The Atlantic

Alex Jones Can’t Pretend His Way Out of This Reality

The Infowars host unsuccessfully tried to remain “in character” during a legal proceeding.
Source: Oliver Munday / The Atlantic

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The only way to shut up Alex Jones, for a moment, at least, is to place him inside a courtroom. For the past few days, the Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist has been in and out of a Travis County courthouse as one of his numerous defamation trials continues. The trial will determine how much Jones and his company must pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, two parents from Newtown, Connecticut, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. In the years that followed that horrific massacre, Jones used his platform to spread lies that the shooting was a “false flag” operation, and that the grieving families were playing the role of actors in an elaborate government plot. “Jesse was real,” Lewis said of her dead son. She looked directly at Jones. “I am a real mom.”

The past two days of the Jones trial have been wrenching and shocking. Today, the plaintiffs’ lawyers revealed in dramatic fashion that Jones’s lawyers accidentally sent opposing counsel years worth of data from Jones’s personal cellphone, including emails and text messages. The

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