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The Infowars host has influence with the Trump administration. We need to know who he is and what he believes.
While doing research for his lively 2002 book Them: Adventures with Extremists, author Jon Ronson found himself at a Ku Klux Klan cross burning in the Ozark Mountains. But the Klan members at this point were suffering from a bevy of logistical problems. For one, the cross was too large for them to lift. And they couldn't figure out how to soak it in kerosene to make it flammable.
"Do we raise it and then soak it," asked one attendee, "or soak it and then raise it?"
Tradition had been to soak the cross and then light it, but another Klansman complained about that plan. "If we soak it before we raise it, we'll get kerosene all over our hands and clothes when we raise it."
"How are you going to soak it after you've raised it?" snapped the group's leader after a great deal of standing around and debating.
"We thought you'd have a ladder," mumbled someone in the crowd.
Ronson's book provides an invaluable look into extremist groups on the fringes of society — even those, such as the KKK, that are morally reprehensible. His reporting recognizes that those who join these groups are real people with real thoughts and feelings, even if what they stand for is monstrous. And he digs into their motivations for adhering to such objectionable world views.
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In the final chapter, Ronson teams up with a Texas-based conspiracy theorist trying to expose a secret group of world leaders that he believed was conducting clandestine rituals that involved both human sacrifice and praying to an owl. This particular conspiracy theorist had gained notoriety for inventing bogus theories about Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. His name was Alex Jones.
Fifteen years later, Jones' crackpot conspiracy theories have drawn him into a slew of emotional controversies. This week, NBC News host Megyn Kelly faced a backlash when she released clips of an upcoming interview she conducted with the Infowars.com host. Among his most reprehensible theories, Jones believes that the attacks on 9/11 were an "inside job" conducted by the government and that the 2012 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children were shot, was a hoax.
Yet most of the the pre-Jones interview outrage hasn't been targeted at Jones and his band of reprobates at Infowars, but at Kelly for conducting the interview in the first place. Sandy Hook parents were upset that Kelly would give Jones a "platform" to spout his nutty theories to the nation. New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio suggested the segment be pulled from the air. Financial giant J.P. Morgan Chase refused to show any of its ads on Kelly's show before the Jones interview finished airing.
Whereas reporting on society's fringes used to be seen as a valuable public service, now it's seen as damaging and distasteful. At some point, trusting news consumers to recognize oddballs for what they were switched to people being afraid of their fellow citizens being exposed to conspiracy theories.
A great deal of this change is due to Jones' apparent influence within President Trump's inner circle. In December of 2015, Trump appeared on Jones' online show and repeated a debunked claim that Muslims were seen celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Following Trump's election, Infowars was even granted a temporary White House press pass. So while we used to be able to pat nut jobs on the head and dismiss them, now the president has granted them the imprimatur of the highest office in America.
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But that is the strongest argument for why we need interviews with distasteful fringe-dwellers like Alex Jones. If this bottom-feeder has any level of influence or access with the Trump administration, we need to know who he is and what he believes. Americans can't worry about what other cranks might be attracted to his message — our right to know supersedes any recruitment effect due to Jones being on the air. (Jones himself has asked the segment to be pulled, claiming that "deceptive editing" makes him look like a monster.)
Of course, everyone's hearts go out to the families of the Sandy Hook victims for the unspeakable pain they have endured. And while they have every right to object to giving Jones air time, the public has a right to hear what he has to say. (Further, the outrage over the Jones interview, scheduled to air Sunday night, is a bit odd given that Kelly's first interview was with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a guy who has actually killed people.)
It is unconscionable that anyone who runs a media outlet would declare the Jones interview to be unworthy of airing. Whether a story is about the KKK or people who think the Earth is secretly controlled by an extraterrestrial race of reptiles, information is always the disinfectant, never the poison. We can handle it.
Any marketplace of ideas must have its fruits and nuts section — and it's required of good reporters to tell us where America's president decides to shop.
Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow him on Twitter @Schneider_CM
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
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