What are some of the things that keep you up at night? The prospect of losing your health insurance? Nuclear holocaust? Economic collapse?
Those are a few of the things that cause me to sit bolt upright instead of sleeping at night, and now there's a new thing. Alex Jones is apparently the designated validator and information source for the president of the United States.
Or so the New York Times says, anyway.
"But [Jones] is apparently taking on a new role as occasional information source and validator for the president of the United States, with whom, Mr. Jones says, he sometimes speaks on the phone," the article states.
White House officials declined to talk about Jones' involvement in detail, according to The Times. But there is no question that Trump is lending the weight of his office to Jones' credibility, and vice versa, as he wraps himself around outlandish theories that Jones peddles every day on his show.
There is this, for example:
And these:
Before that, there was Mr. Trump’s false claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, which Infowars had asserted in November and then repeated, giving “oxygen to the lies,” as CNN put it then. Then again, others in the right-leaning internet ecosystem had forwarded the illegal voting report, too.
Mr. Jones’s influence could be seen more directly last spring when Mr. Trump told a crowd in California that “there is no drought” — oh, yes, there was — and suggested that reports of one were part of a plot to protect a “three-inch fish.” It was very similar to reports in Infowars suggesting the drought was manufactured and promoting the fish theory.
Now that there is an anti-vaxxer in the White House, anti-vax paranoids feel empowered, in what state, again? That's right. Texas. Thank Jones for that, too. It's all part of his loony-bin conspiracy theories about government, medicine, and snake oil. (He sells snake oil, just like Trump.)
I hope someone pulls out the FBI pictures of Sandy Hook and shows Trump the slaughtered children and teachers in all their gory detail. I hope they make him look and look and look until he retches from the gore of it all. And then remind him that his pal at Infowars denies those children died. Make him figure out how his "validator" will deal with that.
The idea of Alex Jones serving as "validator" to POTUS 45 is enough to keep me up at night, grinding my teeth and pounding my pillow. What the hell kind of monster do we have in the White House, and how are we going to survive until he's gone?
