Tragedy and truth

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/04/2022 (1280 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alex Jones is so repugnant he makes Judas Iscariot look good.

He is but one of the vile people condemned by writer Elizabeth Williamson in her magnetic and cogent postmortem of one of the most horrid mass shootings in U.S. history and the degenerate reaction to it.

A lone gunman killed 20 first-graders and six teachers 10 years ago at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the gentle Connecticut town of Newtown. The slaughter took less than 10 minutes.

Almost as criminal as those killings, says Williamson, was Jones’ unconscionable misuse of his far right and virulent social media platform, Infowars. With the dead children still lying in the schoolyard, he said the shootings were faked and the grieving parents nothing more than actors in a conspiracy staged by government to support the need for more gun control.

In his trademark bombast, Jones called on his viewers — largely conspiracy believers — to descend on Newtown in outrage to bully and harass the people in this bogus massacre. It not only worked (and terrified the community), it made Jones rich hustling overpriced merchandise on his program.

Williamson is a features writer with the New York Times’ Washington bureau and a former foreign correspondent. She lives in Washington. There is in her writing an affection between the lines for the undeserving people Jones tortured for years.

Williamson quotes conservative columnist Richard Grenier as defining conspiracy theories as “sophistication of the ignorant.”

She says Jones’ success in making lies true and truth lies encouraged conspiracy theorists in every major conflict after Sandy Hook: numerous shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic, the oxymoron of “alternative facts,” Donald Trump’s bogus claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and last year’s assault on the U.S. Capitol building which he challenged his followers to carry out to “stop the steal.” She says Trump is much like Jones in that he convinces people what they (already) want to believe.

Meanwhile, as Williamson found, back in Newtown the grieving parents of murdered children not only had to live with their heartbreak, but also fight back angry conspiracy theorists that came calling to leer in their faces and finger them as frauds on the street, in stores, from passing cars and in coffee shops.

Simultaneously, they had to weather an attacking army of swarming and aggressive news media that competed for answers to the most delicate of questions asked again and again in an ambush of interviews demanding they relive horrors that would make anybody cry.

As Williamson found from one victimized parent, they began to think they were “prey.” And even when they stayed indoors with the drapes drawn, there were always knocks at the door and phones that kept ringing.

When they left town for elsewhere, either permanently or just to get away, they’d be confronted by strangers who recognized them from news photos and videos and would again be harangued and trailed by swearing or questioning complainants, returning again in their minds to the memory of the deaths.

A fascinating and revealing part of Williamson’s book is her explanation of the history and psychology of conspiracy theorists and the growing threat they pose to the maintenance of order and society’s trust in media, government and religion. Her book involved over 400 interviews and three years’ work.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, says Williamson. She describes how brave Sandy Hook parents began fighting back right from the beginning of their nightmare and started to make life miserable for some of their obnoxious foes, including Jones and a major gun manufacturer, Remington Arms, who made the weapon used by the Sandy Hook gunman. (The school where the shooting took place was later torn down and a new one built close by.)

While millions of Americans continue to wallow in ludicrous conspiracy theories fanned by liars that make it sound like the truth, Sandy Hook’s victims of this mendacity are also getting back at their perpetrators through court decisions they initiated that are denting their detractors’ bank accounts. By 2018 some 10 Sandy Hook families were suing Jones.

Williamson also reveals that some of the academics supporting these kinds of lies have been fired, and most of the social media platforms employed by the venomous loudmouth Jones have been taken away from him.

And significant horsepower soon will be added to this engine of change when Jones’ money tree is pruned by the courts for his horrid attacks on the Sandy Hook parents.

He has already admitted he was wrong; the parents recently turned down his first monetary offer to settle their defamation suit against him. In addition, he is being fined by the courts at a daily rate for failing to co-operate. That bill alone is over $500,000 and counting. The parents may well end up with millions, but it’s still in the courts.

(Canada is not immune to the same kind of viral lies. The Senate has been flooded by conspiracy theory claims that changes to basic income legislation is the work of a shady global elite.)

It seems not only news travels fast — so does nonsense.

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.