It all started with the headline over an entry in Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter in the Atlantic: “Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here?” This is an interesting question because Jones is an internet troll so extreme that he makes Donald Trump look like Spinoza. For many years, he has parlayed a radio talkshow and a website into a comfortable multimillion-dollar business peddling nonsense, conspiracy theories, falsehoods and weird merchandise to a huge tribe of adherents. And until 4 August he had got away with it. On that day, though, he lost an epic defamation case brought against him by parents of children who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre – a tragedy that he had consistently ridiculed as a staged hoax; a Texas jury decided that he should pay nearly $50m in damages for publishing this sadistic nonsense.
Warzel’s newsletter consisted of an interview with…
