How Far Can a Conspiracy Theory Go?

My one regret about the pasting that Alex Jones took in a Connecticut courtroom yesterday is that it required the murder of twenty young children and eight adults to bring it about. Jones has done his best over the years to pollute the public dialog with his particular brand of conspiracy theories, up to and including being embraced by a certain American President who made common cause with Jones during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

I would have had no problem with Jones promoting conspiracies if he behaved like an entertainer for whom conspiracies were a shtick in the same way that one-liners gave Henny Youngman a particular kind of entertainment style which always got a laugh.

‘Doctor tells the patient he’s got six months to live. Patient replies that he can’t afford to pay the bill. Doctor gives him another six months.’ That’s Henny Youngman.

‘The Sandy Hook shooting was planned and managed by the government to make it easier to take away everyone’s guns.” That’s Alex jones.

If Jones had run the Sandy Hook story up the flagpole for a week or so, nobody would have cared how he explained the event, no matter how crazy his explanation happened to be. But the media frenzy which accompanied the Newtown massacre was so great that Jones couldn’t resist the temptation to use this particular conspiracy narrative to peddle more health supplements and other crap on his website.