• by Tom Siebert , Op-Ed Contributor, April 30, 2018

The moment somebody tells the media emphatically what’s not happening — “I am not a crook,” “There is no improper relationship,” “It was not a missile” — there’s a very good chance that’s exactly what’s happening.

Thus, we had the sad spectacle of DNC head Tom Perez defending the party’s lawsuit against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and Wikileaks, claiming a “conspiracy” to steal the presidency from its presumably rightful heir, as neither “stunt” nor “joke.”

This is the same DNC that says there was no “conspiracy” to steal the party’s nomination from Bernie Sanders, while at the same time successfully battling in court for their right to hand the nomination to whoever they want.

This new lawsuit is going nowhere, however, and it’s not like I’ve been traveling in Nikola Tesla's time machine. There is literally no way that anybody in the DNC wants to go through the discovery process, or answer any questions on the stand under oath. 

And that’s got nothing to do with the innocence of the Trump campaign or the Russians being blameless, because neither is the case.

It has to do with this pivotal question, which nobody at the DNC — or, frankly, the RNC, FBI or CIA — wants answered: “Was this even really a hack? Or was it a leak?” 

But it’s a different lawsuit that dropped two weeks back, against the nation’s best-known “conspiracy theorist,” Infowars’ Alex Jones, that is our main focus today. It’s a defamation-of-character lawsuit from parents of two of the children killed at Sandy Hook, seeking $1 million. It was filed after Jones said on his program that the event was a hoax and the parents were crisis actors. 

Now, I’m not going to suggest Jones is a total fraud, a blowhard publicity whore and illegitimate media creation to make critical thinkers look bad and misdirect focus from legitimate conspiracies. Oh, wait. I am. 

Which brings us back to why nobody ever wants to go to court.

In Jones’ recent child-custody battle, during which his ex-wife attempted to portray him as unhinged and unfit, Jones’ lawyer explained that good old A.J. is merely “playing a character. He is a performance artist. [It would be like] judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute, based on his performance as the Joker in ‘Batman.’”

So if Alex Jones is playing a character, what kind of character is that? On one hand, you’ve got his obvious role: the incendiary, ranting conspiracy nut. 

But on the other hand — the hidden hand, let’s say — there is another role: The guy who is there to undermine anybody trying to lift the curtain a bit on this veil of tears, or any movement pushing back against the establishment narrative. Because nobody wants to get lumped into “Dude, that’s Alex Jones-type thinking!”

One example of Jones poisoning the water is his notorious rant about how “they’re turning the freaking frog gay!” — which became such a joke it evolved into a meme. 

Except that in 2010, a Berkeley study showed that a common pesticide called Atrazine, running off into American streams and rivers, had begun to “turn male frogs into females that are successfully able to reproduce.” Five years later, a Yale study found the same thing.

The Yale study was so convincing, the European Union subsequently banned Atrazine. The U.S. did not.

Like your grandmother taught you, it’s not what you say — it’s how you say it. And that sums up Jones’ act in a nutshell. Half the stuff he's saying is actually in the ballpark. But he’s telling you in the court jester’s outfit.

Or worse. Jones has also been captured, on video, attempting to bring chaos and disruption to peaceful, organized right-wing rallies, and then lying about what went down to make himself appear the hero. 

In my opinion, all this makes Jones the embodiment of what could be called a one-man, all-purpose, multimedia COINTELPRO cancer on the critical-thinking community. He’s both pied-piper leader and leech, and even his best days — and there have been a few — only serve as cheese on a rat trap of societal management and manipulation. 

In closing, here is my de rigueur reminder: “Conspiracy Theorist” was literally developed as a “weaponized term” in 1967 by the CIA — you can see the original 2-page memo here.  I’d really like it to stop working so well, but it's the new fallback, since “fake news” was not an effective replacement.