Alex Jones

A 948-foot cargo ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland at 1:27 a.m. this morning, causing it to collapse. Within minutes, all of X/Twitter suddenly became experts on cargo and supply chains. As rescue workers plunged into the chilly waters in the early morning darkness, accounts were driving clicks from the comfort of their beds with rumors of engine failure, foreign intrigue and Pete Buttigieg’s incompetence.  Some on the far right have already determined the crash was a terrorist attack, beating both the Department of Transportation and local government to any official pronouncement. “This ship was cyber-attacked,” Andrew Tate posted on X from his Romanian exile, leading the charge. “Lights go off and it deliberately steers towards the bridge supports.

Ten years ago today, Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people in Sandy Hook, Connecticut: his mother, six educators, twenty first-graders. Then he shot himself. Speculating about what might have motivated Lanza to commit an atrocity of this scale was difficult in 2012. What information was available about Lanza was sparse; what we did have was difficult to make sense of. A bug-eyed photo of him. A single mother who loved guns. A crazy, isolated kid — maybe it was the medication? There was very little to weave a story out of. It was haunting; it was horrifying; but it made no sense. There was no ready-made narrative for a twenty-year-old who could step into a first-grade classroom and open fire. There was nothing we could compare it to. Mental health, probably. Guns, probably.

Alex Jones looks unwell. He lost his bodybuilding figure decades ago but for years he was a veritable tank of a man. Now he looks swollen and exhausted — one piece of bad news away from his heart giving up. I say that with no relish. Jones is an extraordinary American character. America is like an enormous carnival and, for better or for worse, it is rich in charismatic mountebanks. You don’t have to like them but they are as American as pecan pie. Jones is an undeniably astonishing performer. His thunderous speech is often imitated, never equaled — a perversely captivating force of nature. His ability to switch tones in an instant — from cussing out the globalists to apologizing like an old Southern gentleman — is used with pinpoint comic timing.

The obituary for Alex Jones’s Infowars will not blame gay frogs, Bill Gates’s microchips or Robert Francis O’Rourke — instead, the rather less exciting cause of death will surely be Chapter 11. Infowars filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy this weekend as its founder Jones faces liability in three defamation lawsuits for his ghastly claim that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, in which twenty students and six staff were killed, was a hoax. In an earlier legal battle — over custody of his kids — Jones’s lawyers argued that on air, he was “playing a character.” “He is a performance artist,” attorney Randall Wilhite told a Texas judge.

Controversial social media star Donald J. Trump has jumped to the defense of controversial social media stars Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson after controversial social media company Facebook banned them from Facebook, Instagram and other key institutions of the political-media complex. ‘So surprised to see Conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter, and Paul Watson banned from Facebook!’ Trump tweeted on Friday night. This is fake news. Twitter haven’t banned Woods. The digital nannies have only put him on the naughty step for appearing to suggest that Robert Mueller and his fellow reporters should be hanged. Woods and Watson are only ‘Conservative thinkers’ in the ‘Easter worshippers’ sense.