You must tell the truth while you testify
The war between Alex Jones and truth:
The judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, scolded Jones, after he told untruths at least twice on the stand. “It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth when you testify, but here I am: you must tell the truth while you testify,” she said. “This is not your show.”
Jones tried to interject, saying he had only said what he believed to be the truth.
“You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true. That is what we’re doing here,” the judge said.
But if he really believes everything he says is true how is he to know it’s not true?
By learning a little epistemic humility, I suppose. By learning that his belief doesn’t make something true.
But of course he has zero motivation to do that, because his whole career has been built on the opposite.
He claims to be a “voracious reader.”
He lists a number of books written about the second world war and the Nazi regime that he read as a young man. Among the ones that most shaped his thinking, he says, was None Dare Call it a Conspiracy, by Gary Allen, a prominent member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The book claims that an all-powerful group of businessmen, communists and socialists are secretly trying to take control of the world.
Ok here we go – here’s an opportunity for some epistemic humility, or at least caution. Why would “businessmen” team up with communists and socialists? Pause, take a deep breath, and think about that.
On his regular Infowars show, Jones is bombastic and animated. He gets worked up into fierce diatribes about such matters as demons and politics, fluoride in the water supply and an interlinked global conspiracy that is responsible for everything from Covid to gun control.
Ah yes fluoride. How pleasingly antiquarian of him.
Do you think he has any semantic concept of what the word “true” means? I’m not sure he does. It’s one of those words that he surely has heard people say over the course of his life, but I’m not sure it maps on to any concept for him.
Oh, yes. I think he’s cynical, not deluded. His lies have made him a lot of money.
So, not like Trump, just an enabler of Trump.
I agree that Jones is a cynic who knows he’s lying, he just knows that he can make a lot of money through his lies. He probably believes some of it, at least on a metaphorical level — that there are dark forces conspiring against “regular folk” like him — but he’s happy to make any assertion that gets him through the next five minutes of his show, even if he knows it’s nonsense and/or contradicts what he said yesterday.
Trump is a bullshitter. He literally doesn’t care what is true. Truth is whatever he can convince people of, so a lie that is repeated often enough and broadly enough becomes true as far as he’s concerned. In fact, even mutually contradictory assertions are fine because each serves its purpose.
Hence, January 6 could be simultaneously a great, wonderful display of patriotism by Trump supporters who were morally justified in everything they did and are being unfairly oppressed by the justice system, AND it can be a false flag operation by antifa to discredit Trump supporters who would never dream of breaking the law. It just depends on what argument you need to make on a given day.
I’m sure Jones does know the difference between truth and bullshit. Even between the shades of truth that a complex world throws up. I don’t think he cares. Neither does Trump. Or anyone else in that broad camp. For that matter the same could be said for some on the activist left (TRA’s anybody?). The common thread for all these people with megaphones is that they are appealing to the emotions of their audiences. The words don’t have to be true (and usually are not). They have to evoke the feeling that the audience crave. It’s especially dangerous because it’s addictive, probably in a literal sense. The more someone gets high on listening to emotionally powerful nonsense, the more detached they become from the reality that could give them pause. The more they crave the next hit that makes them feel justified in their beliefs. The more they reject other views. The more they get dragged to the extreme end of their views because people there accept and encourage them, while others begin to shun them. The more they need and seek out the reinforcement and the more they shun reality as being a conspiracy and a sham.
I suspect that in pre-information age society people like this were kept functioning within broadly normal bounds by the social pressure of neighbours, bosses, co-workers, and family. They probably made up about the same percentage of the population, but except for the odd sudden mass social disruption things ticked along. Those who didn’t were the madmen, the social outcasts. Now, with social isolation being the norm in our culture, and a hosepipe of any sort on online, cable, or TV of your individual taste available, those susceptible are able to mainline the extreme without connection to the rest of us.
Looking at history I’d normally say this would be sorted by a war, brutal government, or eventually fade out to background again over 2-3 generations. With the rising pressure of resource shortages and climate change added to the mix, it’s hard to see a benign outcome.
Steven Colbert was really on to something with his “truthiness” concept — but it FEELS true!
[…] a comment by Rob on You must tell the truth while you […]
In the absence of telepathic powers it is, of course, always risky to make sweeping claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads, but I tend to agree with people like Peter Pomerantsev that, to the likes of Trump and Putin, the goal is not so much to “convince” people of anything as to make them doubt everything. As it turns out doubt, distrust, suspicion, and cynicism are as useful for controlling the masses as belief, trust, naivety, or gullibility. In an age of information overload they’re also a lot easier to generate. It doesn’t matter if no one believes the lies of the regime as long as they don’t have anyone else they trust more with whom they can form alliances. Rather than out on the streets parroting the party slogans, they want the majority passive at home in front of their computers or their TV screens feeling cynical, powerless, and resigned.
The old authoritarians, such as the leaders of the Soviet Union, tended to claim the truth for themselves and put considerable effort into making their lies seem superficially credible. The new authoritarians are different in that the lying is so obvious and blatant that it stretches the imagination to think convincing people is really the goal. When Putin told the world in 2014 that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine (apparently the soldiers we could all see on TV were just local patriots who had bought some Russian uniforms at an army surplus store), or when Trump told the world that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, there was a underlying message of “Wink wink, nudge nudge! We all know that what I’m saying now is not literally true. I know you’re not naïve. You know the real world doesn’t work like that. You know just as well as me that whatever passes for ‘truth’ is all just part of somebody else’s nefarious plot or hidden agenda. The only difference is that, unlike my opponents, I’m not underestimating your intelligence. Nor am I being hypocritical about it. Look, I’m showing you my cards! Yes, I’m a liar, but so is everybody else. Yes, we’re all crooks, but I’m your crook”. This allows Trump’s followers to feel like they’re in on the plot, thus even if they know he is lying, they don’t hold it against him because they don’t feel like the lying is directed at them. Instead they see him giving the middle finger to the people they hate by lying to their faces and getting away with it, and they absolutely love him for it.
According to Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, when you start pressing, say, QAnon supporters to state what they actually believe, they may not be literally convinced that Hillary Clinton is running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. It’s more of a vague notion that the accusations are “true enough” as Muirhead and Rosenblum put it. I.e. “Even if the Pizzagate story isn’t literally true, she’s still a crook and this is just the kind of thing she’d be capable of, so I might as well run with it”. Also, as Timothy Snyder has pointed out, the more blatant and obvious the lie, the more willingness to repeat it becomes a useful test of loyalty. It doesn’t take much loyalty to repeat a plausible lie. To repeat an obvious lie shows real commitment to the cause and that you’re a true ally.