Category: Current Events

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It's Pathological

But oh, the schadenfreude!

I cannot wait for the J6 Committee to get their hands on Jones' texts.

As the latest defamation trial of Alex Jones wound down to its conclusion, an old saying seemed to become more and more apropos.

How can you tell Alex Jones is lying? His lips are moving.

In the trial that concluded Thursday in Texas, the jury only needed to decide how much Jones owed Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis—parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis who was murdered in the 2012 school shooting. Sandy Hook victims in Texas and Connecticut already won a default judgment against Jones for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

As such, it would behoove Jones to only tell the truth while on the stand, under oath. Instead, the InfoWars founder and host was caught in several lies including one about the judge presiding over the trial—Texas District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble.

The still grieving parents' attorney Mark Bankston asked Jones' directly if his InfoWars website and program repeatedly shared a meme depicting Judge Gamble on fire.

On the second day of Jones' testimony, Bankston asked:

"You've been broadcasting repeatedly a picture of our judge on fire, haven't you?"
Jones' lawyer immediately objected, but Jones still answered:

"No!"

After Jones' first day of testimony, Bankston called for sanctions against him and his lawyer Adino Reyal for knowingly presenting lies to the jury to influence the ruling.

Judge Gamble chastised Jones for lying and not answering the questions he was asked.

The judge provided explicit instructions and guidance on telling the truth then dismissed the parties for the day.

You can see Judge Gamble's excoriation of Jones here:

In response to being told not to lie, Jones told Judge Gamble:

"I believe what I said was true."

The judge—appearing exasperated—replied:

"You believe everything you say is true. But it isn't. Your beliefs do not make something true."

She later added:

"Your belief that something is true does not make it true. It does not protect you. It is not allowed."

"You are under oath. That means things must actually be true when you say them."

https://twitter.com/BettyBowers/status/1554874601112469505

On Jones' second day of testimony, plaintiffs' attorney Bankston questioned him about using InfoWars to further defame his clients—Heslin and Lewis—during the trial.

Bankston said Jones also used his platform to try to discredit Judge Gamble, but on the stand, under oath, Jones denied it.

Bankston asked:

"In fact, Mr. Jones, you're telling the world not to believe what happens in this courtroom because the judge worked with Child Protective Services, who you say is involved with pedophilia and child trafficking?"

Jones replied:

"No, that's not what I'm saying."

After Bankston shared more damning evidence…

…Jones justified his answer by claiming he didn't direct or produce the InfoWars segment.

He also suggested it might be taken out of context which Bankston disputed.

Bankston responded:

"Is there anything before and after that that will make it great to show pictures of our judge on fire and tell the world that she's involved with pedophiles?"

"Tell the context that comes before or after that makes that great."

Despite being told the day before about the difference between truth, opinion and conjecture, Jones once again chose to lie then backtrack.

People were astounded at Jones' hubris.

https://twitter.com/AnnOkla/status/1555638766433345536

https://twitter.com/ChafedCharlie/status/1554989631535398912

https://twitter.com/ChafedCharlie/status/1554989631535398912

 

On Thursday, the jury awarded Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis $4.1 million.

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Quote of the Day

Violence does not spring from a vacuum. It's born out of other men's violence. It gets nurtured and it grows in a soil of prejudice and of hate and bigotry." ~ Rod Serling

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Thank You for Talking Me Off the Ledge (Metaphorically)

From Infidel 753:

Keeping Perspective

With the end of Roe, the theocratic capture of the Supreme Court, the logjammed Senate, various rumblings of conspiracy against democracy, etc, some have yielded to pessimism and proclaimed an unprecedented threat to the country, the political future shrouded in despair.  While the moan-groan-doom-gloom crowd is pretty much a one-note chorus, and tends to sound the same no matter what the objective situation, it remains true that we face problems that no one before November 2016 would reasonably have expected.

Nevertheless, it's important to keep things in perspective.

It is always tempting to overestimate the depth of the problems of the period in which one happens to live, because we are experiencing them directly, while the much more serious problems of the past exist, for us, only in history books.  Through the great majority of American history the overall situation was astronomically worse than it is now.  We had slavery until 1865, and got rid of it only via a horrendous war that killed off one out of every fifty Americans alive at the time.  Massacres and forced relocations of Indians continued for several decades after that.  Lynchings and terrorization of black Americans, sometimes involving torture and murder as horrific as anything seen during the Dark Ages, continued well into the twentieth century.  Women couldn't vote until 1920 and didn't get fully equal civil rights until several decades later. The right to abortion wasn't nationally guaranteed until 1972.  Just a few decades ago, same-sex marriage, or a black president, seemed unthinkable.  Gay people could still be arrested and imprisoned in some states for consenting-adult sexual activity up through the early years of thiscentury.

Covid looks like a catastrophe by today's standards, but at almost any time before the mid-nineteenth century (if not later), something like the covid pandemic would hardly have even been noticed — it would have been lost in the statistical background noise underneath all the routine outbreaks of mysterious disease which commonly killed much larger percentages of a given population.  The very fact that covid now stands out as a major problem is actually testimony to how successful we've been at eradicating the much worse plagues that beset us for most of recorded history.  And the unprecedented speed with which the vaccines were developed shows how well-armed we are against future new diseases.

What we're seeing now is a roll-back of one or two elements of the immense social progress we have made during most of US history — progress so great that a return to the pre-1972 status quo now feels like a disaster.  It is not the country, as such, that is doing this.  It's a roll-back engineered by a shrinking fundamentalist minority which has managed, by skilled exploitation of weaknesses and oddities of our political system, to thwart the will of the majority and seize control of certain strategic centers of power such as the Supreme Court.  It's a jerry-rigged, gimmicky strategy which can't sustain itself in the long run.  Post-Roe abortion bans, for example, will just generate an endless stream of horror stories which will mobilize voters against the party imposing them.  This is already starting to happen (see recent generic Congressional ballot polling).

The country is not as polarized as we are constantly told it is.  What we have now is a pair of ultra-politicized fringe elements — I call them the progs and the trogs — totally dedicated to a scorched-earth, dead-end demonization of "the other side" in each case.  They make a lot of noise, but they don't represent the majority of the people.  Given time, one party or the other (or hopefully both) will repudiate the apocalyptic hysteria and start inching toward the sensible center.  That's where the votes are.  I already see signs of it.

Never forget that politics is "downstream" from culture.  Political forces cannot stop or substantially slow down cultural change — the decline of religion, the growing acceptance of homosexuality, etc — and culture ultimately shapes everything else, including politics.

There's no denying that some bad things are happening.  But almost every previous generation of Americans faced much worse problems, under far less favorable conditions for solving them, than we do now.  They persevered and won out.  So will the Americans of today.

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Shriveling Into Meaningless Trivialities As The Enormity of This Scandal Grows Overwhelming

Via Wil Wheaton

Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony about Jan. 6 continues to drive brutal headlines for Donald Trump across the country. Leading analysts are describing her revelations as alternately devastating, emotionally powerful and historic. Others are comparing her depiction of the former president's insurrection to the most deranged presidential moments in U.S. history.

Yet Trump's propagandists have found an answer. They are claiming Hutchinson's appearance was a flop, based on the fact that a single anecdote about Trump — one barely related to the central allegations against him — is now being questioned by a handful of bit players in this saga who aren't even offering this pushback publicly, let alone under oath.

In addition to providing an object lesson in how pro-Trump propaganda functions, this buffoonery reveals just how weak Trump's defenses have become. The pushback is shriveling into meaningless trivialities even as the enormity of this scandal grows overwhelming.

Trump's defense against Cassidy Hutchinson's Jan. 6 testimony is full of holes