Alex Jones’ doomsday has arrived. A jury in Connecticut has decided that the right-wing conspiracy theorist must pay eight families of Sandy Hook shooting victims and a first responder a staggering $965 million.
The decision comes on the heels of a trial in Texas, where a jury found the Infowars founder should pay another pair of Sandy Hook parents who sued him in the Lone Star state nearly $50 million.
In all, Jones’s lies about the Sandy Hook shooting have so far cost him more than $1 billion.
With his punishment, jury decisions could curtail or even doom Jones’s Infowars media empire, which has been at the center of major conspiracy theories dating back to the administration of former President George W. Bush and embraced by Donald Trump.
The reckoning for Alex Jones comes at a crucial time in American society, where lies and conspiracy theories have flourished in recent years, often enriching and empowering those who sell them to the public.
Jones has been an avatar of that behavior. He amassed great influence and wealth by poisoning the online well of information, writing a playbook that has been employed and executed over the years by others seeking wealth, fame, and political power.
While Alex Jones may face a reckoning, nearly a decade after his egregious lie about the Sandy Hook shooting, the corrosive project that catapulted him to fame and fortune on the political right is here to stay.
It is impossible to undo.
And it’s more popular than ever, imitated by former President Donald Trump, right-wing cable channels like Fox News, radio hosts (both local and national), and the myriad online influencers who command a sizable following on media platforms. social media.
Many years ago, “Deep State” rhetoric and “false flag” conspiracy theories were confined to places like Infowars, where viewers had to sit back and watch a hysterical Jones rant about the globalist and dark forces that , according to him, they wanted to end the American way of life.
This is not like that. These conspiratorial elements are now the center of conversation on the American right.
It is simply impossible to quantify or calculate the enormous influence that Jones has had on the conversation that has captivated the Republican Party. He has dragged the mainstream to the fringes.
Which is to say that while “Doomsday” has arrived for Alex Jones, the model of information warfare he popularized lives on, now entwined in the very DNA of the American right.