Sandy Hook, page 41
Pattis typed, the ellipsis bubble pulsing on the screen.
“The cynic in me thinks: Fifty Shades of Victimhood. Posner [sic] claims PTSD over a whacky book?
“I want that appeal.”
27
In mid-March 2019, a year after Lenny and Neil filed their lawsuits, Mark Bankston deposed Jones in Texas. Farrar & Ball posted the videotaped exchange on—where else?—YouTube. Dressed in an olive-drab polo shirt and sporting a close-cropped beard, Jones planted his elbows on a table set against a marbled-gray backdrop. From the time he took his seat, Jones alternated between bemused cooperation and adolescent defiance, widening his eyes theatrically, sighing heavily, and audibly cracking his neck during breaks between questions.
Lenny had sued Jim Fetzer and won in less than a year, a remarkable achievement. But suing Alex Jones had presented a far more difficult challenge. By mid-2021 the Sandy Hook families’ lawsuits against Jones in Texas and Connecticut had consumed more than three years, with a trial date for any of them likely another year away. Jones had deep pockets and employed a revolving cast of nationally known free-speech absolutists, culture warriors, and publicity seekers, supplemented by a shifting cast of second-string lawyers.
More than five hundred thousand people viewed Jones’s three-hour deposition video, a purgative accounting of his workaday dishonesty, and his high-wire struggle to defend it under oath without perjuring himself. Claiming not to know even the date of the shooting, Jones questioned the facts in front of him and his questioner’s motives, seeking to lure Bankston into his gravity-free realm where theater supplants truth. But this was Bankston’s turf, and for the most part, the lawyer tethered Jones to it.
Space prevents me from presenting Jones’s depositions in their entirety. But Farrar & Ball posted the full versions of all of Jones’s depositions and those of his associates, including Rob Dew and Paul Joseph Watson, to its YouTube channel.[1] Together they provide an aerial tour of America’s scorched, post-truth landscape.
“One of the things that you’ve tried to make clear is that you’re not the one who started the theory that Sandy Hook was a false flag, correct?” Bankston asked Jones, who answered, “Yes.”[2]
Bankston played a ninety-second montage of Jones’s remarks during his December 14, 2012, broadcast, which Infowars later posted under the header “Connecticut School Massacre Looks like False Flag Says [sic] Witnesses.”
“You’ve heard me say look for a big mass shooting at schools,” Jones said in the clip. “You’ve heard me. We’ve gotta find the clips. The last two months I’ve probably said it twenty times.”
In another clip Infowars flashed an early, incorrect account of the shooting from the U.K.’s Daily Mail on the screen, while Jones said, “And that is an inside job right there, either way you cut it.”
In the final clip Jones says: “Now that Obama’s coming in with gun control, magically these shootings are popping up. People gotta find the clips the last two months! I said they are launching attacks, they are getting ready. I can see them warming up with Obama. They’ve got a bigger majority in the Congress now, in the Senate. They are going to come after our guns. Look for mass shootings. And then magically it happens. They are coming, they are coming, they are coming!”
Bankston turned to Jones. “The truth is, Mr. Jones, you were the first person in the world to make the false flag theory about Sandy Hook, and you did it before the bodies were even cold,” Bankston said, his even tone turned lecturing. “That’s the truth.”
Jones, belligerently: “No. That’s not true.”
Jones told Bankston that he doubted the official narrative of all major events “because there’s such a long history of governments and corporations and legal groups engaging in fraud. And I said that before you played the clip.”
* * *
—
Toward the end of the deposition, Bankston drilled in on Jones’s accountability for the families’ hurt.
Jones presented his theory of the case.
“It really is the fact that we’ve allowed the government and institutions to become so corrupt that people lost any compass of what’s real. And I myself have almost had, like, a form of psychosis back in the past, where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’ve now learned a lotta times things aren’t staged. So I think as—as a pundit and someone giving opinion that my opinions have been wrong, but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people.”
So Jones telling millions of Americans that Sandy Hook was as “phony as a three-dollar bill,” his mocking portrayals of Robbie and Veronique as actors faking their grief, his insinuations that Neil had lied about seeing a bullet hole in his son’s head, his efforts to direct hate toward Lenny were simply his opinion, warped by exposure to government lies. Jones didn’t do it for money, fame, or entertainment. He did it, he claimed, because he was a victim of “the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much.”
Alex Jones, self-described God-and-country patriot, tough-talking, gun-toting hater of snowflake libs, was claiming he maligned the families of murdered children because he was “like a child, whose parents lied to him over and over again. Well pretty soon they don’t know what reality is.”[3] It sounded risible. In fact, it was an early hint at a chilling new legal strategem deployed by conspiracy theorists sued for defamation, including those sued for spreading lies about the 2020 election. In a twist on an insanity defense, it posits: If people are too deluded, too immersed in falsehoods to distinguish between truth and reality, can they be held accountable for the harm they cause?
* * *
—
I watched Jones’s deposition again in early fall 2021. At that point, the nation was experiencing another surge in COVID-19 infections, with 2,000 new deaths being reported each day. Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, more than 700,000 people in the United States had died from the virus.[4]
Most of the people who died that summer were unvaccinated, among them those who believed the falsehoods Jones and many others had spread: that the vaccines were poison, evil, government tyranny.
On August 21, even Trump was booed at an Alabama rally for telling people to take the vaccine. “Shame on you, Trump,” Jones said on Infowars, calling the former president a “dumbass.”[5]
By September, scores of Americans were calling poison control centers after overdosing on ivermectin, a common livestock dewormer that they wrongly believed was a treatment for COVID.[6] On his show, Jones ripped open the packaging of what he said was ivermectin for humans.
“See this, Fauci? You see this, Bill Gates? I’m gonna kill those prions, you bastard murderers. You gonna hit me with a bioweapon, you monster? You wanna suppress me? You want to kill me? You son of a bitch! You goddamned demon. You think I’m easy to kill?”
Jones pushed a pill into his maw, washing it down with what looked like a beer.
“You leftists taking all the shots and dying are the dumbasses!”[7]
Taking a break from watching Jones’s deposition, I checked email and saw one from a colleague, forwarding a note from a friend unnerved by the virus’s resurgence.
“I despair that the country is losing its ability to self-correct,” my colleague’s friend had written. “It all began after Sandy Hook.”
* * *
—
Internet-borne conspiracism had metastasized, spreading over the years from Sandy Hook to encompass virtually every major trauma. On January 6, 2021, conspiracists loyal to President Trump acted on his most audacious claim: that Democrats had colluded in a grand scheme to steal the presidency from him.
The lawyers in Texas, Mark Bankston and Bill Ogden, told me that the attack marked a sickening turning point for them.
Upon filing the families’ lawsuits against Jones in 2018, “I was so filled with enthusiasm, and thinking I could make a big difference,” Bankston said. Now he’s dejected: “What I saw between 2018 and the present was how so many people decided that the leading issues of the day were fair game for this kind of manipulation.
“A large portion of our political culture has perhaps correctly deduced that there are things that are way more useful, more potent, and more powerful than truth.”
I was writing this final chapter while the United States marked twenty years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The media that weekend was awash in coverage, some pondering the ways in which the 9/11 “truther” movement provided a tool kit for the wave of political conspiracists who followed. Kevin Roose, the Times’ technology columnist, did a deep dive on the 2005 homemade video project Loose Change, which eventually reached 100 million people.[8]
The video’s “DNA is all over the internet—from TikTok videos about child sex trafficking to Facebook threads about Covid-19 miracle cures,” Roose wrote, all of it urging skeptics, as the Loose Change filmmakers did, to dig in and research the event themselves.
That call to action was echoed by Alex Jones, who helped produce a subsequent, slicker version of Loose Change.
Then came the internet, with its power to stir mass movements and link the rare conspiracists prone to violence into a mob.
“A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” former president George W. Bush said on September 11, 2021, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed to earth.
“So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together,” he said.
Bush drew a link between the foreign extremism responsible for September 11 and the dangerous beliefs underpinning the Capitol insurrection.
“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
* * *
—
When Joe Uscinski, the University of Miami professor and American Conspiracy Theories coauthor, began studying conspiracy theories in 2011, he set a Google Alert for the term. “Then it was like five articles a day,” appearing in the media about the phenomenon, he told me. “Then you get to 2016, and it’s between fifty and one hundred a day.”
Even as president, Trump inspired conspiracy-minded distrust of the government he led. His handling of the coronavirus pandemic provided just one example. Every day for months, he minimized the coronavirus pandemic, promoted quack cures, and politicized the government’s response, until its every aspect drew skepticism and partisan resistance. As deaths mounted, he used his online platform to blame the machinations of an imagined “Deep State” for the leadership failures that led voters to reject him for a second term. His refusal to accept his loss in 2020 raced from unthinkable to a threat to our democracy in less than a year.
Though the Stop the Steal mob nearly killed some of them, Republican Party leaders still tend the conspiracy theory’s embers, ensuring it flares anew with every vote.
As I wrote this, Republican-led legislatures in several states were embarking on “reviews” of 2020 election results, following false allegations of voting irregularities raised in Arizona, where a faulty, partisan review of Maricopa County’s results touted by Trump was condemned as a sham by Republicans and Democrats alike.
“For those who are pushing the fraud narrative, the actual truth is beside the point,” Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, elections expert, and scholar of democracy, said in the Times.[9]
“The idea that the election was stolen is becoming a tribe-defining belief. It’s not about proving something at this point. It’s about showing fealty to a particular description of reality.”
Never before has a major American political party so assiduously nurtured this destructive force. Yet many of Trump’s followers, including the Sandy Hook conspiracists in this book, held a range of political views before Trump appealed to something darker that united them. The anti-vaxxers booing Trump in Alabama underscored that conspiracists’ first loyalty is to their beliefs, a situation easily exploited by a demagogue of any political persuasion.
“A lot of times what you find is that people are concentrating on the specific theories, like, ‘Oh my god, this theory is going viral. How can we refute that theory?’ ” Uscinski said. “When really what’s going on is that it’s just a visible manifestation of the underlying worldview.”
Even QAnon, typically described as a mass delusion afflicting the far right, transcends politics, Uscinski told me. “In our models, partisanship and ideology drop out as predictive of QAnon beliefs,” he said. “So what we’re left with are dark personality traits.” These traits are led by what psychologists call the “Dark Triad”: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, meaning the willingness to manipulate others to gain a certain result. Those three, along with others like dogmatism and poor conflict management skills—screaming, throwing things, even slapping or punching in an argument—distinguish people likely to spread antisocial conspiracy theories.
John Kelly of Graphika, who maps the viral spread of misinformation across the web, said few theories have united disparate conspiracy-driven groups like coronavirus vaccine skepticism. Anti-technology types, antisemites, far-right politicos, and hippie alternative-medicine fans all found something to hate in the government’s vaccination campaign.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit working to disrupt the spread of online hate and misinformation, studied online anti-COVID vaccine content over six weeks in early 2021.[10] The center found that 65 percent of anti-vaxx messages were attributable to just twelve people, all with enormous social media followings. On Facebook the “Disinformation Dozen” were responsible for nearly three-quarters of vaccine misinformation. The group spans the political spectrum. In second place, behind diet supplements and snake oil peddler Joseph Mercola, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the assassinated Democratic presidential candidate, whose Children’s Health Defense group targeted African Americans and Latinos with anti-vaxx messages. Behind Kennedy, in third place, are Ty and Charlene Bollinger, pro-Trump conspiracists who hawk books and DVDs touting their loopy claims, including that vaccines fulfill Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’s plan to inject people with microchips.
Deplatforming these repeat offenders is “the most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information,” the center said. Yet Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and Twitter had to that point failed to enforce their own policies prohibiting COVID misinformation, and most of their accounts remained active. By the end of 2021, that had belatedly begun to change.[11]
It’s no accident that Alex Jones failed to make it into the Disinformation Dozen. Deplatformed in 2018 and 2019, his social media presence remains a faint shadow of what it was, despite constant efforts to sneak back on. By late 2021 less than 1 percent of all traffic to Infowars’ website came from social media, according to an analysis for the Times by Similarweb,[12] an internet tracking company.
Deplatforming blunts misinformation superspreaders’ influence and access to funding. White nationalist Richard Spencer, who rode Trump-era bigotry to stardom, had his social media accounts yanked in the aftermath of the 2017 neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Sued for his role in that violence, Spencer told a judge in 2020 that he was having so much trouble raising money online he couldn’t afford a lawyer.[13] Spencer’s National Policy Institute has closed. He lives in Montana, shunned even by his neighbors.[14]
To be sure, deplatforming is a pretty blunt weapon. Platforms take ages to do it, it creates “free speech” martyrs, and it can drive extremists onto anything-goes platforms like Gab and Parler, where they can become further radicalized.
Experts argue for a finer-grained approach, like imposing time delays between the submission and appearance of a post; disabling the comments function to avoid its becoming a misinformation forum; and, perhaps most important, disabling recommendation algorithms for those accounts so that false content isn’t pumped into the feeds of susceptible people.
J. M. Berger, a writer and researcher on extremism, terrorism, and propaganda, told me he recommends deplatforming as a part of a “drug cocktail” of measures, including civil lawsuits and prosecutions, which “are good at stopping groups or movements with strong organizational elements, but less effective at diffuse movements or those that straddle the line of the law.”
* * *
—
Nearly ten years after Lenny saw the first conspiracy posts about Sandy Hook, his combination of content removal and lawsuits had slowed their spread to a crawl. His use of the bully pulpit and his content-removal demands got the platforms’ attention. Facebook designated him a “trusted partner”; and YouTube, a “trusted flagger,” whose reports of offensive content lead to swift takedowns. After a virtual meeting with Lenny in mid-2019, Twitter also made changes. The company told me that feedback from Lenny and others “provided an important perspective to inform changes to our rules and enforcement, including expanded guidance in our hateful conduct policy that specifically prohibits the denial of violent events, including abusive references to specific events like Sandy Hook.”
Lenny said that’s still not enough. But every Sandy Hook conspiracist I spoke with said that it’s nearly impossible to post lies about Sandy Hook on social media, and have them stick around for more than a day or two.
