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Editorial/OP-ED

Opinion | For Alex Jones, a Moment of Truth in a Flood of Lies

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In America’s clash between information and disinformation, the facts just won a rare round: Alex Jones has conceded that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, which he had repeatedly told millions of readers of his alt-right website Infowars was “a hoax” perpetrated by “actors,” was, in point of fact, “100 percent real.”

He told this truth on Wednesday on the witness stand in a defamation lawsuit, but only after lying multiple times under oath and only after failing to produce documents and to testify at earlier trials. He told this truth only after the plaintiffs’ lawyer revealed that Jones’s lawyer had inadvertently emailed him several hundred gigabytes of Jones’s cellphone records, suggesting that Jones had perjured himself on the stand, apparently lying even about his own lies and knowingly withholding crucial evidence in defamation lawsuits brought against him.

Jones told the truth only after being confronted face to face in the courtroom by Scarlett Lewis, one of the many grieving parents of children killed at Sandy Hook, who said of her son to Jones: “Jesse was real. I am a real mom.”

Jones was ordered to pay more than $4 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages to Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of Jesse Lewis, shot to death at age 6. Jesse was among the 20 young children and six educators slain that day at Sandy Hook. Heslin had wept on the stand as he described his son’s final moments.

This marks the first time Jones has been financially penalized for his yearslong disinformation campaign about Sandy Hook, a charade that helped earn him up to $800,000 a day. And he will no doubt pay more in at least two other cases pending. It was also the first time Jones acknowledged the truth of what happened in Newtown.

This vindication of the truth, though gratifying, raises three disquieting questions: First, does a single truth badgered out of a serial liar matter? Second, does Jones’s apology, elicited only with his sweaty back pinned against the wall, mean anything? And third, will his admission or his apology have any effect in a mediasphere in which a single lie can quickly metastasize into an intractable web of falsehoods?

These are depressing questions to have to ask, but they’re not difficult to answer.

The answer to the first question is that Jones’s reluctant admission of the truth doesn’t matter nearly enough. Whatever comfort it offers Lewis and Heslin, it cannot change the grotesque fact that for years, the family members of Sandy Hook’s victims became Jones’s victims, that parents suffering the unimaginable loss of a child were then subject to harassment, threatened to the point of needing to move to new homes and hire security. It cannot change the fact that an unscrupulous fabulist leveraged the weaknesses of our current media ecosystem — its fragmentation, lack of standards and polarization — to his financial advantage.

There was a certain small satisfaction in the fact that Jones was taken down by an accidental email — that technology, media and information decisively bit back at someone who had abused all three. But those leaked texts also made clear that Jones continues to spread disinformation, whether about the coronavirus pandemic or the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Even when the truth comes out, it can feel like an afterthought, and worse, irrelevant.

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“Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true,” the judge in the case, Maya Guerra Gamble, had to remind Jones as he dissembled from the stand. This wasn’t his radio show, she explained.

As for the second question, nothing about Jones’s apology merits forgiveness. He threw out a flimsy excuse, saying he’d suffered “a form of psychosis.” He emitted a meager note of contrition, a non-apology to outdo non-apologies, constructed in the “mistakes were made” patois of our times: “I unintentionally took part in things that did hurt these people’s feelings and I’m sorry for that.”

Unremorseful, mediated, bloodless. It was the one thing he said on the stand with total lack of conviction.

The third question — what kind of effect did the day’s events have on Alex Jones and the distorted world he’s helped build? — has an equally bleak answer. Only hours after the jury’s decision, Jones, who once described himself to The Times’s Elizabeth Williamson as a victim of a “media conspiracy,” skulked back onto his radio program — according to one metric, the 42nd most popular radio show/podcast in the country, just behind “Planet Money” and ahead of “Pod Save America.” There he disparaged the day’s legal proceedings as an “attack” by “globalists,” promising listeners, “I will go down fighting.” In fluent doublespeak, he called the decision “a major victory for truth.”

Which truth? Confronting Jones in court, Scarlett Lewis had said: “Truth, truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on. And we have to agree on that to have a civil society. Sandy Hook is a hard truth.”

Hundreds of school shootings later, what’s even harder is knowing how many people in this country have trouble knowing what truth even means.

Read the full article here

A journalist since 1994, he also founded DMGlobal Marketing & Public Relations. Glover has an extensive list of clients including corporations, non-profits, government agencies, politics, business owners, PR firms, and attorneys.

Editorial/OP-ED

Black Women Were Always at the Table — Stop Writing Them Out

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(BALTIMORE – August 8, 2025) – The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) recently dropped a timeline highlighting major milestones in U.S. women’s political history — from Seneca Falls to Kamala Harris. It’s long, detailed, and well-produced.

But let’s keep it real: it’s incomplete.
And this is personal for menot because I’m a woman.
I’m a man. A Black man.
And as a journalist, publisher, and student of history, I have a responsibility to call it like I see it.

What I see is a whole lot of celebration for white women’s progress — and not nearly enough credit given to the Black women who’ve been leading, building, organizing, and risking it all from day one.

Where’s Sojourner Truth, who stood up in 1851 and demanded the world answer: “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Where’s Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a Baltimore legend who confronted white women suffragists with truth and grace?
Where’s Ida B. Wells, who stared racism in the face and built her own organizations when others tried to silence her?

And how do you miss Frances Ellen Watkins Harper — a Baltimore-born powerhouse who was one of the first Black women to publish a book in the U.S. and who addressed the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention with a message that still resonates? Raised and educated in Baltimore at her uncle’s Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, Harper’s early years in this city shaped the moral clarity and courage that defined her national work. She’s not a side note. She’s a cornerstone.

You mean to tell me there’s a 48-year gap between the 19th Amendment and the first meaningful mention of a Black woman in elected office? That’s not an oversight. That’s historical malpractice.

Black women have always been in the fight.
They didn’t wait to be invited. They didn’t ask for permission. They created their own lanes — from the Black women’s clubs of the 19th century to the organizing of the Civil Rights Movement to the halls of Congress today.

And while others were patting themselves on the back, Black women were doing the work.

I’m not speaking for them — I’m standing beside them.
And I’ll use every mic I’m handed to make sure their names, their labor, and their leadership are never erased. Because Black women didn’t just join the movement.
They moved the movement. And BlackUSA.News will always make sure the world knows it.

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Editorial/OP-ED

Message to the World: We Are Not Trump

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(BALTIMORE – August 2, 2025) – Greetings. 你好. Namaste. Hola. Bonjour. Salaam alaikum. Nomoshkar. Olá. Shalom. Здравствуйте.

I come to you humbly and respectfully to say this: most of the people I know and live among are nothing like President Donald Trump.

From where I stand, I imagine much of the world watches in disbelief as this man — and those aligned with him — continue to dismantle civil rights protections, gut healthcare programs like Medicaid, and insult global allies without remorse. It’s disheartening, shameful, and dangerous.

And yet, here we are.

Even after years of evidence — his public misogyny, the racism, the cruelty, the lies — millions still voted for him. Only now, with democracy in crisis and global trust fractured, are some Americans having what we call a “come-to-Jesus moment.”

That’s what we call cognitive dissonance: when someone knows the truth but refuses to fully accept its consequences.

Around the world, cultures may differ, but many share a basic value: respect. It costs nothing — but means everything.

I felt that truth in my bones when I watched Vice President J.D. Vance berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the global press. I was sickened. The disrespect was not only unnecessary — it was classless.

I wasn’t raised like that. And neither were many of the good people I know across this country.

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To be honest, I think the group most manipulated in all this were white women voters. They knew who Trump was. The video clips, the criminal allegations, the “grab ‘em” tape — it was all out there. But still, many chose him over Kamala Harris, a competent and qualified leader.

Was it the trauma of having had a Black president for eight years that made the idea of a Black woman too much to bear? Maybe. But it’s worth asking.

America has never truly reconciled with its original sin: slavery and the structural racism that followed. And now we have a president who canceled MLK Day, who mocked a teenage climate activist on the world stage, and whose wife often appears unwilling to even fake a smile beside him.

Let us not forget: this is the man who incited a violent insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

Dear world, please know this: America is better than what you’re seeing right now.

As my mother always said, “Nobody is better than you, and you are no better than anyone else.” That’s the kind of America I believe in — not one built on ego and profit, but on humility and shared dignity.

Still, we live in a society where your bank account defines your worth, where kindness is seasonal, and where too often, decency gets buried under division.

But where I come from — Baltimore — we still learn respect. At home, in the streets, in school. You give it, you get it. You don’t give it, you learn the hard way.

That’s the American spirit I stand for. That’s the America I want the world to know.

So no, we are not all like Trump. And many of us are doing everything we can to keep our country from falling deeper into that abyss.

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Wishing you peace in the midst of this storm.

‘Til next time,
Doni Glover

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Editorial/OP-ED

The Rebirth of BlackUSA.News

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(BALTIMORE – August 2, 2025) – In December 2020, right in the thick of COVID, everything was turned upside down. Interviewing people became nearly impossible — folks weren’t coming outside, Fauci was in everyone’s ear, and Trump was out here talking about drinking bleach. It was chaos.

But through the madness, we found a way forward. We embraced streaming.

Special thanks to Peggy Morris of Sisters4Sisters Network. She introduced me to StreamYard.com, and the rest is history. That connection helped birth BlackUSA.News — the national arm of BMORENews.com. It wasn’t the first time Peggy and her network showed up for us, and it likely won’t be the last.

From there, the movement grew.

On the West Coast, De’Von Walker and Troy Rawlings have been pillars. Troy — a Baltimore native — brings heat from Los Angeles, while De’Von’s Black Wall Street Board Game reminds us of Monopoly with a mission: to uplift Black-owned businesses.

In Oakland, Doug Blacksher has been a home-run-hitting host. His show consistently breaks reach records, diving deep into politics and business — his two favorite lanes.

Up in New York, our go-to is Tasemere Gathers of The DM Firm. She’s solid, dependable, and visionary. And we’d be remiss not to shout out Walter Edwards, Regina Smith, and Vito Jones in Harlem, as well as Makonen of the Harlem Business Alliance — each of them pushing the needle forward.

In Atlanta, Robert Scott and Bou Kahn have not only supported the news but have helped us successfully host the Joe Manns Black Wall Street Awards over the years.

And then there’s Lee Vaughan, our National President. Thanks to Lee, we’ve expanded from 6 to 9 cities — adding Mobile, Las Vegas, and Tulsa to the fold. One of his honorees? None other than D.L. Hughley.

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Let me not forget Dr. Eric Kelly, a brilliant connector introduced to us by the illustrious Marsha Jews, our resident anchor and a national treasure.

We stream live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
This is our rebirth.
This is BlackUSA.News.
Check us out — and spread the word.

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