In her important new book about Sandy Hook and the noxious years-long crusade that conspiracy-monger Alex Jones orchestrated against the families of 20 first-graders slaughtered in their classrooms on a December morning, Elizabeth Williamson echoes the warning of a parent who lost a 6-year-old son that day. Not long after the 2012 mass shooting, the father of the youngest child to die predicted that the harassment he and other Sandy Hook families were enduring would become commonplace in the digital age.
He was right. The cancer has metastasized. In the decade since Sandy Hook, virtually every mass shooting has engendered similar online conspiracy absurdities. A through-line from the Connecticut mass shooting connects delusions about the COVID pandemic and false claims about the 2020 election. Amplified by an irresponsible, conspiracy-addled president, those claims ignited the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it,” Williamson writes, “has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.” Her book, “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth” was published last month.
Jones, the man who made millions denying and distorting, is in trouble these days. Last year the Austin-based founder of the media outlet Infowars and related companies lost two defamation lawsuits filed by 10 Sandy Hook families. Juror selection in his trial to determine how much he should pay the families was set to begin last week, but has been delayed by a last-minute bankruptcy filing and attempt to move the trial to federal court in Houston.
To think that Jones ranks among the best-known Texans is appalling. Aside from a power-mad Russian tyrant ravaging Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine a more despicable individual than the founder of a roiling media snake pit of absurd conspiracy concoctions. Listen to Infowars and you’ll learn that both the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 were U.S. government plots. You’ll be made to feel enraged by wild-eyed warnings about liberal-led schemes to confiscate America’s guns. You may come to appreciate Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule.
Although Jones doesn’t talk about Sandy Hook these days, the unspeakably horrible event was made to order for the Infowars formula: A deranged gunman didn’t really massacre 20 children and six staffers at a Connecticut elementary School. The kids are still alive! The grieving parents were crisis actors. The whole thing, fellow patriot, was just a “false-flag” operation, a staged government plot to confiscate your guns (most likely directed by the nation’s first Black president, the Muslim Barack Obama). To think that Jones ranks among the best-known Texans is appalling.
Infowars listeners by the thousands swallowed the Sandy Hook absurdity. As Williamson describes in her book, they launched a relentless campaign of harassment against victims’ families, calling and e-mailing, lobbing vile, obscenity-laden threats on social media and occasionally showing up in person. In Newtown, Conn., they vandalized memorials and stalked family members. One of the parents has felt compelled to move nearly 10 times since the shooting, Williamson writes; he lives in hiding to escape the crazed mob Jones unleashed.
The tough-talking Jones intersperses his radio rants with ads that have made him millions. He touts libido-enhancing, brain-building diet supplements, components for ghost guns, dried food to survive the End Times and other products meant to gull the gullible.
“Jones is not an ideologue,” Williamson writes. “He is a salesman and a diagnosed narcissist.” She quotes court documents in which he claimed that Infowars at its height brought in $50 million annually.
Jones claims that the lawsuits are the reason Infowars is bankrupt. In Chapter 11 filings with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, he says the company has up to $50,000 in assets and as much as $10 million in liabilities. Defending himself, he says, has cost him more than $10 million. Attorneys for the families accuse him of hiding millions of dollars in assets.
A bankruptcy filing is, of course, a conventional business strategy available to almost any company, even one as ignominious as Infowars, though Jones’ last-minute filing and attempt to have the case removed to federal court seems more like a stalling tactic. Under bankruptcy protection, he’d likely be able to continue broadcasting as he has been despite being banned from Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and Twitter. Across America, 100 radio stations still carry his broadcast.
The upcoming trial may or may not cleanse the air of Jones, but in the ongoing struggle to defend truth in our distressed society he’s almost an aside. His departure would make barely a ripple in the roiling sea of misinformation threatening the health and well-being of our democracy. De-platformed in 2018 and 2019, his influence has been diminished, but there’s no shortage of successors.
So what do we do?
Waiting for Congress to fix the problem, or even for the platforms to step up efforts to limit hate speech and misinformation, isn’t necessary. The solution — or a large part of it — may just be in our own hands. What if we as users, turned off the computer and talked to real people? Talk, and listen, in conversation with neighbors, fellow members of community organizations, book groups. Interact with anyone who might belong to the “exhausted majority,” a group “which is tired of fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise,” to quote social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University, author of a recent Atlantic article entitled “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
