Cough drops and flagrant liars
Why "The Truth vs. Alex Jones" is the year's best documentary so far
I don’t like hearing Alex Jones’ voice. Like many tote-bag-clutching liberals of my ilk, I have carefully followed the story of Jones’ rise to power, his cultivation of MAGA influentials from Donald Trump on down, and more recently, the saga of his two overlapping trials in Connecticut and Texas for his unceasing harassment of the grieving parents of the Sandy Hook shooting, but have sought to avoid encountering Jones himself. Having watched Dan Reed’s painful, painfully necessary documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones, that choice was a mistake, and I can tell you why.
A bit of necessary backstory: Alex Jones has used his platform to torment the parents of the twenty children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. He has repeatedly told his audience that Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation to take away American gun owners’ weaponry, that no one was killed in Newtown, that the mourning parents were themselves actors hired by shadowy others to play a role. For a decade, Jones has sicced his audience on the Sandy Hook parents, who in the aftermath of unspeakable grief, have received harassing messages, death and rape threats, and threats that their children’s bodies would be exhumed.
Let this sit with you for a moment: People have urinated on the graves of murdered children because Alex Jones encouraged them to believe their parents were liars.
The Truth vs. Alex Jones culminates with footage from the two trials. The parents are impassioned, furious, determined, and also more than a mite pessimistic. They come to court every day, secure in the knowledge that Alex Jones will never change, and will likely never stop lying about them for profit. But they show up anyway because it is the right thing to do, and for this alone, they are truly heroic.
“It’s, like, surreal what’s going on in here. I think everyone in here probably feels that way.” Scarlett Lewis, one of the plaintiffs, mother of Jesse Lewis, has taken the stand, and her hands fly up, seemingly out of her control, an expression of her own frustration at having to sue a powerful, wealthy, and influential man in court to get him to stop peddling lies about her. “I hope to accomplish an era of truth. An era of truth. Please.”
It is that last word that hangs over the entirety of The Truth vs. Alex Jones. This “please” is not directed at the jury, or the court. It is directed to Jones, and we understand the whole point of this case, requiring millions of dollars of labor and effort, has been to summon this man to this room so this woman could insist that he hear her say “please.”
It is not a polite “please,” not the “please” of everyday discourse. This is a “please” with a decade of hurt pent up inside of it. She says it even though she knows that Alex Jones will not listen, that he cannot truly hear her appeal, that he is beyond her reach. Reading about Alex Jones is fine, but you really must see him to understand just how grotesque he is. This profiteer off of others’ pain does not appear to understand the harm he has caused—not because he can’t, but because he won’t. Lewis shakes her head and lets out a small puff of air, simultaneous relief and exasperation.
Jones himself is beefy, dressing as if all his shirts accidentally shrunk in the wash in a heat-cycle mishap. He looks older than his 48 years, and his facial expressions in court consist of an array of squints, eyebrow lifts, eye bulges, and sad, soulful shakes of his head, mostly intended to convey his shock and dismay at the kangaroo court summoned to silence him. Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether or not Jones is an entertainer, whether he believes his own filth, but ultimately the question is moot. He is the living embodiment of Vonnegut’s dictum from Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
When Jones takes the stand in the Texas case, he lets out of a few barking coughs, complains of a torn larynx, and mentions that he is about to have surgery. The judge—heretofore strict with Jones— leans over to offer the witness a cough drop, which he gratefully accepts.
Lewis appears onscreen after the day’s testimony is over. “I felt such tremendous compassion for him, and so brought him a water and four cough drops,” Lewis tells us. Lewis is a reminder of what people can be; Jones, in all of his self-pity, bullying, and cruelty, what they all too often are.
Jones briefly huddles with Lewis and her husband to tell them that he has been misrepresented, that he apologizes, that he has gotten caught up in this story. He shakes hands with Lewis and her husband, and for the first time, makes eye contact with the people whose lives he has wrecked. But we are never in any doubt that Alex Jones will go right back on the air and repeat those lies again, that nothing he says now will prevent him from doubling down later. Lewis’ compassion—those four cough drops—stops me in my tracks. Who could ever find such reserves of decency for someone so indecent?
We live in an era of flagrant lies and the powerful manipulators who wield them. We may feel helpless at times in the face of hellspawn like Alex Jones, but Scarlett Lewis sets out a path forward with her cough drops. We must strive to act with decency and compassion because we make the world anew each day. What else is there to do?
This is so heartbreaking. All I can think after watching Trump bloviate at court earlier today is that there is so much pure evil operating in our public domain right now. But there are also cough drops!