By Jim Geraghty
Friday, August 05, 2022
I am not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, and chances are, you aren’t either. That means we’re not properly trained to assess someone’s behavior and conclude that they’re legally insane or mentally incompetent. But . . . we all know when we run into someone who’s crazy. Much as Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart characterized his ability to determine what is and what isn’t pornography, we know it when we see it.
Alex Jones is crazy. Everybody’s known this for a long time. Back in 2018, just about all of the social-media companies chose to remove him from their platforms, and not because he was offering garden-variety nutty statements and conspiracy theories. At the time, Jones was fighting a defamation lawsuit from the parents of a six-year-old killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. The parents’ suit alleges that Jones showed his audience their personal information and maps to addresses associated with the family, leading to years of threats and harassment from Jones followers who, like Jones himself, claimed the shooting was a hoax.
Yesterday, a jury in Austin, Texas, found Alex Jones guilty of defamation after he claimed the shooting was a hoax, making the podcaster pay over $4 million to the parents of one Sandy Hook victim. The jury awarded the plaintiffs, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, much less than the $150 million they originally sought. The jurors will now determine if Jones has to pay any additional punitive damages.
Earlier this year, Alex Jones’s companies, including his conspiracy-theory-focused website, Infowars, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Contending that mass shootings are all elaborate, government-backed hoaxes and that no one was shot or died is crazy. Publicly accusing grieving parents of faking their feelings of sorrow and loss is a particularly malevolent and evil form of crazy. And encouraging people to find and confront those grieving parents is off-the-charts-danger-to-the-public crazy.
I only encountered Alex Jones in person once, at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. I was talking with a friend in the press center when we heard some commotion approaching and getting louder. It was Jones, surrounded by a large gaggle — maybe 20 — of people holding various cameras, microphones, and cell phones, walking behind, alongside, and slightly ahead of him, hanging on every word he was bellowing. And he was off-the-charts loud, red-faced, and screaming at the top of his lungs in a barely coherent rage. His spittle-flying frenzy was so intense, I couldn’t even understand what he was yelling about. The cacophony came and went like a passing train at a railroad crossing.
Jones was acting like a raving maniac, and he was giving those members of the media exactly what they wanted. If he had used his indoor voice and not been an erupting volcano of rage, would they have been disappointed? Would they have been bored and stopped paying attention? Without the cameras, would Jones behave the same way? Did the audience’s tastes create an incentive for Jones to act like a maniac?
For years, there was this question surrounding Alex Jones: Was this all an elaborate performance, or was Jones genuinely unhinged? If it was the latter, it meant that the entire phenomenon of Jones was an unseemly form of an audience enjoying one man’s broken mental health as entertainment. Sure, there was something funny about watching him scream that polluters were using chemicals that turned frogs gay . . . but what if he actually believed it? What if some sort of brain-chemical imbalance made him believe it?
(Fascinatingly, back in January 2021, Alex Jones concluded that the QAnon conspiracy theory was a bunch of nonsense. “Q tells us stuff, and all of it’s lies,” Jones raged. “Because every [expletive] thing out of you people’s mouths doesn’t come true. And it’s always ‘oh, there’s energy’ or ‘oh, now we’re done with Trump.’ You said he was the messiah! You said he was invincible! You said that it was all over. That they were going to Gitmo. And now that he’s part of a larger thing of Q. I will not suffer your Q people after this! I knew what you were Day One, I know what you are now, and I’m sick of it!”)
Much of what Alex Jones offers is a darker, more sinister version of Art Bell’s old program in the 1990s, which was also about conspiracy theories, secrets, and the paranormal, and yet somehow fun and even goofy. But few if any ever felt any sense of menace from Art Bell; there was a sense that this was a late-night version of ghost stories around the campfire, stories that were probably all made up, but in which someone may have included one or two elements of truth. (The U.S. military is testing something, probably next-generation aircraft, out at Groom Lake, Nev.) If all the recurring conspiracies Bell’s listeners heard were true, it would mean Elvis, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Chupacabra are all hanging out at Area 51, using remote viewing to look at crop circles and ancient structures on Mars.
But in Jones’s vision of the world, there is one dark, coherent theme: They are out to get you.
And unlike the average guy on the street screaming that Triffids, pod people, or some other sinister force is coming to get us, Jones has been enabled, through the wonders of the Internet, to find an audience of people who believe the same things. He offered a form of contagious craziness to troubled souls who were looking for something to believe in.
The cinematic classic Speed includes a line from Dennis Hopper, playing a villain who has just collected a large ransom, responding to the accusation that he’s crazy: “Poor people are crazy, Jack. I’m eccentric.”
Society can and should welcome eccentricity. That trait is often in the eye of the beholder, and if someone tells you the man who lives down the street is “eccentric,” no one gets that worried. But if someone tells you the man who lives down the street is “crazy,” you get the distinction — there’s potential for trouble there.
Do you feel like you spend more time now dealing with people who are crazy than you used to? Is it possible that we genuinely have more people who are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs walking around than we had a decade or a generation ago?
In New York, and the country more broadly, the scary thing isn’t that crime is high, though it is, though not as high as in previous crime waves. What’s scary is that people no longer think the personal protective measures they used in the past apply. Previous crime waves were a matter of street thugs and professional criminals, and you could take steps in anticipation of their actions. Don’t walk in the park at night — criminals like darkness. Take the subway in rush hour — criminals don’t like witnesses. Don’t be on Main Street at 1 a.m., but do go to the afternoon parade.
You could calculate, thereby increasing your margin of safety.
Now such measures are less relevant because what you see on the street and in the news tells you that more than in the past we’re at the mercy of the seriously mentally ill. You can’t calculate their actions because they can’t be predicted, because they’re crazy.
The pandemic and lockdowns certainly weren’t good for anyone’s mental health. They probably didn’t drive anyone crazy by themselves, but the long stretches of isolation, disruption of routine, and cutting off the vulnerable from their support networks likely exacerbated existing mental-health issues.
Or perhaps the era of social media has incentivized crazy behavior. At this point, we can say Lady Gaga is an enormously accomplished singer and actress. But back in 2010, when she was still climbing the ladder of fame, she infamously wore a dress made out of raw meat. Is Lady Gaga insane? She seems normal enough, at least by celebrity standards. But to get that public attention, she was willing to do something that seemed insane.
If we constantly reward insane behavior with attention and effectively “punish” sane behavior by ignoring it . . . should we be surprised at the state of our society?
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