Alex Jones will not go away

Empowered, Rogue, and MAGA

It’s always a bad idea to wake up in the middle of the night and, under the self-delusion that I just want to know what time it is, reach over and click on the phone. It’s an especially bad idea if, as sometimes happens, a news alert lies alluringly below the digital hour.

So, reader, yes, I clicked this morning.

Four AM is an especially bad time to read the words “Alex Jones.”

Overnight, a Texas federal bankruptcy judge had overturned the sole bit of cheering news since the November election. The satirical publisher The Onion had managed last month to buy Jones’ Infowars site in a fire sale triggered by Jones being adjudicated financially liable for $1.5 billion for his unspeakable abuse of the Sandy Hook families of mass-murdered first graders.

Jones, in a just world, would perhaps be tarred, feathered, and deported to Siberia by now. But he has managed to “use the chapter laws,” as Donald Trump once described his six bankruptcies, to cling to his empire of lies and supplements. Somehow, even having been adjudicated to owe $1.5 billion dollars to his victims, and agreeing to liquidate assets to come up with the money, he has managed to get his pals to reorganize his former holdings into a new company to which he seems to maintain some access.

The Onion had planned to kick Jones out and relaunch Infowars in January as a parody. The Onion taking over Infowars was an especially delicious prospect because it was teaming up with gun control advocate Everytown for Gun Safety and planned to turn Infowars into an enterprise both funny and good for America.

But Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez agreed with Jones that The Onion’s offer was too much lower than that of the Jones-affiliated bidder, and so, canceled the sale. He argued that the families were not being served by the lower bid, even though the families have specifically stated that their satisfaction of the judgment against Jones includes him no longer having control of his media operation.

Lopez's decision means Jones can stay at Infowars in Austin, Texas. Jones immediately went on X and live-streamed himself gloating to 440,000 viewers. That this conspiracy-mongering, evil side of beef on testosterone and other supplements has nearly half a million fans is still shocking - even though I know it shouldn’t be after the re-election of Trump.

But that the decision rewarding him comes off the Texas federal bench is no surprise. Texas judges are so devoted to the “cruelty is the point” MAGA ethos that they have long been the favorite destination of venue-shopping fetal fanatics, xenophobes, gun-nuts, and greedy oligarchs and their flinty friends in the small business communities. They have also been crucial in advancing countless outrageous cases filed by Lone Star State Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose failure to appear on Trump’s shortlist to head the DOJ, despite having been accused of all manner of corruption in impeachment and fraud cases, seems deeply unfair.

Bankruptcy Judge Lopez is a lesser goblin in the great army of Texas creepies that includes the terrifyingly dead-eyed Judge Matthew Kaszmaryck (about whom more below). Lopez was appointed by the Fifth Circuit court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, rules on cases coming out of Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Trump appointed six of the judges to a panel already packed with Reagan and Bush picks.

The result is “the most conservative” appeals court in the federal system, “an outlier” that frequently “goes off the rails,” as legal reporter Ian Milhiser said on NPR last year. The Fifth Circuit not only ensures that the most culturally and politically regressive states in America remain so - its decisions affect Americans far beyond Dixie.

Last year, a 2-1 panel of this 5th Circuit officially stayed Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling invalidating the FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, approval that had existed for 20 years. But the panel played doctor itself: ruling on when and how mifepristone can be prescribed, blocking distribution by mail, telehealth prescriptions, and prohibiting its use after seven weeks of pregnancy when it was previously available through 10 weeks.

Besides making sure American girls and women are forced to give birth no matter what they want, or how old they are, or how they got pregnant, the Fifth Circuit has been busy chiseling away at American freedoms and standard of living in other ways.

In a cold-hearted ruling that even a Michigan Fox news outlet called “A Lump of Coal” for American workers, a Texas federal judge struck down a Biden Department of Labor rule that raised the minimum salary for salaried employees in the US, expanding overtime eligibility in the process. Under the rule, the minimum salary for salaried employees (also known as exempt employees) increased from $35,568 a year to $43,888 a year.

In other words, if you want a living wage, all you single mothers working in administrative jobs … go fuck yourself.

Dickensian lifestyle goals are just the beginning.

Last month, another Texas federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking the enforcement of an anti-money laundering law that requires corporate entities to disclose to the U.S. Treasury Department the identities of their real beneficial owners. U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman, Texas, was an Obama appointee, so, go figure, something in the water down there. He agreed with the National Federation of Independent Business and several small businesses and non-profits by concluding the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act was likely unconstitutional.

The ruling is just in time for Trump 2.0, headed by a family whose holdings and financial networks lie hidden behind paper labyrinths of shell companies and LLCs to hang out a new sign: Welcome money launderers! America is a good place to do business again.

Good news for Russian money launderers, but what about American teens who want to carry handguns in public? Well, the Texas federal bench has you covered, young man!

Two months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to carry weapons in public for self-defense, Trump-nominated U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman threw out a Texas ban on 18-20-year-olds carrying handguns.

Judge Pittman might argue that his hands were tied, the 20-year-old Sandy Hook and teen-aged Uvalde and Santa Fe perpetrators and 12 other ghastly Texas mass shootings in recent years notwithstanding. He grounded his decision in the Supreme Court’s declaration that the federal judiciary must apply a “history-only” test when considering challenges to weapons regulations.

Under the new standard, a weapons regulation is only constitutional if it is similar to one around the 18th century when the Second Amendment was ratified. So, Judge Pittman, finding no such restriction on the boys of the 1700s, ruled that there was no historical tradition of stopping young adults from carrying guns in public.

Before you start looking up other 18th-century norms that might be disinterred in your neighborhood and applied to you, here are a few favorites from my week of reading:

Steve Schmidt, a never-Trumper and former Republican advisor to John McCain, publishes a terrific Substack newsletter (and podcast) called The Warning. Steve is one of the strongest voices against MAGA on the internet, eloquently pouring contumely at Trump almost daily, and so likely in line for Trump’s promised retribution. Here, he lays out why he will refuse to accept a preemptive pardon. Hint: speech is Constitutionally protected, not a crime. No need to pardon.

And, here, my colleague at COURIER, Melissa Ryan of Ctrl Alt Right Delete, examines the hypocrisy of billionaires who claim to hate “woke.” She picks apart a fawning, cringe-worthy Bari Weiss post-election interview with Peter Thiel (which I had hate-listened to and laughed at on a long drive a few weeks ago). “Billionaires whining about ‘woke’ has always been code for really what pissed them off: attempts to check their power,” Ryan writes. “It’s not just about their bottom line but a firm belief that they should be able to do what they like (and treat workers and consumers however they want) without consequence.”

And while I’m recommending things ….

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Troubled times demand both awareness and laughter. If you’re looking for something short and clever to divert you from our real-life dystopia for a few hours, click here and order a copy of my new (and first) novel, Zero Visibility Possible. The book is a funny dark satire about American gun violence, the media and disinformation, and the political uses of public trauma. Early readers called the book “a stick of dynamite” (Greg Olear) and “dark, witty and obsessively readable” (Rick Wilson). Buy one and I will gift you a one-year PAID subscription to the American Freakshow. Just DM or email me the receipt.