Becca Lewis, expert witness in Alex Jones’ 2022 trial, detailed how his 500K YouTube subscribers and 100M+ Sandy Hook views amplified conspiracy theories via platforms like Coast to Coast AM and Red Ice, despite defense attacks on her credentials. The trial exposed extremism’s institutional shift—from fringe figures like Breivik to Marjorie Taylor Greene—while contrasting Jones’ clownish behavior with victims’ heartbreaking testimonies, like Neil and Scarlett Hicken’s. Media’s role in radicalizing audiences, even unintentionally, was critiqued, but Lewis argued the internet merely accelerated preexisting societal demands. Ultimately, the episode underscores how extremist networks exploit mainstream credibility to normalize harm, leaving lasting emotional scars on both victims and those studying the rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
So I research communications is the field that I'm in.
And specifically, I look at right-wing and far-right social movements and also just more broadly, like disinformation efforts across the political spectrum and how they kind of disseminate throughout the internet.
So that was really the role they brought me on to talk about.
So like other witnesses talked about the, you know, like Fred Zip, the journalism expert, talked about kind of the actual protocols of genuine journalism and how Infowars wasn't following any of those.
Of course, the forensic psychologist talked about, you know, the mental anguish that the parents, Neil and Scarlett, experienced.
And my role was to talk about the role of Alex Jones in just how widespread this conspiracy theory has become.
A topic which I don't think either of you may be very familiar with.
I was trying to make a bad joke because I feel like you two are like the most qualified people to talk about this ever, but I'm glad to hear it was interesting.
Yeah, we can talk ideas and Alex's coverage of things, but in terms of the stuff that's around him, you know, like that picture is something that I don't know.
I mean, I certainly have a sense of it just sort of anecdotally from like being around conspiracy circles at the time.
Yeah, and I think it's true, actually, that you, you, when you work in this space, you quickly come to realize you're like, I am going to bite off one very, very small piece of this puzzle because it is just so massive.
There's so much to delve into.
And so you really do have to rely on the work of other people.
And it's incredibly important, I think, to like chat with and make sure you're gleaning expertise from other people around because, yeah, you just have to be the expert in your one spot and then make sure you're looking at what everyone else is doing too.
No, I was just going to say the cool thing for me is that during the trial, it's been like your podcast has been the forum where you've been able to bring a ton of people together, right?
You've heard from the lawyers, from Elizabeth Williamson, who's incredible.
Like, if that wasn't the case initially, it certainly is the case now that you're bringing everyone together in a really cool way, I think.
I mean, that's what's so fascinating to me is you can see like there are network studies that get done about kind of the dynamics of these things.
You see the giant nodes that form in terms of right-wing, the spread of right-wing ideas and information.
And it's like, you know, the big institutional hubs throughout kind of the 2010s were Fox News and Breitbart, you know, particularly through like 2017, 2018.
But when you look at individuals, it's Alex Jones.
There's no one, you know, really the only person with comparable reach to him in this space is Joe Rogan.
And like, obviously, Joe Rogan is a bit more of a complicated person in the way that he back then.
There were a lot of Angel FIRE websites devoted to Dragon Ball Z that were all about disinformation, if I recall correctly, but mostly about how GOKU was a yeah, limited hangout.
Yeah, I feel like um, like Alex Jones is really this hinge point where it's like you're saying he was.
He was there in the 90s, he was doing the, the Public Access Television, he was doing the radio thing, but then he also was incredibly, you know, prescient in a lot of ways and was able to do the influence, the online influencer thing.
You know, pretty early on, he was on the, the crest of that wave.
The juxtaposition of how Alex describes all of his guests as like the most qualified, the top of their field, the single greatest person everybody knows.
This person and Mark could not have tried to twist the knife more at the beginning than when he was like, where did you graduate from?
Oh, that's cool.
Let me ask you a question, did you graduate from somewhere?
unidentified
Even more important, is that a prestigious college?
You know, like well that's, I mean, that's the thing also is that plenty of prestigious institutions have lots of idiots that go there right but um, Harvard has turned out its share of people i've paid attention to, which is not good yeah, but listen, but in my case clearly, it only turns out, you know, ex geniuses.
Yeah hell yeah, I. Um, when I went to I, I dropped out of high school and after that I was applying for colleges and uh I, I was guaranteed basically, that I could get into the University OF Missouri because I lived in Columbia and it was an easy uh, it was a dunk right uh, but the only other college I applied to was Harvard.
I guess my dad went to Harvard and so I was like hey, i'm a legacy, this will make up for me.
Dropping out, did not work out, did not get in and uh went to Missouri amazing, I regret nothing.
So the also another thing that it was fun is, I believe it was you who did the jury ask you to swear you weren't a lizard, or did that question not make it through?
I'm thinking about this, this, this picture of the media landscape back then in like 2012.
And even the thing that I brought up, I realize, like Coast to Coast AM is probably one of the biggest things other than Alex that touches on some of these issues.
But that even seems silly to say because Alex was constantly on Coast to Coast.
I feel like, I mean, yeah, a couple of other things about the internet at that point.
And I feel like, Dan, you brought this up in a recent episode about like Facebook being an entirely different place back then, too.
The other thing you find when you go back and start rooting around in like archive.org and these other like, you know, ways you try to try to go back and look at what the internet was like then is it was much less like people didn't have verified accounts at that point.
So you had Alex Jones's, but then you also had like dozens and dozens of, if you look at what the other recommended accounts were at the time, it's all of these Alex Jones ripoff accounts.
And so the posting and reposting and reposting is like something that is hard for us to even conceptualize now in this.
Obviously, there's still posting and reposting, but it was a very different version of that back then.
Like we still think of social media as a cesspool, and obviously it is, but the amount that has changed between then and now is pretty remarkable.
And then to your point about the kind of, you know, Alex Jones going on these other shows, I mean, this was something that I didn't really have time to get into on the stand, but that's, that's a lot of what I look at, right?
Is how you get these different creators who kind of amplify each other and each other's ideas and create this like self-reinforcing feedback loop, right?
It's like someone will reference Alex Jones as like the authority and be like, well, that's why I can spread this idea.
And then Alex Jones will point back to, you know, Wolfgang Halbig or whoever and be like, oh, yeah, he has his credentials.
And so then you start to get this, these networks of people who are all going on each other's shows, who are all kind of amplifying each other's ideas and reinforcing them and seem like they're kind of citing genuine people because they have this whole network of people that are their quote-unquote experts.
I feel like, well, first of all, the thing about that network that I made was it was specifically looking at kind of like, it started with Dave Rubin as the seed account and then did like what we call snowball sampling from there because the idea was to say like the most mainstream, quote-unquote, mainstream person that I could think of who had influence and a lot of people on his show.
And then go from there and see where it spun out.
And the interesting thing is there's a ton of people from Alex Jones's world on that network web, right?
That like PJW is on there and a bunch of people.
But at a certain point, I realized I was going to start including Alex Jones in this, but the way I bounded it, ended up having to leave him out because he was at the center of his own alternative influence.
That's what I was thinking is that if you added him, then it would sprawl like a completely wild direction, even though there's a ton of overlap in terms of people he's connected with on here.
Like, well, I guess at the time, probably not Nick Fuentes, but he had Faith Goldie on his show, certainly Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Gavin, Cernovich.
But yeah, that is interesting that he would be his own visualization of its yarn pattern.
So, you know, to YouTube's credit, you know, like I think, and actually, Alex Jones' lawyer asked me about Stefan Malinu, which was an odd choice, I would say.
Like, just the amount of, first of all, like, he's someone I legit have so many receipts on, like, at the ready.
And then, like, also, is just someone who is, it was a bad choice of someone to bring up, but um, he is such a um he was such a powerful radicalization point, right?
Because he was someone that maintained enough uh, quote-unquote credibility for a while that he would get invited on like Jordan Peterson's show, Rogan's show, um, these uh, uh, Dave Rubin, these people that have kind of you know, mainstream uh, again, quote-unquote credibility.
Um, but then he would, you know, go on these other, uh, kind of more openly extremist shows and kind of speak his mind much more openly.
And he was just like known to be uh, uh, Robert Evans wrote about this too in a lot of his um uh you know where people got red pills, you know.
Um, yeah, people talked about, I believe that he was one of the ones mentioned by name, um, although it's been a while since I've read that, so don't quote me on that.
But um, yeah, so so the fact that he got kicked off, I think, was a huge deal.
Um, the fact that like red ice and some of these other kind of openly white supremacist channels got kicked off was a big deal, so it really has changed.
Actually, I wanted I wanted to touch on Red Ice really quick because they've come up a couple times on our show in the past, but I, you know, looking at this 2018 report, Henrik and Lana are like way off in the side of this visualization of the network.
But I was thinking about this as I was looking at it.
That's right, real quick, I just want to interrupt.
So, because we can't see you on the screen, Becca, you just need to know that Dan instantly brought up your article on his computer the moment that I brought up how stupid I am.
It's like, and obviously it's not, it's not as germane to the case.
So I get why it hasn't come up, but it just the amount of anti-Semitism and white supremacy that Alex Jones ends up baking into his conspiracy theories.
It's like the way that you come to see it is through the people that he's working with because he's good at couching.
But then the people that he amplifies, if you go onto their shows, they're not couching it in any way.
I mean, on the one, first of all, you do have this interesting dynamic where understandably, I think there's been a lot of anxiety around YouTubers radicalizing YouTube viewers, which I've, you know, that's part of what I've written about.
But then you also have this other feedback loop because viewers now can leave comments and like on live streams can comment in real time and all these things.
You actually have audiences demanding more extremist content from creators.
And so you get this weird feedback loop where it's like creators end up, you know, kind of responding to the wishes of their audience.
Like I would say that Tim Poole is a really classic case of this where like I've done the Alec, you know, I've done the knowledge fight treatment on Tim Poole where like I've seen all of his content up through like, you know, a certain amount of time.
And it's so interesting to watch him inch bit by bit into the positions that he has now, in part by seeing how when he delved into that stuff, that's where his audience really responded to it.
Weirdly, what happened in the YouTube space and a lot of these spaces is I think the people that were strategic enough to straddle the line and never openly say, you know, that they're a white nationalist or a white supremacist, but who still use that rhetoric, they're still thriving and their rhetoric is getting more and more extreme, even as they're not.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people talk about figures as being fringe, like white supremacists being fringe.
It's like, no, they are sitting there in some of the most powerful media positions.
I mean, look at Tucker Carlson.
Like, he's an incredibly powerful media figure.
And if you just take, I've done this in certain presentations where I just take a quote of his about great replacement theory, a quote of the Christchurch shooter, a quote of Charlie Kirk, and a quote of Jason Kessler, the organizer of Unite the Right.
And their four quotes about great replacement theory are indistinguishable.
And so, you know, of course, like Alex Jones' lawyer was asking me about confirmation bias and stuff.
But to me, the interesting thing is if you take away that certain biases that we have and you just look at the data, that's the most damning thing possible.
And one of the things that really stuck out to me was the, if you were to isolate just the words of this, it would sound very familiar to InfoWars listeners.
And it was just, that was kind of a revelatory moment for me of like how gross.
And, and yeah, you're saying like it's not fringe.
It is.
It's the stuff that's in Anders Breivik's manifesto is broadcast stream in some places.
I really like there's a really good scholar of extremism who he defines extremism as an in-group that defines their success only by kind of punishing an out-group.
But the thing that I love about this definition is that he says it's a it's a misunderstanding to say that extremism is defined by being outside of the mainstream.
Because if you think of some of the most important extremist regimes in history, they were the mainstream, right?
Nazism, Nazi Germany was the mainstream during World War II and the Holocaust, right?
And you, you guys like call, call him on this all the time that it's like, when it's advantageous to him, he says, oh, we're just, we're just an upstart little, you know, we're the, we're the underdog.
No, that was a really interesting part of your testimony, especially when the question came from the jury, because that was almost the identical question Bill asked Owen in his deposition to define.
If you say you're against the mainstream media, define it, and then see if you don't fit all of those definitions.
Owen was basically walked into conceding that himself and most of the people he thinks are fringe are actually mainstream, according to his own definition.
I was just going to say that, Dan, you had a great line on a recent podcast that stuck with me and I'm going to use, which is that they, Alex Jones or one of these folks like want their cake and eat it too, and to have a slice of pie.
That to me, just like in every respect, that's that defines Alex Jones, right?
It's like he'll answer completely opposite things and somehow try to hold them both in his mind and in his rhetoric in a way that lets him squirm out of anything.
Speaking of that, how did it feel to be cross-examined by the defense's lawyer?
Because the moment he asked you after, well, one, he said two things that made me want to fight him before he even, before he even started asking you questions, he was trying to imply that you were unqualified, despite the fact that we heard a list of qualifications that can only be described as the most overqualified human being ever to sit in that chair.
And then later, when he asked you what confirmation, if you knew what confirmation bias was, I was ready to jump over the walls and just be like, yeah, it was a wild experience.
But no, that, you know, the confirmation bias thing, that one didn't really phase me because, you know, particularly actually with this 2018 report that I released, that one caused like such a stir among the YouTubers that I was writing about.
So it is different in that context to be like, okay, what are the and also because I, as an academic, you know, you get me rambling about these things and I can talk for hours.
And it's like, no, I have to limit myself to what is applicable for this specific case.
You know, but that was the other thing to try to gauge, like, because he started really getting into the weeds on statistical stuff.
And so I was trying to gauge, like, okay, how much do I prove that what he's asking is like absolute nonsense?
And also, yeah, it was just some of those were easier to respond to.
Like, when you start getting into why, like, what is statistical significance, that was the part where I just decided not even to engage with it because there's no way I'm going to be able to respond to that in like 30 seconds in a way that's satisfying to jury members, you know?
And so, but that's frustrating because to actually answer the questions he was asking me, like, I couldn't really answer them without going into some of those details.
But then you look at a lot of these people who are on here and we see where they've gone since.
And I think their arguments are a little bit flawed.
But I wanted to get your sense because, you know, you're somebody who still watches a lot of this stuff and you still are studying this space and maybe outside of YouTube.
But who do you think is like the big nodes now?
Like, who would you think are on radars or should be more on radars?
And secondarily, do you think that the people who are on here did anybody ascend or anything?
I'm not sure.
The phrasing of that question isn't great, but I think you maybe get what I'm asking.
And, and, like, you know, Tucker Carlson did entire segments kind of like defending and hosting Martin Selner and his wife, who were people that, you know, the Christchurch shooter ended up, you know, visiting before, you know, his massacre.
I mean, obviously, I don't know what their mindset was, but like whatever they were doing was clearly strategic because it worked in terms of bringing them fame.
And it felt like a very Dave Rubin-esque move, right?
Why I left the left type of thing.
And that's what Dave Rubin was doing in 20, what, 2015, 2016.
And now here they are doing it, you know, in more recent years.
So it's a little bit less YouTube-centric, but it's still about this network of kind of this loose network of influential people who I think are able to help each other out with networking, but also maintain some type of plausible deniability because they're like, you know, the lines that Glenn Greenwald was using about interviewing Alex were precisely the lines that Dave Rubin used about interviewing people like Stefan Molyneux five years ago, you know?
And it's the lines that Greenwald has about the like, it's identical essentially to Rubin too, with the like, I'm not on the right, but the left has gone too far kind of mentality.
And that's like, and that's exactly what feeds into, you know, right-wing audiences and further right-wing audiences to sort of anesthetize them to the idea that they're further to the right than they think they are.
And then I think the other big figure who has been so incredibly successful, but somehow has managed to stay so under the mainstream radar is Tim Poole.
Tim Poole is somebody who, like, I've wanted to cover maybe, and, like, people have asked us to, but he seems like somebody who is so into attention that you try to start a fight with me, and I just don't want to do it.
Like with the like, I was offered all of this stuff and I turned it down.
Like, I don't know if he turned it down or not, but like jock boffers at Fox and like the idea that like, oh, you'll have a book that you put out and will automatically make it a bestseller just by buying tons of that.
And to me, that's it's just so depressing and cynical.
And in a weird way, even more depressing than like the true believers, because with a true believer, you can work on de-radicalization.
And I mean, not to be too flippant about it, but it's, it's like the Big Lebowski line, right?
Like say what you will about National Socialism, at least as an ethos.
Like the nihilism behind just doing this stuff for profit and thinking you're above the politics of it is just so disgusting.
And I think with the with the true believers, those are the ones where I still hold out hope that you can somehow, you know, there are people that work on de-radicalization with them, but what do you do with someone that's just purely in it for the money?
I really do liken it to religious people insofar as like, I respect people who believe it, you know, like who really believe all of it and try to do the stuff.
Even if I think it's absurd, at the very least, I can see them processing this information, believing it and acting upon it.
And it's the people who are manipulating them for, let's say, a trillion dollars in gold that they wear around their neck or whatever, you know.
It's like, you're the most monstrous thing I can think of.
And that's the thing, too, with Alex Jones viewers.
These people, you know, it's a little bit like thinking about cult members who go on to like recruit new cult members, right?
This is, it's not to take away the responsibility of the Alex Jones viewers who went on to harass the Sandy Hook parents, but it is to say that they are also being harmed by Alex Jones and his rhetoric because Alex is feeding them lies and they are trusting him to deliver the truth.
And so they are also harmed by this, even as they are part of the problem.
But like in principle, I always have tried to look at things as like empathy towards the consumer of this bullshit and like really, real strong disdain to the producer.
And I, I'm yesterday, I taught my class about kind of the First Amendment and misconceptions around the First Amendment and how it relates to social media.
But yeah, this is the thing that, like, and there's incredible scholars working on this.
That historically, thinking about the First Amendment, this idea that Alex Jones promotes about like the First Amendment and freedom of speech means that I personally, as an individual, should be able to say anything that I want to say.
That's not been the way that the First Amendment has been understood throughout the history of the United States.
And in fact, like many kind of top legal minds have said actually that, you know, you need to think about freedom of speech more in a communal sense and thinking about what will get the most speech to flourish within a community.
And also, like, why part of freedom of speech is also the freedom to hear valuable information, you know?
And so that is where kind of it's whatever.
unidentified
It's sorry, I'm rambling now, but it just really obvious and noble and real truth.
Yeah, I think I always find that so interesting, but in like a boring way, if that makes sense.
The notions of the First Amendment that people like Alex have, it's interesting to me that it exists, but like it's so boring how much they bring it up in completely unapplicable situations.
I think it's not only Alex Jones that, you know, like it's the social media platforms have promoted this idea of free speech.
And the reason that it's partly interesting to me is that that's the reason they promote that idea of free speech is because that's the idea that's profitable to them, right?
I mean, it goes all the way back to, you know, we discussed it a while back, Le Problematique, you know, like the idea that all of these things are interconnected.
They are not individual elements to or individual things.
They're all part of a larger whole that we're not dealing with.
Okay, I know, Jordan, you like to say that you're like just a clown and all of this stuff, but I have to say that you're do not, whatever you're about to say next, do not say it.
Your critiques of the media coverage of the Alex Jones trial, I think, have been so necessary and spot on because this is actually even before I wrote my report on YouTube.
My colleague Alex Marwick and I wrote a report about how much the mainstream media plays a role in the amplification of far-right content and feeds directly into their ideas.
And I think that you've been hitting the nail on the head with all of that and the coverage.
You know, there have been a few journalists who have been there like day in, day out, who are doing incredible work, obviously, like Elizabeth being one of them.
And then, you know, people that have less Twitter presence, but like there's an incredible court reporter from Reuters and Dan Solomon from Texas Monthly.
No, I mean, I do think one of the big things that the media absolutely refuses to acknowledge is that part of the reason they like to amplify these voices is so they get to clown on them.
And then creating that owning the conservatives turns into another owning the libs and it just creates this feedback loop.
And this is what, you know, Richard Spencer was a master of this because at any time the mainstream media wanted to Talk to him, he was more than happy to chat with the mainstream media that he so hated, you know.
And listen, if 99 out of 100 people read that and hate him, he doesn't care.
It's that one person who listens to him and says maybe he has a point that he's trying to reach out to.
And the mainstream media, I mean, this is also why I think people like Alex, one of the reasons they can be effective is because the very first fraction of the first part of what they're saying is a valid critique of the mainstream media.
And then they just take it from there and take it in wildly inaccurate, awful directions, right?
But to say that the mainstream media is sensationalist is true.
And yeah, like I just want to make clear, like those kernels, I think they're dangerous because that becomes a mechanism by which to kind of ensnare people in his worldview.
And some of these people who are in this, you know, who are, you know, people you pointed out in 2018 are people who have ascended to more similar, like seeming institutional power.
Like Dave Rubin, you know, from having just a YouTube thing to now he's on Glenn Beck's network.
Because that's a great point with Marjorie Taylor Greene that, like, now you have enough literal members of Congress who are on board with these folks that that has significantly changed the landscape as well.
Yeah, I mean, there's also an argument that I keep coming back to of like, it is very easy to get caught up in this sort of recency bias while at the same time being like, well, you know, things were different back then.
People were more in the middle.
And maybe there's just part of it is that because society was so geared towards white people, they didn't even have to say anything.
You know, like, why would you be an extremist during slavery?
You own people.
Would you be like, oh, we need to come after the government?
You're like, no, the government gives me people to do things for free.
I mean, I'd be curious to hear how you all are feeling after what has just been like a roller coaster couple of weeks, because I've found it to be quite draining, to say the least.
And so I had heard a lot of the content of the first few days.
And so for me, it was kind of a, there was a lot of, a lot of kind of some of that stuff was a little bit of an exhausting thing for me because I just didn't have anything new for my brain to attach to.
But the other thing, the other thing is that when they were choosing a jury, the concept of you shouldn't know anything about Alex Jones or the Sandy Hook case to me is not a jury of your peers.
It just isn't.
Like, the only peers that Alex have are people who understand why Alex is never telling the truth or never lying.
He just doesn't care.
You know, so whenever you get him caught out in a lie, you know, and you get him caught out in a perjury situation, he doesn't even know.
And the other thing that was really exhausting, I think, about the trial, too, was the constant pretend game that the defense was playing where they pretended not to understand it was a damages hearing.
And it was so, I just felt also like a lot of emotional whiplash because it was this constant thing between like the clownishness and constant chaos of Alex Jones' world and the like very real and present sense of tragedy that was there.
And it was just back and forth between those two incredibly intense kind of emotional states for two weeks solid.
And that day, that Tuesday where it was Neil and Scarlett in the morning and then Alex testifying after was just like that whiplash was much too useful.
Cause like, like, obviously, I am, I have absolutely, you know, I've seen a lot of the love that, you know, Knowledge Fight listeners have been giving, giving to me, which is like so appreciated and really validating and affirming.
But also it's like, it's not, it's not about me.
It's not about any of the people that are surrounding this.
You didn't know this, but actually at one point, maybe you did know this, but actually at one point I was sitting directly behind you while you were having a conversation with Mr. Zip about your upcoming testimony.
And I don't think either of you had any idea who I was.
Technically, as an expert witness, I think it would have been fine, but that was my approach too.
It was just like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to go up and introduce myself to them until after I've testified.
But then we didn't get a chance to do that.
But anyways, yeah, so that's funny that we all knew who all of us were.
And yeah, in terms of my reaction, yeah, it's like, it's really similar.
Like I found it to be thrilling at times because it really does feel like this is the start of a snowball of accountability, hopefully.
And at times, at other times, I found myself feeling like it doesn't matter how much money ends up coming back to him because so much damage has already been done that can't be undone.
And I don't know.
I just, I find myself kind of yo-yoing between these like intense reactions.
And then also I did find like you both have been commentating on that the dynamics of the trial and the media around it and everything are fascinating in their own way.
So there was like my direct emotional response to it.
And then there was also the like academic response or in your case is the podcaster response of like this is what the fuck is going on.
This is a phenomenon worthy of study and commentating on in itself, right?
Like the way that Alex Jones and his team are trying to abuse the justice system in the same way that they've abused the media system is fascinating.
And I don't know if you had the same response that I kind of did, but as I've come home and I have a little bit more distance from it, I realize I felt a little bit of a dissonance and maybe even a little bit of a shame about the because I try to,
as much as possible, despite my very impassioned speech at the beginning of the Greenwald episode, I try to keep a sort of distance from the topics that we cover in order to not just be you.
So it was really difficult to have this thing that I have a huge interest in having a sort of detached approach to where you have this trial of the person that I've been studying and this is ridiculous.
But then at the same time, the impossible to not have an emotional connection with the experience of seeing Neil and Scarlett in the courtroom and testifying and their therapists.
Although I also don't think sometimes I think that the dissonance or pitting these things against each other, they don't need to be pitted against each other.
That you can, you can, and this is maybe a little bit what I was trying to get across when I talked about confirmation bias, that like to be starting with the data and not having confirmation bias doesn't mean you can't have opinions or emotions about the things that you're studying.
It means that you start with the data and you let that inform your thoughts and opinions, but you still have those thoughts and opinions.
They're just informed by the data.
And I also think that to study these issues in any kind of ethical way, you need to approach it with humanity because otherwise you're just going to get swept up in their propaganda.
You need to have that humanity there first and foremost and think about the people that are being harmed by this rhetoric.
No, I think you should just write a lot about how the families want money and Alex Jones is really sorry for what he did and he admitted that he was wrong.
I say this also as someone who like in 2016, there was this wave of scholarship that started to come out about the alt-right that just came from these people that were kind of like, oh, isn't it fascinating that 4chan has all these memes, right?
And it wasn't really coming from it from a place of thinking about why does this matter.
And the minute that you start thinking about why does this matter, there's going to be emotions involved.
And so I think it's actually important to hold space for those.
And that doesn't have to be in contradiction to kind of approaching things from a fairer and balanced and non-confirmation bias perspective.
That's interesting because I think that most people think that expertise leads you to be like sort of a cold, dispassionate, like I mean, in terms of like, I don't know how many like professors in like classics or philosophy you've met, but a lot of them are pretty right.
Or let's look at another unfortunate reality, and that is that anybody who is probably sort of credentialed to be in the position you are in has a negative opinion of Alex Jones.
Yeah, I mean, and this is a debate in social science, too, right?
You have people that try to say that you need to take this completely like you need to try to have this neutral approach that's a view from nowhere type of thing.
And then you have people that are more like tend to be more ethnographers and people doing qualitative research who say, no, like none of us can escape our own perspective.
It's about understanding how that perspective informs what you're doing.
And so it's like, yes, as a woman, a bi-woman, a bi-Jewish woman, like all of these things, I'm very conscious of how that affects the way that I read hate speech online, right?
unidentified
And the way that I'm- Well, I can't believe the far right really attacks you.
And so like, I need to stay conscious of that when I'm reading anti-black racist content, you know, that like I'm not going to fully understand the pain that that brings to black people.
And right back at you, you know, a lot of your work and published pieces have been really important in terms of giving some context and insights into a lot of this world.