Welcome back to Is That a Fact? I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Today we bring you a special two-part episode marking the 10^th anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.

On that day, unimaginably, 20 first-graders and six adults were brutally murdered at the hands of a 20-year-old gunman. And then, as the families of the victims grappled with the horror of their loss, they faced yet another unimaginable blow – a mass conspiracy theory claiming the shooting was a “false-flag” operation staged by the government to restrict the freedom of gun owners and promote gun control.

These conspiracists – or “hoaxers,” some call them – were largely operating on the fringes of society back then. But in the 10 years since the Sandy Hook tragedy, their disproven theories have been driving dangerously close to the mainstream.

Leading the hoard is the wildly popular alt-right radio host Alex Jones, who began denying the shooting within hours of its occurrence. Jones has since lost three lawsuits by victims’ family members who were harassed for years by his disciples, who believed the parents were actors in the Sandy Hook Hoax. Jones has been ordered to pay almost $1.5 billion in damages with one more trial outstanding.

To help us make sense of this incomprehensible need some people have to deny reality and the lucrative market that drives it, we turn to New York Times feature writer Elizabeth Williamson, author of “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and The Battle for Truth.” This is part one in our two-part episode “Sandy Hook at 10: Tragedy, conspiracy theories and justice.”

Thank you for joining us today, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Williamson:

I’m delighted to do it.

Darragh Worland:

You devote a fair amount of time in the beginning of your book, offering a behind the scenes look at what the hours and days leading up to and then immediately after the shooting were like for the families and the victims.

Elizabeth Williamson:

Yes.

Darragh Worland:

Could you tell us why that was so important to you?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Absolutely. So, I felt like it was very important to establish the baseline truth of what happened. And when I went through that, there are obviously many sources for that material. I looked at probably most of them, you know, meaning the official investigation done by the state and the state police, and I had spoken with Bill Cario, who was Connecticut’s state police sergeant at the time and was one of the first law enforcement officers into the school. I looked at his reports, the ones that I read were unredacted and I spoke with Bill himself. And I felt like those reports were not only an official source from an eyewitness, but they were also very intimate in their way. And because I had gotten to know Bill, I knew the spirit in which he conveyed those official reports.

Darragh Worland:

And then also, you spend a fair amount of time on the families and what they were doing leading up to and then immediately after and waiting to find out news of their children’s fates. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Elizabeth Williamson:

So those recollections, obviously I spoke with the family members themselves, but I also reviewed what they had said closer to the time of the tragedy. What they recalled immediately afterward, what they had written themselves in some cases about the aftermath of the shooting and their waiting in the firehouse near the school for news. And I put that all together and synthesized that and ran that past them, just to be sure that everything was accurate. One of the things that happens with trauma, as all the family members told me, was that recollections can be blurry and that peoples’ memory of such an intensely traumatic time can be obliterated in some cases, or at least for periods time. So, it was important to me to assemble not only their recollections nearly 10 years later, but also what they had said in the moment or shortly thereafter and put that all together to provide as clear and as nuanced a picture as possible.

Darragh Worland:

So, when Jones first hears about the Sandy Hook shooting, he doesn’t seem to doubt that it’s real. And then, in your book, you suggest that he pivots because – this is not word for word, but you write — but you suggest in his mind with so many young children murdered, the only valid counter-argument to make against gun control was to claim that the shooting never really happened and that it was a false flag event and that the children who were murdered never really existed. So that might seem odd or unlikely to some listeners, can you unpack what you’re arguing here about this pivot?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Alex Jones was a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, so one of the things that he said just going in, just before anyone knew the severity or the death toll in this shooting, was that “This’ll be an excuse for the left to introduce more gun control measures.” So even before he knew, you know, how bad this really was, he was saying that. What he was doing in the beginning was his typical Second Amendment advocacy and his prediction, which turned out to be true, that there would be a push for more stringent gun legislation in the aftermath of Sandy Hook.

And then once he realized that this was an enormous toll and that this shooting would be historic in its proportions and in the number of people killed here, and the youth of the victims, he felt like if he’s going to fight back against, you know, any kind of gun control measures, what he’s [going to] have to do is cast this as a hoax, that it would not only be useful to him but maybe necessary to say “they trumped this up,” et cetera, et cetera, because it was such a horrific shooting that he knew there would be a very legitimate push for additional gun legislation in the aftermath and that that would gain a big momentum. And I think he just felt like, “Hmm, what can I do to push back against this?” And that was one of the reasons, I won’t say it was the only reason, but I- I feel like that fed into the denial that came after.

Darragh Worland:

Yeah, that the public response, the public horror would be so dramatic. So, just going back to the term “false-flag?”  Can you just sort of enlighten our listeners who may not be as familiar with the term and- and sort of the origins of it?

Elizabeth Williamson:

It’s a maritime term, it comes from, you know, ships that would venture close enough to another ship by flying a flag of either that ship that they wanted to attack, or an ally and then at the last moment swap out that flag and attack. So “false-flag” refers to that tactic in, you know, naval battle or warfare. In this context, a “false-flag” operation is a government pretext (sic) for doing something else. (In) this instance, staging a mass shooting as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms. And so that was the “false-flag” operation. Now we see that term being used much more frequently than back in 2012 when Jones was using it to describe Sandy Hook. And many other people besides him, of course.

Darragh Worland:

Does it also imply a cynicism or suspicion of the government as well, if you’re thinking that the government would stage something like this?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Absolutely. Many of the theories that we encounter in the decade since Sandy Hook have at their root, a deep distrust and suspicion of government.

Darragh Worland:

And I think that’ll probably come up again later in our conversation. You know, your book describes two different kinds of antagonists who propagate the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory. There’s the profiteers and deluded people, as you call them. And I guess you could argue that Jones is both, but he’s definitely a profiteer, he’s made a lot of money off of conspiracy theories. And in fact, you’ve referred to his business strategy as “genius.” Can you tell us, how does he make money?

Elizabeth Williamson:

What Alex Jones does is he sells products on his conspiracy-laden broadcasts that cater to the fears and paranoia of his audience. So, he sells survivalist gear and doomsday-prepper merchandise – you know, dried food, things to stock your shelter if you’re preparing for the end of times or for a full-on government take over. He sells diet supplements, that’s probably his most profitable product line. Diet supplements and quack cures for people who distrust traditional medicine and who think that the government is trying to poison you. Iodine drops for people who think there’s radiation in the air, water and air filters for people who think the government is putting harmful chemicals into your water supply and into the air.

He stokes all of these fears and then he’s offering a product as a solution. So, you know, he is a coronavirus denier, he’s an anti-vaxxer, you know, he was busted by the government for selling quack cures for coronavirus during the pandemic. And what we’ve seen in the aftermath of these lawsuits, is that he stokes product sales not only by circulating theories that would inspire people to buy these products, but he also is stoking fears now that the government in the ultimate plot, is aiming to silence him and shut him down and the only way to help him survive and fight back legally is by stepping up your purchases of these products and by out and out donating to him. So, he does these sort of money- bomb donation drives as well.

Darragh Worland:

So, he can almost turn any argument against him in his favor?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Yeah, he is sort of the ultimate huckster. His father, who is very involved in the business and has gotten him into the diet supplements business, has testified under oath in an unrelated court case, that when Alex Jones gets behind a certain product, sales of that product skyrocket. He is an undeniably good salesman.

Darragh Worland:

So, who’s his audience? Who is lapping this all up?

Elizabeth Williamson:

So, his audience are people who have a deep distrust of government, of traditional medicine, of established science. Of course, the government has lied to us in the past, there have been harmful conspiracies against citizens and against individual groups that the government was behind. No one is denying that, but what happens among people in Alex Jones’ most committed audience, is that they think the government is lying to them every time or that they’re political enemies are forever engaged in plans to deprive them of their rights, of their freedoms, of all the things that they hold dear as Americans. And that it happens in almost every instance, virtually every instance. And that’s where things tip a little bit off the rails.

There’s a strong group cohesion among those individuals. You know, this is something where they get a lot out of believing in a theory like Sandy Hook. They coalesce online, they find each other, they band together, they become friendly. Conspiracy theorists, before social media, tended to be somewhat isolated people. They were the person who cornered you at the family reunion, or the person who handed you a flier on the street or on the subway. And now these individuals find each other online and they develop communities.

And that’s why it’s really hard to peel them away from these theories once they embrace them, because they’re getting a lot more out of it. Once they embrace these and they find the community that coalesces around them, you’re not just asking them to give up a set of facts, you’re actually asking them to give up an identity that they’ve formed and a group and a community that they’ve joined. You have individuals who have been able to reinvent themselves from person-with-a-workaday job, just like any of us, turn themselves into a sort of high-profile … you know, “citizen journalist,” or “an investigator” or author of a book of these false facts. So, they’re really, really reluctant to give these theories up once they’ve taken hold.

Darragh Worland:

Wow, that’s really interesting, that whole identifying so completely with their conspiracist identity, yeah.

Elizabeth Williamson:

Yeah, and you can hear it in Alex Jones’ pitch. It’s always, “They are doing this, they will take your rights, they want to silence you, they want to shut me up.” It’s them, them, them and “you and I are in league against them.” And that’s a really important part of his pitch. “I’m gonna help you fight back, I’m gonna help you defeat the plot, I’m gonna help you uncover them, I’m gonna blow this coverup wide open. It’s you and me together.” And that is part of the call to action that in this case has been so insanely harmful to these families. “We have to investigate this; you need to go out and find out what’s happening.” You know, he deputizes his audience to fight back and, in the case of Sandy Hook, (his audience) did that with confrontation and with threats of violence.

Darragh Worland:

Coming back to the parent, the first significant target of the Sandy Hook conspiracists was Robby Parker, whose daughter, Emilie, was killed in the shooting. He was the first to speak to the media and he was the first to be accused, I believe, of being a crisis actor. Can you describe why he was targeted and how?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Sure. Robbie didn’t know this at the time, but he became the first Sandy Hook relative to speak publicly after the shooting. And he’s probably the most unlikely person to step forward and do this because his family’s very private. As many people would, they wanted to grieve privately and just have their family and friends there. But what started to happen was they had people back in Utah where they had great number of family and friends saying, “We’re being contacted by the media.” He had two old friends who had set up a Facebook page to try and raise money for Emilie’s burial back in Utah. The members of the media, the mainstream media, were contacting these friends and saying, “Can you speak to us? Can we interview you about Emilie and her life and her family?”

Robbie and Alissa Parker, Emilie’s parents, decided no, we really want anything that’s said about Emilie and her life to come from us and to come from us directly. And the pressure on the family members and friends was becoming so great, that Robbie told one of these friends, “Look, I will meet a reporter from an affiliate of one of these networks and I will speak about Emilie and her life. And then you can broadcast that back in Utah so that people who are concerned about us and know us will know more about her and her life, and how we are, et cetera.”

So, he agreed to meet this single reporter, he thought, in front of his church in Newtown and they set up a lectern outdoors and when he arrived, he realized word had spread and again, he was the first family member to speak publicly, didn’t know that.

Darragh Worland:

And what did he find when he arrived?

Elizabeth Williamson:

There was a sea of cameras and reporters and so he came out of the church, stepped to the lectern and just stunned by all the lights and the cameras and people placing microphones on the lectern. He made a comment to one of his family members who had come to back him up and he gave a kind of shocked, half laugh and said, “Start,” as he stepped to the lectern.

And then he delivered what was just a wrenching and very emotional recollection of Emilie and who she was as a sister and as a student, and as a budding artist. And, you know, it was just a very heartfelt and deep, really searing recollection of who she was. And he also, you know, very tellingly about the Parkers, expressed compassion for the family of the gunman.

Darragh Worland:

That’s remarkable.

Elizabeth Williamson:

But none of this appeared on Info Wars. What Alex Jones did, was immediately after this press conference, it’s emerged in the years since, he seized on this split second in which Robbie Parker smiled and gave a kind of laugh as he stepped to the lectern and said that that was disgusting, that he was an actor and that that split second was proof that he had been in on the plot and that the whole thing was fake. And Jones played this split-second clip over and over and over again. And there’s no evidence that he ever even saw the rest of the video, which lasted many minutes. It was just this, and it was a close up of Robbie’s face, so he was identifiable, recognizable. He played it over and over again for years. He repeatedly called him an actor, people picked this up, they made memes out of it, they circulated it, they printed fliers with it. They put it in videos. They put it on their own websites. And so, he kind of became over time sort of the face of this idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax.

Darragh Worland:

It’s kind of unimaginable and I think this was like, what, within 24 or 48 hours after the tragedy happened?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Yes, it was the night after Emilie’s death, so it was Saturday evening. It was the 15th and the shooting took place on the 14th of December.

Darragh Worland:

So, you can imagine just the awkwardness and the nerves of speaking in front of the media, having no media training. Being somebody with no experience speaking in front of the media and then to home in on this one second of the video. So, the whole concept of the crisis actor became this fascination with Jones’ followers, particularly after he had this so-called expert named James Tracy, who was shockingly, a journalism professor from a university in Boca Raton, on Info Wars. And then traffic to a site called crisisactors.org soared after he was on Info Wars. Can you just describe this whole episode for our listeners?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Sure. So, there was an organization that, and I won’t, you know, name them because they’ve also been targeted, but their actual business was to supply individuals who would help a first responder group, whether they were EMTs, or police, or firefighters. If they were doing a practice drill of how would you respond to a mass casualty event, this organization would supply individuals who could portray victims so that they could practice triage and evacuation and things like that. The term “crisis actors” came from actually something completely unrelated, but the idea that these individuals were “crisis actors” kind of morphed into what people accused the Sandy Hook families of being.

But that term — James Tracy, Florida Atlantic University journalism professor at the time – (he) kind of coined the term “crisis actors” in this context. And it was the first widespread use of the term “crisis actors” to describe, you know, this sort of theorizing that goes on in the aftermath of a mass shooting. You mentioned, Darragh, that a lot of these family members, they had never talked to a reporter before this tragedy that took their children and their loved ones. Even if it weren’t that kind of a scenario, it would’ve been obviously awkward and difficult to have your first televised interview even if it were under happy circumstances. So, the idea that people picked apart the way these individuals behaved when a microphone was thrust in their face or when they were for the first time speaking with a known television personality is particularly cruel.

You know, it was that they weren’t eloquent enough, or they were too eloquent, those who found words. Or they wouldn’t be that well put together if they were really grieving. Or they looked too old to be parents, or whatever it was, you know, just picking apart these grieving family members’ words — their appearances, their demeanor, their age, every aspect. It’s really unconscionably cruel, but people who were deluded like this believed that all of those things were so-called clues to the fact that this was fake.

Darragh Worland:

Yeah, I think the word “cruel” really sums it up. What are the tactics the conspiracists used to harass families of Sandy Hook shooting victims?

Elizabeth Williamson:

In the beginning, it was largely online. They would get onto the family members’ social media pages and level accusations there and abuse them there. They fanned out to anyone who was a friend, who might have been setting up a memorial, a Facebook page, for example. Or, like I mentioned, two friends of Robbie Parker’s who were trying to raise money for Emilie’s funeral back in Utah, they were attacking them. The abuse on that got so bad – and that was not only a fundraising page, it was a page for people who knew the family to post their recollections of Emilie, to offer their condolences and their thoughts and to let them know that they were thinking about them. And it emerged during the latest damages trial. That page was a lifeline like no other for Robbie in particular, who could just go on there and read those messages. So, these hoaxers invaded that page with their insults and their false accusations and their attacks.

So that was kind of how it started. Then it fanned out. They began showing up in Newtown. There was one in particular – conspiracy theorist, Wolfgang Halbig – made some two-dozen trips to Newtown. He submitted just a flurry, a blizzard of public records requests that generated ever more requests (be)cause he was never satisfied with the material he received and anything that wasn’t in the possession of the people that he was FOIA-ing was more proof that there was a cover up or a plot. People began following the family members on the street, they looked in their windows, they dug through their trash, they photographed them with their phones. They disrupted memorial events, a 5K run in memory of Vicky Soto, one of the first-grade teachers who died, waving photographs at the family members and saying, “This never happened. Explain this photo.”

And it escalated. There was one individual who made several death threats against the Pozner family. She was eventually apprehended, and she went to prison for that. There were letters that people received with death threats, rape threats. And they came to these individuals’ homes, which was really terrifying because it meant that whoever was sending them – they were always anonymous of course – knew where they lived. And then there were people who sent messages with images of actual murdered children, saying, “You’re a liar. You’ve never really seen a murdered child. So here you go.” There were people who said they had desecrated the children’s graves or that they wanted to dig them up and prove that they hadn’t died.

So, it was a pretty long list of torment, and it went on for years.

Darragh Worland:

Yeah, just hearing it all again, it’s just truly unimaginable. And how did the parents react to this harassment, and can you share specific anecdotes?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Sure. Initially, the prevailing sentiment among the family members was what many of us think. “Don’t feed the trolls and they’ll go away if we can ignore this.” And some people just didn’t pay attention to it (be)cause they just simply … they were grieving. They just didn’t have the bandwidth, getting out of bed was hard. So, you know, pushing back against some of this material or these individuals just wasn’t even on the radar for them. Others, early on tried to confront them directly. But mostly, it became “let’s just not dignify this with a response,” which is certainly understandable.

But Lenny Pozner took a different approach from the beginning. He had a tech background; he knew about the algorithms that drove this material to so many people. He knew how big the spread was, how deep this went. And he also figured, and he was right, that this was a foundational story of how disinformation and false narratives travel in society. He never saw this as a one-off by people who were opposed to gun control measures or even people who were somehow personally scandalized by this particular tragedy. He saw this as emblematic of a new development in our culture and in our society and he was absolutely right.

Darragh Worland:

In Part 2, we’ll elaborate on this by speaking to Pozner directly about his fight to preserve his son Noah’s honor from the hoaxers. Now back to our interview with Williamson.

Darragh Worland:

Conspiracy theory proponents often refer to, this is such a common phrase you hear, doing their own research. And another thing they say and Jones himself has said it, is oh, we’re just asking questions. How does this compare to the work journalists like you do?

Elizabeth Williamson:

When you’re doing real journalism, the idea is to do as much research as you can, try and understand a situation. If it’s a contested situation, try and understand what people on all sides of that debate are saying and to talk with people on all sides of that debate, to better understand not only the facts of the case, but the emotions around it. But if you are a conspiracy researcher with a point of view and you are steadfastly believing something, you know, contrary to the facts, you will ignore all facts that don’t feed into your narrative, and you will either ignore or attack all individuals who espouse a narrative at odds with your own.

So, it’s a distortion of the journalistic process and it’s also a kind of group think … I had a long conversation with one of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists about this. I said, “You know, if at the New York Times, I wrote a story where I put out the birth dates of the victims, their home addresses, their family members’ names, any personal information I could glean from the Internet and I said, ‘I’m giving you these people’s addresses because I think their homes were given to them for free because they participated in this government plot. I’m using a faulty property sales information database. I don’t know what this means, but here it is. I’m throwing it all out here, you all decide. I welcome your thoughts, tell me if you agree, tell me if you don’t, but here’s what I found, and doesn’t this look suspicious?’ We would be sued, and rightfully so.”

But that’s what happens with these conspiracy theorists. They throw everything they can out there, they put their plot out there, everybody embroiders it. And anybody who says, “Well, wait a minute. Over here are some actual facts from a pretty reliable source,” they attack them. So obviously, that’s not journalism and, um, (laughs) you know, individuals who call themselves “citizen journalists” who engage in this are just sort of bastardizing the term.

Darragh Worland:

In your author’s note, you mention that you conducted over 400 interviews and that you reviewed more than 10,000 pages of transcripts and documents of various kinds in order to complete the book. Can you talk a little bit about that too and the extensiveness of what you were doing compared to what a conspiracy theorist is doing.

Elizabeth Williamson:

Sure, and here I (want to) pause and just give enormous credit to the people who helped me in that endeavor, including Lenny Pozner, whose son, Noah Pozner, is the youngest Sandy Hook victim. (H)e started an organization called The Honor Network, in which he has devoted his life to pushing back not only against the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists and that conspiracy theory as it travels on social media, but to protecting people who are subject to all types of online abuse and stalking.

So, members of his organization had volunteers. There’s one in particular I have in my mind … a man named Charles Fry, who went by the sort of [pseudonym] C.W. Wade when he was fighting back against the conspiracy theorists. You know, they compiled beyond what was available through public sources like the police and the state’s attorney’s office and the Sandy Hook advisory commission that was convened by the governor in the aftermath … all of those records. They also had police reports about activities that the hoaxers were engaging in, videos that they had found online in which they would debunk using pages and pages of official sourced material.

So obviously when you’re writing a book about a battle for truth, you gotta (laughs) find as many truthful sources as you can. And they were just invaluable for some of the more obscure material, particularly things like … there was one conspiracy theorist who, you know, seized on this idea that she- she had the false, the deluded idea that no one had hired anyone to clean up the school in the aftermath of this horrific carnage. (laughs) That was a page that was readily available in the voluminous records compiled in the official investigation. You know, here was the name of the organization that did this, here was a police report of exactly how many boxes of material and furniture and carpeting and everything that was torn out of the school. Where it was taken under guard. They were very nervous that these individuals would take things from the school. That’s a kind of macabre, you know, murder memorabilia or “proof” of something or other.

But the records were all right there and I called the company. They verified for me, yes indeed, that that was the work we did in the aftermath of the shooting. And yes, that police report is correct and that’s what we removed. And that would be real research. When I presented this woman who was a conspiracy theorist about this with that, she paused for a minute and was like, “well, where are the receipts?” So, there’s never, you know, enough. But I tried in reviewing that much material to show that of course, definitive records exist. And so (laughs) one of the goals other than just researching the book, was to just show that, yes, this is findable and doable and, you know, these theories are easily disproven.

Darragh Worland:

You cite a statistic in your book that by 2020 one-fifth of Americans believed that every school shooting that occurred in the country was fake. Now that’s a stunning statistic and I know this was research that was done by one professor. I don’t know if it was peer-reviewed and how extensive the study was. Maybe you can speak to that and how accurate this research is.

Elizabeth Williamson:

That number has been borne out by multiple studies. You mentioned Joe Ushinski, who has, done some fantastic work researching conspiracy theories and the people who believe them, particularly political ones like those around Sandy Hook. He just had researchers in the field after Uvalde to see if that was still holding true and it was nearly 20% of Americans believe that every high-profile mass shooting was staged, usually by the government.

So yeah, there was a Fairleigh Dickenson University right after Sandy Hook … actually, it was closer to a quarter of Americans believe that Sandy Hook was either possibly or probably staged. And then over time this has just sort of solidified. Nearly one-fifth of Americans have coalesced around this view that every major mass shooting is a government false-flag.

Darragh Worland (35:53):

I mean, my mouth is gaping. And does this cut across party lines?

Elizabeth Williamson:

I do think … the work that I’ve read has said that Republicans are more likely to embrace this. But I think this is really a good opportunity to say that conspiracism is never and never has been confined to one view, one party, one position on the political spectrum. This goes to, as we talked about earlier, a social identity that people get. It goes to a mindset, you know, and it goes to individual personality traits that make individual people through their own psyche and experience more susceptible to conspiracy theories and more conspiracy minded in general.

Darragh Worland:

How much do we think we can trace back to Jones the fact that one-fifth or potentially one quarter of the country is now denying that these mass shootings are taking place?

Elizabeth Williamson:

So, if you look at our pandemic of disinformation in this country, and you do contact tracing, you’ll get back to Info Wars because Alex Jones has an audience of tens of millions of individuals who, you know, are very devoted and very loyal to him, and are also very activist in their approach because that’s part of his schtick is the call to action. So, I don’t think you could reliably say “X percentage of these people got this from Info Wars,” but it is telling just sort of anecdotally how many of these individuals mention something about Alex Jones or, when speaking about the sentencing of this woman, Lucy Richards, who was making death threats against Lenny Pozner and his family, she was banned from watching Info Wars as a condition of her home release. These people cite Info Wars, they verbatim repeat some of what Alex Jones has said in his broadcasts and he just has a really enormous reach. So, he is a sort of typhoid Mary of the Sandy Hook hoax.

Darragh Worland:

That’s a (laughs) really interesting metaphor. I can appreciate that.

Elizabeth Williamson:

(laughs)

Darragh Worland:

So, in your book, you argue that in 2020 Trump adopted Jones’ tactics when he lost re-election. Can you explain for our listeners?

Elizabeth Williamson:

Sure, it’s interesting and it isn’t talked about very much the role that Alex Jones played in sort of spreading the 2020 election conspiracy, that the presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden’s allies, delivered to Joe Biden and that votes were either falsified, lost, or otherwise not counted.

Alex Jones, back in 2016 when there was an effort to during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, to do a floor vote denying the nomination to Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Roger Stone started a Stop the Steal campaign then and were talking about how people would be turning out into the streets and we will whip up a protest, et cetera, et cetera.

Alex Jones turned up, you know, after the election. They were present at state capitals doing Stop the Steal rallies and on the day that Donald Trump issued his call to action by saying, “Be there, will be wild on January 6th at the Capitol,” Jones immediately picked up on that, did a broadcast saying that this was a 1776 moment and that people better get themselves to the Capitol.

So, he played a big role in getting people to the Capitol. He was not inside the Capitol, he broadcast that day live from Washington. A number of his past, current, and associated individuals (laughs) were inside the Capitol, including an Info Wars cameraman who marched into the Capitol following the mob, advertising Info Wars merchandise on the way and broadcast live the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by an officer inside as she was trying to break into the speaker’s lobby inside the Capitol. Joe Biggs, a former Info Wars employee, now with the Proud Boys, was there. And Alex Jones helped to raise money for then-President Trump’s speech on the Ellipse right before people marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol.

So, he was sort of here, there and everywhere. The night before he did a Stop the Steal rally, he was at the Willard Hotel when allies of Donald Trump were meeting and talking about these events. So, his presence is all around. He wasn’t inside the Capitol himself, but both the Justice Department and the January 6th House Select Committee are taking a look at the role he played, in getting people there, in raising money for events around the January 6th insurrection and what he knew about what took place that day.

Darragh Worland:

Wow so there really is a through line going directly from Sandy Hook to the steps of the Capitol and Alex Jones is directly connected. He is that through line.

Elizabeth Williamson:

Yeah, I mean, he’s really, to me, he’s emblematic and sort of personifies what has happened in our broader public discourse. You know, the sort of erosion of truth, the idea that sort of emerged in our public discourse that you can discard or deny facts that don’t support your point of view. You can question major events by just saying they didn’t happen. Or you can push alternate theories and just see how many people will embrace them and the answer is a surprising and frightening number.

So yeah, he has been at the front of and pushing all of the highest profile delusions in the decade since Sandy Hook. Whether it’s Sandy Hook and other mass shooting denials, coronavirus myths and quack cures, the great replacement theory that led to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia … Pizzagate, you know, it was an Info Wars video that brought a gunman to a Washington pizzeria, shooting a rifle inside a restaurant full of kids, not very far from where I live. Finally, the 2020 election conspiracies that brought the mob to the Capitol. So yes, he has been there every stop along our descent as a nation down the rabbit hole.

Darragh Worland:

So, after all the context setting and the reporting that you’ve done, how do you feel about the battle for truth? Would you say we’re winning or losing? What’s the prognosis?

Elizabeth Williamson:

So, as I say in my book, so much of this just depends on how these stories are received. We owe the Sandy Hook families a debt of gratitude because they used their position as survivors of one of our most horrific public tragedies to advocate for truth and take back not only their own story of what happened, but to point out that this is something that’s happening to mass shooting survivors, vulnerable people, but it doesn’t only affect them, that it’s starting to erode the basis for our democracy, that they’ve lent their voices to this.

I am really encouraged by how many people, people like yourselves and your organization, are speaking about this and talking about things like news literacy as potential solutions to this problem. There are a great many wonderful minds being put to work on the spread of disinformation in our discourse and in our society. It’s not something that was being spoken about when it first started to gain steam after Sandy Hook and now it’s very much in the forefront of peoples’ minds and that will lead to policy solutions, more pressure being put on social media platforms that have done precious little in stemming the flow of this disinformation, harmful, violent conspiracy theories.

I do think that we’re having a public reckoning with this that wasn’t in the offing 10 years ago. And I think people like Lenny Pozner and the Sandy Hook families who fought Alex Jones and the January 6th Committee and people who aren’t going to let this pass are doing a tremendous public service because they’re lending their voice, not only to let us know it’s happening here, but also that there really needs to be more solutions devised for this because it’s really becoming a threat to the foundation of our country.

Darragh Worland:

Before we go, I’d like to leave you with this thought. Toward the end of her book, Williamson hits on a truth that could just as easily turned any one of us into a hoaxer. She writes, and I quote, “None of us wants to believe it could have been our loved ones there as the gunman arrived at the school in Sandy Hook, or the night club in Orlando, the outdoor concert in Las Vegas or the Walmart in El Paso.” And it’s true. While reading her book, I found myself – a parent to twin five-year-olds – constantly fighting the urge to turn away for that very reason, as though bearing witness could somehow make that possibility more real. “In that sense,” she continues, “we are all deniers.” But the best thing we can do for those who have experienced such a tragic loss in real life is acknowledge their trauma and bear witness to their pain. Because if they can withstand it, so, too, can we. In fact, that’s the least we can do.

And that’s exactly what we’ll do in part two of Sandy Hook at 10: Tragedy, conspiracy theories and justice … we’ll speak with Lenny Pozner, whose six-year old son Noah was the youngest of the first-graders killed on December 14, 2012, Williamson told us Pozner is her hero and if you stay with us and bear with us, you’ll understand why.

Is That a Fact? is a production of the News Literacy Project, a non-partisan education non-profit building a national movement to create a more news-literate America. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb. Our editor is Timothy Cramer and our theme music is by Eryn Bush. To hear more about the News Literacy Project, go to newslit.org.