A civil suit brought against Alex Jones convinced a jury that Jones lied about the Sandy Hook school shootings, causing harm to griefstricken parents of murdered children. No doubt public opinion on this, as on most other issues, is inexplicably split down party lines, which could be a sign of the public's growing inability to critically discern real from fake news, coupled with a growing cultural inability to discern any moral obligation to the truth.

Last week's twist in the case, when Jones' own lawyers accidentally sent three years' worth of his cell phone text messages to the plaintiff's attorney, now has some spectators wondering if there are some conversations Jones held with Secret Service personnel that could be used by the J6 Committee to help fill in some blanks left by the Secret Service's accidental deletion of its phone records related to the Capitol insurrection.

In fact, they seem all too ready to just dive right in. I wonder how likely it is they're about to be duped by a maneuver that looks as much like a classic Karl Rove ratfuck as anything we've seen recently.

If the information on that phone contains any bombshells or useful data, they will have to be very careful to get independent verification about everything—especially if any of it seems too good (that is to say, too bad) to be true.

Jones and his people are obsessed about dirty tricks, so-called "false flag operations" and weird, complicated conspiracies (aren't we all?), so I wouldn't put it past them to "accidentally" send phone data that contains fake information with the intent to, say, derail the J6 Commission and send investigators and the media down the wrong path in their Trump investigations. Suppose the phone were to contain some convincingly horrible bombshell about Trump—and at this point, I'm not sure there's much anybody would put past him—something horrible that was a lot easier and more cut-and-dry to investigate than any of the actual allegations?

While the J6C and the media have been largely successful so far in presenting a coherent narrative that doesn't look good for Trump at all, things are now looking like they've uncovered only the tip of the iceberg. They could so easily be led down the wrong path, and then, shortly before the election, the Trump campaign could break the "news" that it was fake, and by that time nobody would remember that it came from Alex Jones' phone. There would be some kind of showy and easy-to-understand proof showing the allegations to be false, which would be enough to confuse a lot of voters and inoculate Trump against criticism, and it's possible the investigation might not ever get back on track.

It sounds like I've been drinking the Alex Jones Kool-Aid* ^{see note}, but don't forget: The same thing happened during the George W. Bush campaign with the Killian documents, and it was maddening how easy the media and the Democrats were taken down by such an obvious ploy. Dan Rather took the fall for it, and it pretty much spelled the end of his career—though it was clear even then that the Killian document wasn't so much a smoking gun as it was a highly photographable piece of evidence, and far from the only source. So even though the reports about Bush receiving preferential treatment during the war were very likely true, after that, the GOP was able to go into that weird Neighborhood of Make-believe Mode politicians have been doing lately, and act like the media had made the whole thing up.

I'm not saying they shouldn't look at the phone data. There is a lot at stake. I'm just saying they need to be very skeptical of what they may find there.

\* Note: That metaphor, popularized following the Jim Jones cult-related mass suicide in Guyana, is inaccurate, because the members of the Jones cult drank their poison with Wyler's drink mix, a product that was similar, but not identical by any means, to Kool-Aid.