/22/18) who composed the musical score for the film, providing a kind of sophisticated and avant garde veneer to a notorious philistine. The duo aren’t simply fans of Jones, then; they’re financially and artistically connected to Moyer’s project—Red Scare even dedicated an episode (11/22/21) to a friendly discussion with Jones and Moyer.
“Taking photos or even collaborating with Alex Jones seems to be an easy way to rack up clicks, first and foremost,” arts journalist William Harrison told FAIR.
Media allies
CNN (1/7/13) boasted of the social media buzz it got from platforming Alex Jones.
Media allies have played a role in ensuring Jones has had a bigger microphone than just Infowars. The Washington Post (8/5/22) reported:
Jones going on the Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 allowed him to push false claims about coronavirus vaccination on Spotify, where he had been banned. A clip shared widely on Twitter this week shows how Rogan, whose show has an estimated audience of 11 million per episode, has previously defended Jones as “hilarious” and having entertainment value.
Jones’ appearance on the Rogan show caused an uproar within Spotify (BBC, 10/29/20), but the damage was done.
More centrist media have also done their part. CNN (1/7/13) brought Jones to speak about gun control with Piers Morgan, presumably to draw attention to the network. Jones had earlier been interviewed on ABC‘s The View (2/28/11) and later by Megyn Kelly on NBC (6/18/17). As Parker Molloy (Present Age, 8/5/22) wrote recently, “All that ABC, CNN and NBC did in these cases was help make Jones a household name, guaranteeing him more subscribers and a larger profile moving forward.”
And many other businesses depend on Jones: The New York Times (7/24/22), citing FAIR’s research (2/11), outlined one of Jones’ key business relationships, noting that
misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the boldface names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, serve ads or syndicate content in the background.
Banal accomplices
A remora gets a free ride (cc photo: Brian Snelson).
All of these people and companies have to some extent affixed themselves to Jones and his image like remoras on a shark—not necessarily because they long to inspire wackos to attack parents of murder victims. They’re more likely motivated by a cold calculus that he’s a media beast whose controversy can move their careers forward, feeding an audience that hungers for nihilist transgression.
Jones’ empire clearly helps put a lot of food on the table for a great many people. Do they know there’s a social cost to helping him? Well, as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
Jones is also connected to the deadly January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection (New York Times, 4/20/22). The Jones machine is more than entertaining insanity—he’s propaganda for a frightening, anti-democratic ideology, with a far-right agenda that’s on the record. Jones now faces financial hurdles and possible other legal ramifications because of both Sandy Hook and January 6. Those who are helping him advance through the media, and to defend himself from consequences, are his banal accomplices. There should be social consequences for them, too.
The post Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.
Ari Paul | Radio Free (2022-08-18T17:53:15+00:00) Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/18/forget-alex-jones-look-at-his-helpers/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.