"A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars..."

"... ruling that the auction process was unfair. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.... Jones went live from a studio soon after the ruling and told viewers: 'We can celebrate the judge doing the right thing.' He had previously referred to the sale process as 'auction fraud' and a 'fraudulent sale.' Onion CEO Ben Collins said in a statement on X that the company... would 'continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks.' 'It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case,' he said...."

NBC News reports.

"On Monday, X filed an objection in The Onion’s bid to buy InfoWars.... In the objection, Elon Musk’s lawyers argued that X has 'superior ownership' of all accounts on X..."

"... that it objects to the inclusion of InfoWars and related Twitter accounts in the bankruptcy auction, and that the court should therefore prevent the transfer of them to The Onion."

From "X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts" (404 Media).

That article asserts that "Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends." But The Onion's desire to purchase the account that Infowars stuffed with speech over the years is all about stifling its specific viewpoint. The Onion has its own X account, but it wants the place that Infowars built up so it can stomp out that speech — rewrite it into a parody of itself. It could do that parody on a newly created account and thus give us more speech, more debate. 

So who's more against freedom of speech here? It seems to me that X is protecting it.

I'll concede that loving freedom of speech is a specific viewpoint.

ADDED: You can read X's filing here. Excerpt: "While X Corp. takes no position as to the sale of any Content posted on the X Accounts, X Corp. is the sole owner of the Services being sold as part of the sale of the X Accounts. While X Corp. has granted account holders, such as Jones and FSS, a license to use the Services, such license is non-assignable, both under the terms of the TOS and applicable non-bankruptcy law (i.e., as a personal services contract), and the Trustee cannot sell, assign, or otherwise transfer such license absent X Corp.’s consent."

"The Onion’s Decision to Buy Infowars Started As a Joke/It’s their most expensive gag yet."

Headline at New York Magazine.

Does anyone find this funny?

Last June, the satirical website’s new CEO, Ben Collins, saw that a federal bankruptcy judge had ordered Alex Jones to liquidate his assets at auction to pay off the millions he owes to Sandy Hook families he defamed. “That’d be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off, if the Onion bought Infowars,” Collins said on Thursday afternoon. “Then I was like, ‘What if we actually did it?’”

There's nothing funny in the vicinity of the Sandy Hook massacre. It's not a playground for anyone. To the extent that the pain the victims' families have experienced through Alex Jones can be converted into a dollar amount, he's obligated to come up with the money, but I guess this is more about disabling him from continuing to speak to the world. What good is the website to anyone else? The Onion thinks it's funny if the URL goes to a page that isn't him but people who hate him? 

"To anyone drawing a parallel between my film Bob Roberts and the attempted assassination of Trump..."

"... let’s be clear. What happened yesterday was a real attempt on a presidential candidate’s life. Those that are denying the assassination attempt was real are truly in a deranged mindset. A human being was shot yesterday. Another killed. They may not be human beings that you agree with politically but for shame folks. Get over your blind hatred of these people. They are fellow Americans. This collective hatred is killing our souls and consuming whatever is left of our humanity."

Writes Tim Robbins. 

Thanks, Tim. 

How can the it-was-staged theory get any traction when we know Corey Comperatore was shot dead? Do they think that was fake? 

Glenn Greenwald, approving of the restoration of Alex Jones' X account and, speaking of defamation, calling somebody who's just interrupting "deranged."

I spoke to @piersmorgan about the decision of @ElonMusk to restore Alex Jones' account on X.

Piers has done a great job airing all views lately, but this is the 2nd straight time I ended up on a panel with a deranged person who couldn't control herself from ranting. pic.twitter.com/ztkqt2gM6O

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 13, 2023

"I was fluid. I didn't really have much restraint."

Ramaswamy expresses pleasure with himself. I watched some, not all of it, and I think he did very well.

This morning, I'm seeing he's trending on X, and NYT is likening him to Trump and Alex Jones:

What's going on here? Hillary Clinton is performing concern about our loneliness

This caught my eye:

 

I copied the whole layout — headline, author's name, lugubrious image— because it's so absurd. And yet, it's just going back to her roots: It takes a village.

What's the deep meaning of Trump's kicking off his 2024 campaign in Waco?

I'm reading "A Trump Rally, a Right-Wing Cause and the Enduring Legacy of Waco/Thirty years ago, a fiery federal raid on a doomsday sect turned the city into a symbol of government overreach. Donald Trump will speak there on Saturday, and some supporters — and critics — say it’s no accident" by Charles Homans (NYT).

[Waco] has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.... Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.

By the way, that book title contains the only appearance of the name Clinton in the entire long article. (There's also one muted reference to Clinton: "the administration of a Democratic president.")

"There are many ways for a person to be questionable... and men found every single one this year. There were the men with an unbearable lack of self-awareness, screaming..."

"... 'cancel culture' to an audience of millions. There were the men whose long history of abuse allegations did nothing to dissuade people from coming to their defense or giving them MTV VMA cameos. Did you know Louis C.K. won a Grammy this year?... It was a particularly embarrassing year for men with too much money. Over the summer, Jeff Bezos reportedly wanted to pay to disassemble and reassemble a bridge in the Netherlands so his big stupid boat could pass through.... [F]or reasons unbeknownst to humankind, Musk tweeted a picture of his bedside table.... ... Drake decided his collaborative album with 21 Savage was a good time to claim that Megan Thee Stallion lied about being shot by Tory Lanez....  [There] were the cringey men — men who embodied 'the ick.'... There was the Try Guy cheating scandal that validated our cultural suspicion of Wife Guys.... [There were] Whiny Little Baby-Men. These are the men who had to overcome such adversity as omelets and pens.... [T]here are men who are still making hypermasculinity their whole thing. These range from supplement-scamming Liver Kings to men who proudly embrace the title 'King of Toxic Masculinity.'... Then there are the truly sinister men.... They have either been a guest on Alex Jones’s podcast or are Alex Jones himself..... [There are] Ricky Gervais, Matt Gaetz, Brad Pitt, Tom Brady...."

Writes Mia Mercado in "The Year Men Flopped" (The Cut).

I love the way she got through all that without naming Trump. We really have moved on! And now, 2022 is about to expire, and we can move on from all the scoundrels she did name. Let's move on once again, to the — hopefully — much better masculinity of 2023.

"It feels gross that someone could say to a computer, 'I want a portrait of Alex Jones in the style of Frida Kahlo'..."

"... and the computer would do it without moral judgment. These systems roll scenes, territories, cultures—things people thought of as 'theirs,' 'their living,' and 'their craft'—into a 4-gigabyte, open source tarball that you can download onto a Mac in order to make a baseball-playing penguin in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. The people who can use the new tools will have new power. The people who were great at the old tools (paintbrushes, cameras, Adobe Illustrator) will be thanked for their service and rendered into Soylent. It’s as if a guy wearing Allbirds has stumbled into a residential neighborhood where everyone is just barely holding on and says, 'I love this place, it’s so quirky! Siri, play my Quirky playlist. And open a Blue Bottle on the corner!'... Prominent bloggers who experimented with having an AI illustrate their writing have been chastened on Twitter and have promised not to do it again. AI companies are talking a lot about ethics, which always makes me suspicious, and certain words are banned from the image generator’s interface, which is sad because I wanted to ask the bot to paint a 'busty' cottage in the style of Thomas Kinkade...."

 Writes Paul Ford in "Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators /True, new systems devalue craft, shift power, and wreck cultures and scenes. But didn’t the piano do that to the harpsichord?" (Wired).

A Blue Bottle is this type of coffee shop — spookily corporately minimalistic. In their own insanely empty words:

Our cafes are designed to be spaces that pair with your coffee. Just like any food or scent, the aesthetics around you should heighten your experience. Whether you’re gathering with friends or searching for solitude, stepping into a Blue Bottle cafe turns each coffee into a meaningful moment.

I was wondering which blogger used AI to "illustrate their writing" and got "chastened on Twitter" — chastened on Twitter, there's a category of pain for you to contemplate — so I did a Google search. And look. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I had to laugh:

Kanye West didn't want to deny that he's a Nazi.

well shit... https://t.co/0RnHcw5Bv4

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) December 1, 2022

More here: "Ye praises Hitler during interview with Alex Jones/The hours-long interview on a conspiracy theory website gave Ye a platform to make antisemitic statements with little challenge from the host" (NBC News).

"In the end, Biden went with the safe choice. That might sound like an odd thing to say, considering that [Ketanji Brown] Jackson is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court..."

"But she’s also an insider — a former clerk for Stephen Breyer, the justice she would replace, and a product of [Harvard Law School]. Jackson has already been confirmed by the Senate three times, including for her current seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That court is often a feeder institution for the Supreme Court, in part because it deals mainly with arcane matters of administrative law, rather than the political kindling that tends to dominate nomination fights — abortion, guns, gender, freedom of speech, religion. Senators and their aides have combed through reams of pages of Jackson’s judicial record — including the nearly 600 opinions that she wrote as a district court judge... [T]he coming battle over her nomination will resemble what fans of professional wrestling call 'kayfabe.' As the sociologist Nick Rogers said of the term in a guest opinion essay back in 2017, 'We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.'"

From "Biden Made a Historic Supreme Court Pick. What Now? Nominating the first Black woman is both bold and politically savvy, Democrats told us. Republicans are divided over how much of a fight to put up" by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam (NYT).

Here's the 2017 Nick Rogers essay, "How Wrestling Explains Alex Jones and Donald Trump." Rogers is a lawyer/sociologist. Excerpt:

"Alex Jones’ wife Erika Wulff Jones allegedly struck the far-right conspiracy theorist 'over 20 times' and threatened to hit him in the head with a stone ball, causing him to 'fear for his life'..."

"... according to police documents reviewed by The Daily Beast... According to the Travis County arrest affidavit, during an initial 911 phone call with police, Jones told an emergency operator that his wife had struck him over the head multiple times and was 'holding a polished club in her hand' and attempting to 'hit him with it.'... According to Jones, Erika had accused him of 'cheating on her,' leading to a violent altercation as the duo bathed their child.... Police located a stone, weighing approximately five pounds, in the primary bedroom... Jones told police that she never hit him with the stone, but 'threw it at his head, missing by inches.'... Jones insisted that she took down two police officers at their Austin home on Friday night after striking him '30 times,' mostly in the back of the head. 'So that’s what happens when someone has a chemical imbalance after surgery and the medication they had mixes together,' Jones said, 'and they literally go to cuckoo world, cloud cuckoo.'"

The Daily Beast reports.

"After popular Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan had conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his popular show 'The Joe Rogan Experience' earlier this week..."

"... Spotify CEO Daniel Ek defended Rogan's decision. 'We want creators to create. It's what they do best. We're not looking to play a role in what they should say,' Ek said... ... Spotify's policies 'do not entail what guests our podcasts invite on, it's more about the content itself.'...  Jones has been banned from publishing on Spotify since 2018 for 'repeated violations' of the platform's policy on hate speech....  On Spotify's Thursday morning earnings call.... Ek referenced Spotify's content policies as to why the episode is still available to stream. "We obviously review all the content that goes up.... But it's important to note that this needs to be evenly applied, no matter if it's internal pressure or external pressure as well, because, otherwise, we are a creative platform for lots of creators and it's important that they know what they expect from our platforms. If we can't do that, then there are other choices for a lot of creators to go to.'" 

From "Spotify CEO defends Alex Jones' appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast: 'It's more about the content itself'" (Business Insider).

I'm only about 43 minutes into this episode, but I've been enjoying the interaction with Joe. Jones is quite a motor-mouth, and he's an interesting contrast to Kanye West, who did a 3-hour show with Joe recently. West, another motor-mouth, is all about imagining things that could happen in the future, while Jones is about all what might be going on all over the place right now. That is both West and Jones are furiously jabbering about what we blasé humans cannot see. Joe is a great mediator, the normal guy who can channel them to us... whether that's good for us or not. 

Thanks to Spotify for sticking with free speech... and its contractual obligations to Joe. I predict that at some point in the future, Spotify will buy Joe out of his contract, and Joe will walk away with a big bag of money and be independent again. Which reminds me of Glenn Greenwald. Isn't he going to be suing The Intercept for breach of contract? And isn't he going to win? In any case, who cares about The Intercept without Glenn Greenwald? It just seemed like a platform for Greenwald to me. 

"(1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all."

"(2) Aside from its free-speech* implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights). (3) This is proof that we need to break up these big tech companies, which exercise way too much power via their near-monopolies. That they coordinate in the abuse of those monopolies only makes it clearer."

Writes Glenn Reynolds. Here's the footnote, which deals with something I've written about on this blog a lot over the years:

* Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

Here's a post from last March where I collected a lot of my older posts about free speech values extending beyond the rights we hold against government.

Glenn writes "Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit." Is Jones working on that? He said (via MacDailyNews):

I’ve had a lot of top lawyers call me today and say, “Alex, we need to sue Apple. We need to sue all these groups that clearly are involved in cut and dry antitrust activities, working with other companies to delist you and block you from the marketplace of ideas, so, then when they demonize you, you don’t have a way to respond to them and they can destroy you and then, with that model, move on against everybody else.”

"Every time I do your show, it's almost like I'm on a black station... There's a certain clairvoyance that black folks born with."

"We don't have as much as we used to, but that's always been there. And so, they can listen to you and know ain't no tricking going on, ain't no nothing. They don't even have to question. Very seldom you hear a black person talking about conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is The New York Times and The Washington Post and NBC and CBS. And just thank God that all these radio stations like yours...."



That's just the first thing I ran into as I looked for old video of Dick Gregory — old in the sense of not things put together on the occasion of his death. That's Dick Gregory talking to Alex Jones.

Here's the obituary in the conspiracy theory New York Times:

Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84....

In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.

Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”...

There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.

And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.

Correction appended: "An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. They were in 2001, not 2011." Of all the dates to botch.

"Drudge... uses his personal Twitter account to tease his ideas and let his followers attempt to fill in the blanks on their own."

"In many ways, it's similar to how he works as a kind of news cycle puppetmaster with the Drudge Report, operating the website as a curated and intentional conversation that is wiped daily for whatever tomorrow might bring. To take Drudge's tweets too seriously, though, is an error. 'Ultimately [Twitter is] boring and the kids are always off to something new," he said [in a 2015 interview]. Of course, Drudge did not reveal that he was also off to something new — essentially 'breaking' Twitter to use it as a Snapchat-like blink-and-you-miss-it palimpsest for whatever comes to his mind."

From "The mystery and intrigue of Matt Drudge's Twitter feed" at The Week.

The 2015 interview is this (with Alex Jones). I've clipped out the part where Drudge rails against the corporate websites that mass human expression in one place:



"Don't get into this false sense that you are an individual when you are on Facebook. No you're not. You're a pawn in their scheme."

ADDED: I don't know what Drudge means in that clip when he says "the robots, which you're so profound on." The "you" is Alex Jones. I'm not a follower of Alex Jones, so whatever robot profundities have emitted from him I don't know. I know. I can Google it, but what will evil corporate Google let me see?

ALEX JONES: Folks, I have hundreds of articles I see every week about human-animal chimeras with no rights. You talked about people you know in research labs, I’ve talked to them too. You see humanoids, they’re like 80 percent gorilla, 80 percent pig, and they’re talking.... We need to make this illegal. This needs to be illegal. They’re talking about making it illegal to make child pedophile robots. Ok. Ok, make that illegal. But what about the humans spliced with animals? I mean this is beyond pedophila.

AND: That last bit makes commenter Balfegor say "That... that was a movie..." Ah, yes:

"It's not going to be a contentious, sort of gotcha exchange," said Megyn Kelly to Alex Jones.

"It really will be about 'who is this guy?' ... I'm not looking to portray you as some boogeyman or just any sort of gotcha moment. I just want to talk about you... The craziest thing of all would be if some of the people who just have this insane version of you in their head walk away saying, 'you know what, I see the dad in him."

Alex Jones releases audiotape in advance of the show airing the interview. NBC is under pressure for giving Jones air time — because of the grieving victims of Sandy Hook — so Jones is setting it up so that he can be the victim.  

It's time once again to quote Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. ...

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

Why don't we all know this by now?

Jones is a conspiracy theorist. You'd think he'd be more skeptical. Or... no, a conspiracy theorist is not a skeptic. He's credulous, indulging more heavily in what is the central human intellectual failing: believing what we want to believe. 

"As families of the Sandy Hook victims continue to pressure NBC to ax Megyn Kelly’s Sunday interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the network has been holding crisis meetings..."

"Insiders told us that staff were in panicked meetings all day on Monday. 'It’s a shit show. No one wants to withstand a whole week of criticism over this. There are a number of people who want to pull the interview.'"

I hadn't been following Alex Jones's theories, but I see now that he calls Sandy Hook "a hoax." Why would Kelly's show entertain such disgusting nonsense? Apparently, they're desperate to bump up their ratings. NBC sure extracted all the value from Megyn Kelly quickly, didn't it?

"I usually wear the 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB t-shirt Alex Jones gave me when I go through airport security."

9/11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett finally gets the security confrontation he'd longed for, and not that much happens.

Then the lead agent pulled himself together. “Is this your?” he said, brandishing a beat-up spiral notebook. I admitted that it was.

“Do you know where we got it?”

“I must have forgotten it on the plane when I got off last Friday.”

“Why is there Arabic writing in it?”

I explained that I had grabbed an old notebook as I left the house with the intention of writing my New York speech on the plane. The old notebook happened to be one I had used during Arabic classes a decade ago....

I sheepishly remembered that it included some bizarre little cartoons I had drawn, along with a draft of an unfinished play about the death of Vincent Van Gogh, A Murder of Crows. An extract.....

[Extract excised for your comfort.]

After remarking on the suspicious stuff in the notebook, the agent changed tack. Gruffly, he announced that he was disturbed by some of my internet essays. I explained that I was just doing my patriotic duty to expose the 9/11 coup d'etat and re-establish constitutional rule. He asked whether I flew around the country saying these things. I said yes. He asked if anyone accompanied me on my travels. I said no, I usually travel alone to speaking engagements. He asked me where I had been staying in New York. I told him I stayed with fellow 9/11 activists. He said “We know you were at St. Mark's church.” Then he asked me point-blank: “Are you a terrorist?”

My response: “To answer that, we have to agree first on what terrorism is.....”

If he really thought the government was so evil that it committed the 9/11 attacks, would he play the smartass during a security check? Here's my conspiracy theory: the 9/11 conspiracy theory is a conspiracy to gain publicity.

ADDED: You have to suspect that he purposely chose that particular notebook and deliberately left it on the earlier flight so he could get the government to pay more attention to him. What do you have to do around here to get the government to oppress you? He must be so jealous of Andrew Meyer. That's all you have to do to be the center of attention?