What will it take to get Alex Jones Infowars off the air in Wichita? | Opinion
In our latest installment of “I Watch This So You Don’t Have To,” we revisit our old friend Alex Jones and his idiotic Infowars program.
The last time we checked in on old Alex, he’d just been hit with a $49 million jury verdict in Texas.
It was punishment for the immense pain and suffering he caused a Texas family whose child was killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre, which Jones falsely claimed was a hoax to gin up support for gun control.
This past week, a jury in Connecticut said, “Hold our beers.”
The Connecticut jury hit Jones with a verdict of nearly $1 billion for his Sandy Hook lies, on behalf of plaintiffs whose loved ones perished in the shooting and who were targeted by Jones truthers who made the families’ lives a living hell.
I didn’t know what to expect when I tuned in Friday morning to Wichita’s KCTU Channnel 5-9. It appears to be the last TV station in America still broadcasting Jones’ ranting absurdity, which it does 24-7.
KQAM radio runs Jones from midnight to 4 a.m., apparently as a public service to Wichita’s speed-freak-can’t-sleep community.
I hoped maybe Jones would finally run out of money, or that KCTU and KQAM would put principles ahead of profit for once and pull the plug on him.
No such luck.
There he was on KCTU, portraying himself as the real victim of Sandy Hook — instead of those murdered children and grieving parents he’d accused of being crisis actors.
Jones is still begging his weak-minded masses for donations for his legal fund and hawking the house-brand dietary supplements and swag that keeps his dubious enterprise afloat.
He vowed to keep fighting on behalf of America’s uber-patriotic halfwits and predicted that he could stretch out his court appeals for at least two years.
But some cracks are starting to show in the Infowars empire of imbeciles.
Jones set-up man and Infowars show host Harrison Smith was was pushing deeply discounted T-shirts while warning viewers to buy now because they may not be around much longer — and if you don’t get one, you could regret it for the rest of your life.
It’s a chance I’m willing to take.
I did see a familiar name on my morning dip into Jones’ cesspool of slime.
In Los Angeles, there’s a City Council scandal over leaked audio of three council members and a former labor leader making racist comments and plotting how to game redistricting to reduce the voting strength of Black people.
We can all thank Harrison Smith for his perspective that it’s A-OK for a public official to characterize another official’s Black child as a “little monkey” while conspiring to disenfranchise Black voters. There’s something you won’t see in the lamestream media.
But what caught my eye was the byline on the story that Smith used as his example of the great injustice that’s perpetuated by the media quoting racists saying racist things.
It was a Politico story written by Wichita native, KU grad, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Wichita Eagle intern Lara Korte.
So a shout out to Lara: Your reporting got you on Alex Jones Infowars. Congratulations. I guess. Don’t put that on your resume.
The unintentionally funniest thing Smith said was that media organizations are watching Infowars 24 hours a day, “looking for that one thing . . . to try to portray us as something that we’re not.”
To Mr. Smith: Don’t flatter yourself. Even if anyone cared that much about what you and Alex Jones have to say on a daily basis, no media outlet could ever hire for the job because anyone with half a brain would quit on the first day.
I’m more tenacious than most and I can only take it for about an hour at a time.
And believe me, that’s more than enough time to portray Alex Jones and Infowars — along with KCTU and KQAM — as exactly what they are.
