At the Texas Observer, I wrote about the need to take attention away from Alex Jones and put it back on his victims:
“A lot of folks are centering Alex when they should be centering the bravery and catharsis of Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis,” said Dan Friesen, cohost of the Knowledge Fight podcast, which has devoted more than 700 episodes to critically examining Jones.
This is a tall order, because making himself the center of attention is one of Jones’ most carefully honed skills. He’s an expert at saying and doing things so outrageous that the progressive left can’t help but share them—always in horror and disgust, but reaping him new viewers and more clicks nonetheless. (Even the Texas Observer is not immune from dwelling on Jones’ antics.)
The media showed restraint in covering the Jones v. Heslin trial—Friesen described it as the opposite of a media circus. Even so, most of the coverage focuses on Jones’ moment by moment behavior in court, from chewing gum to the incredible ineptitude of his legal defense team in inadvertently releasing two years of Jones’ text messages to the plaintiffs. This is understandable: Jones is as terrible as a bloody car crash, and we can’t look away. However, along the way, we forget the victims of his carnage—in this case, Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. It’s also important to recognize the tactics Jones used for years while avoiding taking responsibility for the harm he caused so we can be less susceptible to them in the future.
