Elizabeth Williamson: It Started with Sandy Hook

Welcome to the Bullwhip Podcast on trolley sites. It has been only a few weeks since a jury in Connecticut. Awarded the families of eight Sandy Hooks shooting victims nearly one billion dollars in damages from Info Wars fabulous Alex Jones. The verdict described in the New York Times as a devastating blow against his empire and a message from the jury that his lies and those of his followers have crippling consequences. The reporter who wrote that the author of the book.

Sandy Hook an American tragedy in the Bible for Truth. Elizabeth Williamson joins me on the podcast today. Good afternoon, Liz.

Hey, Charlie. How are you doing? Well,

this is a this is a difficult issue because right right before we started, I said this seems very timely to be discussing this flood of disinformation and the Empire of lies at this particular moment when it all seems to be so much worse in which the floodgates of, you know, propaganda and and and lies, you know, continues to accelerate. But as as you point out, it’s really There’s never been a time when it’s not timely. I mean, we are living in Alex Jones’ world in so many ways, aren’t we?

Yeah. It’s really true. I mean, over the last decade, you know, as I say in the book, Sandy Hook turned out to be a foundational story in the spread of disinformation and, you know, false narratives. And, you know, we’ve seen that happen. It was unusual at the time of the shooting a decade ago, but since then, you know, now twenty percent of all Americans believe that every high profile mass shooting is staged by the government.

Really? I have never heard that statistic before.

Yes. It was interesting because I put that into the story that you just cited about the nine sixty five million dollars judgment against Alex Jones in Connecticut. And an editor said, oh, I need to, you know, look for a citation or hyperlink for that and found three different studies that bore that out.

Well, again, as you described it, that mass shooting, the death of all those children back in two thousand twelve, in Newtown was a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in. And, you know, we look back on this and and the jury verdict. And and I guess the the real mystery is why that didn’t screded the world of conspiracy theorists. Why there was not so much revulsion against the attack against the parents of dead children and and why that didn’t discredit the whole enterprise. And even after this massive jury verdict, things seem to be getting worse.

I know you’ve thought about that. You know, why has there not been this just repulsion against the falsehood and just the the viciousness of it all.

Yeah. I have thought about that a lot. You’re right. And, you know, one and just, you know, as evidence that this not only doesn’t dissuade people from embracing this theory, and actually encourages them. I mean, Alex Jones’ sales and and outright donations to Info Wars have been surging since these jury verdicts, you know, an earlier one this summer in Texas and now this giant one in Connecticut.

And I really think, you know, look for the reasons for this. We have to go beyond the content and really look at what these theories symbolize for people that this is a form, you know, another iteration of the tribalism that we’re experiencing on the right hand left in this country that people are willing to embrace this theory as a kind of tribal signifier that if you say, hey, a lot of these mass shootings are false flags. They’re staged by the government as a pretext for gun control, you’re sort of showing your bona fiedies to be a member in this case of the far. Right. And, you know, that that sort of takes it out of the realm of, you know, information and puts it into the the realm of group belonging and identification.

Well,

it’s also such a a perfect example of the alternative realities that we live in because I remember I remember vividly back in two thousand twelve, hearing about this and what my reaction was and just the the absolute horror, you know, thinking of all those dead children. And I And I think back to I’m trying to remember when I first heard that there were conspiracy theories, that it was that there were actors, and it was false flag, And I will admit to you that I didn’t take that seriously because at the time it seemed like just a remote fringe and I couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually believe this. It just seemed incredible. So I think like a lot of folks I didn’t take it serious. I didn’t see what was happening at the time that these conspiracy theorists were going to spread and become emboldened and that it would become a fact of life in our society.

So you look back on this now, a decade later, And I have to say that I would never have imagined that it would we would get to the point that we are now. Howard

Bauchner: No, it’s true. It just seems too wild to embrace. And also, it’s interesting to note that when this first happened, the some of the people who wanted to believe that this just didn’t occur, were young moms who had children around the same age as the children who died at Sandy Hook, you know, kindergarteners first graders, and they and they felt like I’m there for anybody who will tell me that these babies didn’t die in this way. Interesting. Yeah.

But they quickly fell off because they were, you know, convinced by the facts and by the reporting and the and the, you know, the investigation that you know, ensued. And they actually some of them grew into some of the people who joined Lenny Posner who is a Sandy Hook dad whose son Noah Posner died in the shooting who has for years confronted these conspiracy theorists and formed a group called the Honor Network. Abound tears trying to get not only this content, but other harmful content like this removed from social media. And they became, you know, sort of his core group of volunteers, which was really interesting.

So you you trace the through line from Sandy Hook to PizzaGate to Q1 on to Charlottesville to the, you know, COVID myths to the election lie that brought violence to the capital on January six. And your focus here is the assault on the truth. And you you write you you I think you told Vox, I I started to understand individuals for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths and how once they’ve done it, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise. There there’s also this there’s a psychology that I think you touched on with with the moms But also, I think the point you’re making is that once people buy into some of these lies when they buy into the con, it’s incredibly difficult for them to be deprogrammed. Is there a process by which people feel that that they have to be validated, that they’ve invested too much in it, that they resent the debunkers more than the people who, in fact, misled them in the first place?

Yeah.

I mean, as Lenny Posner, again, the Sandy Hook Dad, had pointed out to me, the people who were the most pernicious spreaders of this and not putting Alex Jones to the side for a moment because he obviously did this for reasons of profit. Every time he talked about Sandy Hook, his sales and his audience surged. But a lot of these people who provided content people like Alex Jones were far lesser known individuals. But what this theory did for them, and again, via social media, they built followings, and they were able to reinvent themselves. So they became, you know, that one guy was a he had a moving business down in South Florida.

He became a citizen journalist. He founded an organization called Independent Media Solidarity. You know, he he was a filmmaker You know, he made a film with a group of other guys about Sandy Hook. That was called, we need to talk about Sandy Hook trying to say that the whole thing was staged There’s a woman out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a grandmother, you know, woman with children over own and grandkids who, you know, decided that you know, she had been a she has a housecleaning business and she decided there was nobody who cleaned up the school and so therefore it was a hoax. You know, she went on all of these radio shows and, you know, she fed this content to people like Info Wars.

So it was a whole new, you know, identity and and a sense of, you know, prestige in this world that that you know kind of attached itself to these people who were the biggest propagators of this lie.

So we’re coming up on the ten year anniversary December fourteenth. And as you report within about two hours of the shooting analyst Jones was telling his viewers that that, you know, the media is gonna hype the living daylights out of all of this and and that this is, you know, this is gonna be a pretext to steal steal your guns, you know, why do governments stage these things to get our guns? So there’s an agenda that drives this as well. I don’t want to say there’s a method to the madness because I think it’s purely evil. But by the time of the funerals, Alan Jones is mocking the parents and claiming their kids didn’t exist and were crisis actors.

I mean, this went on for a very long time. This was not just a one off thing that he got wrong. The Labor corrected. I mean, how long did Alex Jones push this lie?

For years to be. And yeah. And one big example that really emerged in the Connecticut trial Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emily Parker died in shooting. He was the first parent to speak publicly. He didn’t know it at the time.

He thought he was meeting a single reporter in front of his church in Newtown. And he was just going to talk about Emily’s life and who she was as a daughter and as a big sister to her two younger sisters and it was a sea, of course, of reporters and cameras. And when he stepped to the left turn to make some remarks about Emily’s life, he gave a kind of half guest, half laugh as he saw, you know, all these people arrayed before him. Alex Jones captured that moment of the laugh labeled Robbie and actor, replayed that video for years, just that split second of what was otherwise a very gripping wrenching, you know, heartbreaking news conference. And he you know, repeatedly labeled him an actor.

He called that event, you know, that press conference discussing. And people could identify Robbie Parker by face for years. In fact, in twenty sixteen, a man in Seattle, three thousand miles from Newtown confronted Robbie Parker on the street, was calling him a piece of shit, asked him how much money he’d made for taking his daughter’s debt, followed him for blocks just spewing men and calling him a liar. So these were very potent broadcasts I mean, they went to tens of millions of people and they made someone like Robbie Parker sort of the face of this lie that these individuals were crisis actors.

Will you spend time with these parents? I can’t even imagine what it must be like. I mean, to go through the worst nightmare of any parent having your child murdered, And then to go through something like this, it it it seems inconceivable you spent time with these parents. How what does it like for them? How do they What has it done?

How do they cope with this? Other than, you know, look for vindications of the courts, which is only partial, of course. Howard Bauchner:

Right. I mean, initially, say tried to cope with it by saying nothing. You know, I I’ve said in the past that, you know, I don’t know that I could have written this book right after the tragedy because the parents wouldn’t wanna talk about it. You know, they thought, don’t feed the trolls. They’ll go away.

They’ll move on to the next thing. They’ll leave us alone eventually. They’ll stop showing up in our house, digging through our trash, looking at our windows, filming us with their cell phones. But they never really did. And in fact, they not only didn’t leave the Sandy Hook families alone, they moved on to label and or meant other families in this way who had been through mass shootings.

And that was what decided some of these parents like Robbie Parker, You know, the Parkland shooting in twenty eighteen, the same kinds of lies attached themselves to that shooting, and the same individuals in some cases were spreading the lie that Parkland also was a government false flag. So that was when the families said, you know what, this isn’t ending, and And actually, this has grown into something that’s not only impacting, you know, vulnerable people like ourselves, but it’s really starting to erode our democracy because there’s so much disinformation out there in our national discourse. And that’s when they decided to take a stand and they are their resolve is just incredibly impressive because this has been a significant secondary trauma to them as you might imagine. Howard

Bauchner: Let’s scroll down on on the agenda part of all of this because you really you really do break it down and and and put it into context, you know, that The fact that at at that moment in December two thousand twelve, with so many children killed, it was obvious there was gonna be this massive battle for gun legislation. I think a lot of us expected that this was going to be the breaking point. Obama had just been reelected, and there was a lot of concern that he would start imposing draconian measures. Right? You know, he was the outsider, you know, and and his presidency obviously had been a fertile ground for conspiracy theorists.

And this was kind of the the the moment at which social media use was was rising. So all of those played into this, right, that it went viral. The need for a counter agenda, which we’ve seen again and again and again, you know, when something happens and people there’s that feeling like, well, okay, there will be act there will be a reaction to this. We need to change the subject or throw up smoke and and and dust. Is it was that part of this this this story?

Absolutely. You referenced Charlie earlier, Alex Jones’ first broadcast, which was on the day of the shooting. And, you know, within a couple of hours, how he had embraced this theory that this was government false flag. And, you know, there were a couple guys who have analyzed a guy named Dan Friesen who has a podcast call knowledge fight where he really delves into Alex Jones’ career and not only, you know, what how he grew Info Wars into, you know, what it is today, but also his sort of place in the constellation of conspiracy theorists through history. And, you know, his idea was, you he had all these callers who were calling into a show and saying, How should we interpret this?

And hey, Alex, when are you gonna call this a conspiracy? And when are you gonna say this was a false flag? And once he realized what the death toll was, was when he actually went full on into this theory that it was a government pretext for gun control. And this by damn reason said something that I thought made a lot of sense in which I put in the book, and that was that It was then that he realized that this was going to be an absolute trench fight for a new gun legislation. And if you were an opponent of new gun legislation, one tool in your toolkit given the magnitude of this crime and, you know, they outpouring in the country in its aftermath, denying the shooting would be one creepy, but one tool in the anti gum legislation tool kit.

And so that was what some people decided to embrace. But as

you point out though, a lot of the people embrace the conspiracy. They didn’t do so because of political reasons, but but for this social connection, the status, and some of them had started out on the on the left, moved to the far right. And so, you know, we need psychologists to look at this as well as political scientists. Right? I mean, the people who, you know, thought it was all about fact finding.

Right? And and and sharing doubt in the official narrative. Yeah,

a hundred percent there are panoply of reasons why people, you know, attach themselves to this theory. One was just, you know, the the idea of what its implications were for gun control. That was a sort of cynical play on the part of Alex Jones. But his bigger motivation was profit as, you know, it emerged that whenever he spoke about this. Like I said, he’d get a big audience, he’d get a lot of product sales, see Cellis’ products adjacent to these broadcasts.

For others, it was at enhanced social status, you know, conspiracy theorists in this country before social media tended to be much more isolated than they are now. So people gathered online. They developed big groups on Facebook and And websites where they all gravitated and they shared their theories and embroidered them. So it became, you know, like I said, just like a whole sense of so of longing that grew up around that. Of course politics entered into some of that because they were, like, minded individuals.

But then there were, you know, people who genuinely wanted to figure out what had happened. They had for reasons of their own, often highly personal reasons, didn’t understand how this could happen or how it could happen in the way that authorities said it did and they actually tried to research this you know, they’re certainly amount, you know, backs out there, you know, for them to to learn about. And those were the people who just kind of were satisfied and dropped off. And

there’s also that sense that you have the secret knowledge, you have superior knowledge. Right? I mean, that’s always been part of the attraction of the spiracy theory of the paranoid style in American politics. Right? That — Mhmm.

— you have the code. You have cracked the code. You know something they don’t want you to know. And we’ve seen that as a through line, I mean, almost every one of these other conspiracy theories that that you you you link to this foundational moment. Yeah,

conspiracy theorists, you know, serial conspiracy theorists, whether they are on the political right or the left, tend to have that personality trait. You know, there’s a form of narcissism at play here. They do like to be sort of, if you talk to them, they’re very smug and there’s superior knowledge, you know, they have the inside track. They’re eager to educate you, you know, just kind of like talk you out of you’re sort of sheep like adherence to the official narrative. There’s a there’s a machiavellianism.

It’s a it’s a personality type And you know, it really is like the sense of social belonging that we talked about. That is really more a determinant of whether somebody will embrace these sort of antisocial conspiracy theories like like the anti vaccine stuff, the, you know, the coronavirus myths, The the mass shooting mix, it’s a personality issue and a and a sociological phenomenon as much as it is or more than it is a political

one. Do you see this playing out now in the Nancy Pelosi attack truthorism where people think, uh-huh, I I know what really happened there. I’m not going to accept the official line. And the fact that even when you have the police reports and the charging reports, that there’s there’s no way for the truth to catch up with a with a lie. I mean, it it strikes me as that as I’m thinking about the way you’re describing the spread of Sandy Hook, that we’ve seen it again and again.

And we’re seeing it like right now in real time. Do you agree?

Yeah. You know, what did Steve Bannon say? He said, it’s not about persuading somebody about whether your narrative or this alternative narrative is the right one. Some of this is just as as he called it and sorry for my, you know, vernacular here, but he called it flooding the zone with shit. Yeah.

If you can flood the zone with it and have people arguing and and talking about, well, is this narrative right? Or is that narrative? Or debunking people who are spreading falsehoods in the aftermath of whether it’s a, you know, the attack on pulp velocity or mass shooting or, you know, a pandemic. If you can throw enough of that stuff out there, people start to wonder, well, they’re either distracted by arguing over what our established facts online usually — Mhmm. — or they just sort of throw up their hands and say, I have no idea what the real narrative is.

And I think in our political season, that’s the ten k. Annihilation

of truth. Yes. Yeah.

That’s what

Hana Ren described as the annihilation of truth. And and that is the world that we live in right now. I mean, that project is is succeeding. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then, you know, there is something in the human psyche that Aaron also speaks about. And that’s that, you know, people can’t tolerate, and Thomas Pincheon writes about this too. People can’t tolerate a sense of randomness. For a sense of not knowing or, you know, when random acts of violence or crime occur, people can’t live with that sort of uncertainty or this idea that, you know, a loan loser just shot the president, you know, that kind of thing.

So they develop a body of facts around that that that helped to, you know, swash their their insecure feelings that rise out of those random acts. Well,

I was thinking back during that period from two thousand twelve when this occurred to about two thousand sixteen, and one of the changes that I saw was and I I was on, you know, contributive talk radio for many years back then, that up until two thousand fifteen, two thousand sixteen, I felt that I was able to push back against false information or, you know, stories like this. And, you know, if you if you send somebody a fact check, people go, hey, thank you. I’m not gonna forward that email anymore. And that all began to change in two thousand fifteen, really accelerated in two thousand sixteen where it became impermeable And one of the tipping points, at least to me, as I think back on how we got from there to here, it is something you highlight in the book. Which is when Donald Trump running for president fully embraced Alex Jones in the midst of the Sandy Hook truth arism that that he never explicitly endorsed the the the new town theory, but but he helped to amplify Jones and he appeared on his show back in twenty fifteen and he expresses enthusiasm for Jones telling him, your reputation is amazing.

I will not let you down. And so that the Jones Trump alliance had tremendous implications for both of them and really for the future of political discourse, didn’t it?

Absolutely. So in twenty fifteen, you know, as as what everyone knows, in late twenty fifteen, Donald Trump went on in awards and as you just said, you know, praised his audience. Alex Jones’ audience was identified by Roger Stone who was already regular on Info Wars and, you know, Erstwhile adviser to former president Trump. He was looking for that audience to be a vital constituency for Donald Trump. I mean, at that time, you know, he was an outlier in a very crowded Republican primary field.

Most, yo, famously, John McCain would never even remember the in two thousand eight, taking the literally taking the microphone from a woman who said, you know, Obama’s an a rep. I don’t trust him saying, no, no, no, no. We don’t go down that rabbit hole. It’s not happening. Republican politicians did not embrace that element was always I mean, the John VirTra’s were all about the globalists, but those people were shunned by mainstream Republicanism.

Very much that.

And I would

Jones was someone who embraced that group as a really important group of people that could put him over the top in that primary race. Well,

and and by the end of two thousand sixteen, Donald Trump has elected president and according to the Washington Post actually called Alex Jones the week after he was elected president of the United States. To thank him for his support. Outlets like the drudge report were, you know, constantly linking to Alex Jones, so this had come into the mainstream. And I was thinking again, thinking back on all this because they the the fact he was lying about the dead kids seemed to be so completely disqualifying. In fact though, as you’re describing this, if people are willing to believe that the government stage the murder of children, then if you can believe that, you can believe pretty much anything, can’t you?

Right? I mean, once you’ve kind of broken that glass, you know.

Exactly. Yes. Yeah. They’re you’re kind of reaching a point of no return. And, you know, and again, whether you are believing it because you actually think that it didn’t happen or that, you know, the official narrative is wrong somehow.

Or you’re embracing it because you know it drives your, you know, your political opposite number absolutely bananas that that this kind of, you know, that you would actually believe something like that or profess to believe it. Whatever the reason, there are enough people who, you know, I was getting messages throughout covering the trial over the last, you know, five weeks in Connecticut, you know, just people who just stubbornly and showing up in court, you know, stubbornly refusing to accept that this had actually happened. You know, sitting in a courtroom, watching these families break down on the witness stand, reliving this and and just going outside and saying it never happened?

Well, you you do spend some time highlighting the eroes of this story, which are the parents, you know, like and you’ve mentioned several times, Larry Posner, the follow of six year old Noah. It’s interesting that he asked originally originally tries to reason with the trolls by releasing Noah’s death certificate, his kindergarten report card. They wanted his body exhumed. I mean, this is the the world or in. So eventually, he gave up on the trolls and decided he was gonna try to do something else.

Yeah. He Money has a tech background. He knew the algorithms of social media that propel this kind of material, you know, that that caused it to spread so swiftly. He also had a window into the mind he thought of a conspiracy theorist because he had sort of embraced him, conspiracy theories were like the da Vinci Code. You know, just something interesting, sort of entertaining.

He had heard Alex Jones’ show before he had listened to it from time to time. So he felt like he had an ability to reason with these individuals. So yeah, one night he joined one of the biggest Sandy Hook Facebook groups. You know, Sandy Hook conspiracy Facebook groups called Sandy Hook Hops. And he brought those documents, Noah’s death certificate, his birth certificate, some of his school records, and actually his postmortem report, which is extremely painful reading.

And he tried to convince them. But, you know, some there were some individuals I mentioned earlier, those moms, you know, who really just didn’t want to believe that these children had been killed this way. We did convince some people, but a lot of these people, the ones who were most invest in this. We’re getting something out of it, whether it was profit or psychic income. They cast him out of that group, and that’s when he decided he’d start to go after, you know, using copyright laws, you know, take some of this material down off the social media platforms and trying to shame the social media platforms themselves because I’ll tell you, Charlie, a lot of this can be laid at the doorstep of the social media companies because they refused for the longest time to even talk with these parents as they begged them to get this material off their platforms.

So

Jones was de platformed in twenty eighteen from Facebook, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and yet you know, he continues to have have his audience. So I was reading the Washington Post review of your book and they write it not too much of a leap to see the line to the Americans who sack the capital on January sixth, you know, believing that the election had been stolen from Trump despite all of the evidence and the

court rulings. And

the woman who reviewed your book, Barbara Demick, said that that your book was the scariest book she’s read because of the assistance of delusion behind it all. And I think that’s kind of the heart of it. And you you wrote the struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it, has become a fight to defend our society and democracy itself. I I don’t wanna be too negative here, but it feels at the moment that you and I are speaking, though, that we may be losing this fight. That’s a worry,

isn’t it? Because, I mean, how

do you fight against this? How do you fight against the the flood of misinformation, which seems to have so many outlets and appears to be irrefutable in the minds of so many of these people. Howard Bauchner: I

think we have to reach a point, and I I know this is gonna sound really negative but I think we have to reach a point where it is no longer profitable whether monetarily or otherwise for or politically, for people to spread this stuff, where they suddenly realize, you know what? There is an enormous downside here. I thought the January sixth hearings were going to be one of those moments, and maybe they still will be. But people have to understand that while there is always a temptation there, if you have the capacity to profit in some way by spreading this material or at least remaining silent when others do. You are contributing to a problem that could very well bring down our democracy.

That really is the message of the book. This is a problem that is systemic now. It’s not a one off. Sandy Hook was not a one off. It was the beginning of a progression that January six showed us could only get worse.

Well, and on

the right, there’s tremendous pushback against this by saying that, you know, big tech is trying to censor us and there there’s a tremendous move to re platform many of these figures that we have Elon Musk who claims to be a free speech absolutist now controlling Twitter. They’re a little legislative to read a

false claim about Paul Pelosi’s attack last week. In his first seventy two hours in charge. Right. Right. Which

gives you an indication of where we’re going. So the the trend line is not like okay, we’ve all gotten our act together and we are not gonna spread this pornographic hate and build.

Right? No.

And and so you wonder where where you’re going. Now you you mentioned the profit motive obviously which brings us back to this this court case because I think that they’re was some wishful thinking that losing a one billion dollar libel judgment, defamation judgment, was really going to either a, destroy Alex Jones or b, send such a powerful message to every other troll out there do you think it’ll have that effect? Will he ever pay that judgment? Does it bankrupt him in reality? And are other people going to be dissuaded?

What do you think? Well, I

think these are early days. One thing I can tell you is that if this experience has taught these families anything. It has taught them patience and resolve. They are not gonna go away. They will pursue Alex Jones, who is right now, you know, trying to hide his assets that Sandy Hook families say, he’s declared bankruptcy, his parent company has, he has yet to declare personal bankruptcy.

But I’m confident that will leave no stone unturned. It has never been about the money. It has been about sending the message of the corrosive power of disinformation. Not only, you know, to harm individuals, but to harm our system and our government and our democracy. So for them, that’s going to be the reason to pursue.

And they’re using the power that they have as survivors of this historic tragedy to send this message to the rest of us that this is a genuine

problem and if you think you’re profiting from it today, you will not be tomorrow. What about the Dominion lawsuits? Which also seem to follow the same, at least, trajectory, which is to hold people accountable for viral lies out there. I mean, that seems like another route at which the message will be sent. That, you know, this is just not a good business decision to traffic and lies.

Absolutely. Yeah, when you are targeting an individual whether it is a grieving parent or a company that, you know, what was their crime? They made voting systems. You know, then you get yourself, as the Texas slayers put it in the trial in Austin, against Alex Jones, the summer, speech is free, lies you pay for, and that is our system. So that is what all of these legal actions rest on.

That, no, this mirrored right to free speech does not protect you when you spread knowing adjudicated falsehoods. In the public square. So that’s what, you know, we really need to reiterate, you know, regardless of what Alex Jones or any of the other individuals who have claimed free speech protects them when they spread these lies. It doesn’t. You pay for that.

So

here’s the question that I don’t think you’ll probably have an answer for. But when he’s alone, do you think that Alex Jones ever has twinges of conscience about what he did to those kids and to those parents? No, I

don’t. I wish I wish he did. But no, I think any acknowledgment of the pain he’s caused. Any acknowledgement of the fact that this tragedy actually happened has been strategic on his part. It’s been at the the house to lawyers, Alex Jones is a diagnosed nurse assistant himself, so he tends to see everything that happens in terms of it happened to him, that people who criticize him are out to get him, that every criticism no matter how legitimate is an attack on him.

And so rather than, you know, these proceedings convincing him that he’s caused a lot of pain. He’s, first of all, avoided talking with the families or even appearing in court largely, except when he had to testify. But he’s also, you know, doubled down and said that he’ll be questioning more shootings in the future. So by holding him to account, these families in Alex Jones’ mind, have reinforced his own sense that he’s being persecuted by them. I think you’re right, and I think that’s one of the

things that is the most disturbing is the fact that you’re dealing with complete sociopaths, people who who don’t even think in in terms of the pain they cause or right and wrong, or truth or falsehood, you know, it is just either a game or a gift or a tactic in order to get what they want to win to to inflict pain on the people that they want to inflict pain on. And that becomes harder to deal with because you can’t engage then in persuasion or hope that there’s going to be reformation. All you can do is use, you know, blood force of the courts or the electoral system to to push back against them and to and to reduce the incentive. So Yeah. I mean, you’re hoping

people’s conscience would stop them. Right. But if

if it

doesn’t, then we have the courts. The book is Sandy Hook, an American

tragedy in the battle for truth, which was recently named one of the best books of twenty twenty two by Publishers Weekly. Elizabeth Williamson is feature writer in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Liz. Thank

you, Charlie. I really appreciate it. The

Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seary. I’m Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast ask, we’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll do this all over again. You’re worried about

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anything talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life. Afford anything wherever you

listen.