The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

Yesterday I watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones and came away unsettled and discouraged. The film lays out, with testimony and footage, how a powerful falsehood about the Sandy Hook massacre metastasized into a lived reality for many—how ordinary people came to believe grieving parents were actors in some sinister plot. The human cost is plain: families harassed, reputations shredded, lives made worse by a rumor that would not die. The documentary also cites polling that suggests this belief is far from fringe, which is precisely what made me sit up and take notice.

Alan Jacobs, in How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, gave me a frame for that discomfort. Jacobs argues that critical thinking is not merely a set of intellectual tools; it is a moral posture. It requires humility—the readiness to admit you might be wrong—intellectual rigor, and a willingness to engage, civilly, with rival views. In a public sphere where grievance entrepreneurs monetize confusion and cruelty, Jacobs’s point feels less like scholastic nicety and more like civic equipment. To believe in the conspiracy about Sandy Hook is less of an intellectual deficiency and more of a moral one. Willful ignorance is born of belligerence.

There are historical moments when falsehoods gain unusual traction and the public square warps into a theater of lies. Watching the documentary, I thought about those moments not as distant epochs but as warnings: when social media rewards certainty over care, and when spectacle drowns out verification, civic habits fray. On the evening he announced his retirement, anchor Brian Williams put it bluntly when he spoke of “evil winds” in our national weather—less a prophecy than an observation that the job of keeping the truth in view has grown harder.

That’s where I am: uneasy, but oddly steadied by the thought that civic muscles can be strengthened with small, repeated acts. Viktor Frankl reminded us that life’s circumstances often determine the work we must do; perhaps one task for this hour is to preserve the habits that let a shared reality exist in the first place.