There’s a video going around of Jon Stewart confronting a highly influential rightwing propagandist with millions of followers inside and outside the GOP, including supporters of the former president.

I don’t need to tell you his name. I don’t need to explain the context in depth or why they found each other face-to-face or even why the former host of “The Daily Show” was blue face vein-popping angry.

Rightwing success is proportional to the degree of good faith provided by people whom the rightwingers believe do not have a right to exist. When the liberals (anyway, not rightwingers) turn off the good faith, rightwingers can no longer function. They can’t sabotage the enemy by using their sense of reason against them. 

All you need to know is this propagandist represented propaganda. Stewart represented good faith. He wanted the Congress to pass a bill he believed would help sick veterans. The other opposed the bill but didn’t offer good reasons. He offered various and sundry lies.

At one point, Stewart had enough. 

“You’re a fucking troll!”

Parasites die
That’s not the good part. 

The good part came immediately afterward when the propagandist, who’s normally spleen-venting in his rage against the supposed injustice experienced by white Christian men, instantly struck a pose of calm and composure, as if appealing to Stewart’s sense of reason.

It’s usually the other way around.

Not this time.

That’s the point I want to make.

Rightwing success is proportional to the degree of good faith provided by people whom the rightwingers believe do not have a right to exist. When the liberals (anyway, not rightwingers) turn off the good faith, rightwingers can no longer function. They can’t sabotage the enemy by using their sense of reason against them. 

Parasites succeed when hosts don’t know what they’re doing.

Parasites die when hosts figure them out.

What does a parasite feel the moment he realizes that everything he needs to live has been taken away, that doom awaits and that he will leave nothing behind, not even corrupted memories of him?

For that, we can turn to Alex Jones. 

Alex Jones didn’t die
Jones is a conspiracy-monger and host of “Infowars.” He sells lies. He makes a lot of money selling lies. One of the lies was about the Sandy Hook massacre. He said – and kept saying for years – that the 20 schoolkids shot to pieces that day were fake. He said the 2012 calamity was staged to take guns from by “law-abiding citizens.”

Imagine you’re a parent of one of these 6-year-olds. Imagine the unimaginable pain. Then imagine a highly influential rightwing propagandist with millions of followers has over time convinced an estimated 75 million people that your dead kid isn’t a dead kid. 

Then imagine that some of these 75 million people don’t see you as a grieving parent experiencing unimaginable pain but a political operative who is conspiring to take away their freedoms. Then imagine them threatening you with death, forcing you to move and hire security – all the while experiencing unimaginable pain.

That’s what Jones did.

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He is a rich man as a result of his lies feeding off the hosts of good faith. Making as much as $800,000 a day, Jones transmogrified. He became the lies, right down to the individual cells of his body. If those lies were to be cut off from their host – if they were deprived of the democratic conditions in which to live – the shock might kill him.

Alex Jones didn’t die yesterday. 

But he came close.

Ready for death to take him
Jones was in Texas for a civil defamation trial involving two Sandy Hook families. He was on the stand to give testimony under oath when under cross-examination he was presented with his own text messages, thus proving in real time that he was lying to the jury.

How did opposing counsel get text messages that Jones had told the judge did not exist? His own attorney sent them, accidentally, a complete digital file of phone data for the last two years. When informed, his attorney said nothing, because the content itself was proof that Alex Jones and counsel had been lying the whole time.

Jones assumed he’d be given yet more good faith. He assumed he could take advantage of the good faith of normal people: of the court, the judge, the jury and even the Sandy Hook families. He assumed that the lies that enriched him could go on feeding off their host. 

Then every cell in his body seemed to die on impact with the truth.

He might yet die
As I said, Jones didn’t really die. That might come later. 

Within hours of his attorney’s mountain-range boo-boo, the select House committee investigating the J6 insurrection subpoenaed his data. Jones played a role in inciting Donald Trump’s paramilitaries into sacking and looting the US Capitol in a takeover attempt. 

“You know what nobody’s thought about yet? Mark Bankston asked the court on a hot mic. (He represents the Sandy Hook parents.) “What happens when that phone goes to law enforcement?”

Indeed, according to the Connecticut Post, which is covering the trial, Jones’ phone records include “intimate messages with Roger Stone,” Donald Trump’s pardoned advisor, as well as with Trump. Stone was the intermediary between Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 election. Trump later pardoned Stone for not flipping on him.

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The US Department of Justice is investigating the former president’s “actions” in connection with the J6 insurrection, according to the Post. Prosecutors have empaneled a grand jury for the questioning of key Trump officials, including Mike Pence, the former vice president.

What happens?

I think we know what happens.

“Please disregard”
Yesterday Jones said emphatically that he now believes the Sandy Hook massacre is “100 percent” real. But he also said that the federal government was involved in some kind of cover up of it. Jones has said in the past, after being sued by the plaintiffs, that he believed it was real. He’d then go back to the original conspiracy theory.

If there was any trust in Jones prior to yesterday’s spontaneous cell death, that trust is gone thanks to an attorney whose only follow-up to his boo-boo was a message asking Bankston to “please disregard.”

“Please disregard” is how we should treat all of these highly influential rightwing propagandists. They have no ideas or values of their own. Their only sense of morality derives from the reactions they get from the good-faith normal people whom they feed on. 

Parasites succeed when hosts don’t know what they’re doing.

Parasites die when hosts figure them out.

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