The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[2] It has been only a few weeks since a jury in Connecticut awarded the families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims, nearly $1 billion in damages from Info Wars fabulous Alex Jones.
[3] 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.
[4] The reporter who wrote that, the author of the book, Sandy Hook, an American tragedy in the Battle for Truth.
[5] Elizabeth Williamson joins me on the podcast today.
[6] Good afternoon, Liz.
[7] Hey, Charlie, how you doing?
[8] Well, this is a difficult issue because 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 lies, you know, continues to accelerate.
[9] But as you point out, it's really, there's never been a time when it's not timely.
[10] I mean, we are living in Alex Jones's world in so many ways, aren't we?
[11] Yeah, it's really true.
[12] 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.
[13] And, you know, we've seen that happen.
[14] It was unusual at the time of the shooting a decade ago.
[15] But since then, you know, now 20 % of all Americans believe that every high -profile mass shooting is staged by the government.
[16] Really?
[17] I've never heard that statistic before.
[18] Yes.
[19] It was interesting because I put that into the story that you just cited about the $965 million judgment against Alex Jones in Connecticut.
[20] And an editor said, oh, I need to, you know, look for a citation or a hyperlink for that and found three different studies that bore that out.
[21] Well, again, as you described it, that mass shooting, the death of all those children back in 2012 in Newtown was a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.
[22] And, you know, we look back on this and the jury verdict.
[23] And I guess the real mystery is why that didn't discredit the world of conspiracy theorists.
[24] Why?
[25] Why?
[26] why there was not so much revulsion against the attack against the parents of dead children and why that didn't discredit the whole enterprise.
[27] And even after this massive jury verdict, things seemed to be getting worse.
[28] I know you've thought about that.
[29] You know, why has there not been this just repulsion against the falsehood and just the viciousness of it all?
[30] Yeah, I have thought about that a lot.
[31] You're right.
[32] And, you know, just, you know, as evidence that this not only doesn't dissuade people from embracing this theory, it actually encourages them.
[33] I mean, Alex Jones's sales 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.
[34] And I really think, you know, to look for the reasons for this, we have to go beyond the content.
[35] 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 and left in this country, that people are willing to embrace this theory as a kind of tribal signifier, that if you say, you know, hey, a lot of these mass shootings are false flags, you know, they're staged by the government as a pretext for gun control, you're sort of showing your bona fides to be a member, in this case of the far right.
[36] And, you know, that sort of takes it out of the realm of, you know, information and puts it into the realm of group belonging and identification.
[37] Well, it's also such a perfect example of the alternative realities that we live in because I remember, I remember vividly back in 2012 hearing about this and what my reaction was and just the absolute horror, you know, thinking of all those dead children.
[38] 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, it was false flag.
[39] And I will admit to you that I didn't take that seriously because at the time, it seemed like just a remote fringe.
[40] And I couldn't imagine that anyone would actually believe this.
[41] It just seemed incredible.
[42] So I think like a lot of folks, I didn't take it serious.
[43] I didn't see what was happening at the time that these conspiracy theorists, we're going to spread and become emboldened and that it would become a fact of life in our society.
[44] So you look back on this now a decade later, and I have to say that I would never have imagined that we would get to the point that we are now.
[45] No, it's true.
[46] It just seemed too wild to embrace.
[47] And also, it's interesting to note that when this first happened, that 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, kindergartners, first graders.
[48] And they felt like, I'm there for anybody who will tell me that these babies didn't die in this way.
[49] Interesting.
[50] Yeah, but they quickly fell off because they were, you know, convinced by the facts and by the reporting and the, and the, and, the, you know, the investigation that, you know, ensued.
[51] 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, volunteers trying to get not only this content, but other harmful content like this removed from social media.
[52] And they became, you know, sort of his core group of volunteers, which was really interesting.
[53] So you traced the through line from Sandy Hook to Pizagate, to Q &N, to Charlottesville, to the COVID myths, to the election lie that brought violence of the capital on January 6th.
[54] And your focus here is the assault on the truth.
[55] And you write, or I think you told Vox, I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths.
[56] and how once they'd done it, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.
[57] There's also this, there's a psychology that I think you touched on with the moms.
[58] 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.
[59] Is there a process by which people feel 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, had misled them in the first place?
[60] 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.
[61] He talked about Sandy Hook, you know, his sales and his audience surged.
[62] But a lot of these people who provided content to people like Alex Jones were far lesser known individuals.
[63] But what this theory did for them, and again, via social media, they built followings and they were able to reinvent themselves.
[64] So they became, you know, one guy was a, he had a moving business down in South Florida.
[65] He became a citizen journalist.
[66] He founded an organization called Independent Media Solidarity.
[67] You know, he was a filmmaker.
[68] You know, he made a film with a group of other guys.
[69] eyes about Sandy Hook.
[70] That was called, we need to talk about Sandy Hook, trying to say that the whole thing was staged.
[71] There's a woman out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a grandmother, you know, woman with children of her own and grandkids who, you know, decided that, you know, she had been a, she has a house cleaning business, and she decided there was nobody who cleaned up the school.
[72] And so therefore, it was a hoax.
[73] You know, she went on all of these radio shows.
[74] And, you know, she fed this content to people like Info Wars.
[75] So it was a whole new.
[76] you know, identity and, um, and a sense of, you know, prestige in this world that, that, um, you know, kind of attached itself to these people who were the biggest propagators of this lie.
[77] So we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary, December 14th.
[78] And as you report, uh, within about two hours of the shooting, Alex Jones was telling his viewers that, that, you know, the media is going to hype the living daylights out of all of this and, and that this is, you know, this is going to be a pretext to steal your guns.
[79] You know, why do governments stage these things to get our guns?
[80] So there's an agenda that drives this as well.
[81] I don't want to say there's a method to the madness because I think it's purely evil.
[82] But by the time of the funerals, Alex Jones is mocking the parents and claiming their kids didn't exist and were crisis actors.
[83] I mean, this went on for a very long time.
[84] This was not just a one -off thing that he got wrong, that he later corrected.
[85] I mean, How long did Alex Jones push this lie?
[86] For years, Charlie.
[87] And one big example that really emerged in the Connecticut trial, Robbie Parker, whose daughter, Emily Parker, died in the shooting.
[88] He was the first parent to speak publicly.
[89] He didn't know it at the time.
[90] He thought he was meeting a single reporter in front of his church in Newtown.
[91] 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.
[92] And it was a sea, of course, of reporters and cameras.
[93] And when he stepped to the lectern to make some remarks about Emily's life, he gave a kind of half gasp, half laugh as he saw, you know, all these people arrayed before him.
[94] Alex Jones captured that moment of the laugh, labeled Robbie an actor, replayed that video for years, just that split second of what was otherwise a very gripping, wrenching, you know, heartbreaking news conference.
[95] And he, you know, repeatedly labeled him an actor.
[96] He called that event, you know, that press conference disgusting.
[97] And people could identify Robbie Parker by face for years.
[98] In fact, in 2016, a man in Seattle, 3 ,000 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 faking his daughter's death, followed him for blocks, just spewing venom, calling him a liar.
[99] So these were very potent broadcasts.
[100] 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.
[101] Well, you spend time with these parents.
[102] I can't even imagine what it must be like.
[103] I mean, to go through the worst nightmare of any parent having your child murdered.
[104] And then to go through something like this, it seems inconceivable.
[105] You spent time with these parents.
[106] What is it like for them?
[107] How do they, what is it done?
[108] How do they cope with this other than, you know, look for vindications of the courts, which is only partial, of course?
[109] Right.
[110] I mean, initially, they tried to cope with it by saying nothing.
[111] You know, 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 want to talk about it.
[112] They thought, don't feed the trolls.
[113] They'll go away.
[114] They'll move on to the next thing.
[115] They'll leave us alone eventually.
[116] They'll stop showing up at our house, digging through our trash, looking at our windows, filming us with their cell phones.
[117] But they never really did.
[118] And in fact, they not only didn't leave the Sandy Hook families alone, they moved on to label and torment other families in this way who had been through mass shootings.
[119] And that was what decided some of these parents, like Robbie Parker, you know, the Parkland shooting in 2018, the same kinds of lies attached themselves to that shooting.
[120] And the same individuals in some cases were spreading the lie that Parkland also was a government false flag.
[121] So that was when the families said, you know what, this is an ending.
[122] 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.
[123] And that's when they decided to take a stand.
[124] And their resolve is just incredibly impressive because this has been a significant secondary trauma to them, as you might imagine.
[125] All right.
[126] Let's drill down on on the agenda part of all of this, because you really, you really do break it down and put it into context.
[127] You know, the fact that at that moment in December 2012, with so many children killed, it was obvious there was going to be this massive battle for gun legislation.
[128] I think a lot of us expected that this was going to be the breaking point.
[129] Obama had just been reelected.
[130] And there was a lot of concern that he would start imposing draconian measures, right?
[131] You know, he was the outsider, you know, and, And his presidency, obviously, had been a fertile ground for conspiracy theorists.
[132] And this was kind of the moment at which social media use was rising.
[133] So all of those played into this, right, that it went viral.
[134] 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 a reaction to this.
[135] we need to change the subject or throw up smoke and dust.
[136] Was that part of this story?
[137] Absolutely.
[138] You referenced Charlie earlier Alex Jones' first broadcast, which was on the day of the shooting.
[139] And within a couple of hours, how he had embraced this theory that this was a government false flag.
[140] And there were a couple guys who have analyzed a guy named Dan Friesen who has a podcast called Knowledge Fight, where he really delves into Alex Jones's career and not only how he grew info wars into what it is today, but also his sort of place in the constellation of conspiracy theorists through history.
[141] And, you know, his idea was he had all these callers who were calling into his show and saying, how should we interpret this?
[142] And, hey, Alex, when are you going to call this a conspiracy?
[143] And when are you going to say this was a false flag?
[144] 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.
[145] And this guy, Dan Friesen, said something that I thought made a lot of sense in which I put in the book.
[146] And that was that it was then that he realized that this was going to be an absolute trench fight for new gun legislation.
[147] And if you were an opponent of new gun legislation, one tool in your toolkit, given the magnitude of this crime and, you know, the outpouring in the country in its aftermath, denying the shooting would be one creepy, but one tool in the anti -gun legislation toolkit.
[148] And so that was what some people decided to embrace.
[149] But as you point out, though, a lot of the people embrace the conspiracy there didn't do so because of political reasons, but for this social connection, the status, and some of them it started out on the left, moved to the far right.
[150] And so, you know, we need psychologists to look at this as well as political scientists, right?
[151] I mean, the people who, you know, thought it was all about fact -finding, right, and sharing doubt in the official narrative.
[152] Yeah, 100%.
[153] There are a panoply of reasons why people, you know, attach themselves.
[154] to this theory.
[155] One was just, you know, the idea of what, what its implications were for gun control.
[156] That was a sort of cynical play on the part of Alex Jones.
[157] 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 because he sells his products adjacent to these broadcasts.
[158] For others, it was that enhanced social status, you know, conspiracy theorists in this country before social media tended to be much more isolated than they are now.
[159] So people gathered online.
[160] They developed big groups on Facebook and websites where they all gravitated and they shared their theories and embroidered them.
[161] So it became, like I said, just like a whole sense of social belonging that grew up around that.
[162] Of course, politics entered into some of that because they were like -minded individuals.
[163] But then there were, you know, people who genuinely wanted to figure out what had happened.
[164] 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.
[165] And they actually tried to research this.
[166] You know, there's certainly a mountain of facts out there, you know, for them to learn about.
[167] And those were the people who just kind of were satisfied and dropped off.
[168] And there's also that sense that you have the secret knowledge, you have superior your knowledge, right?
[169] I mean, that's always been part of the attraction of the conspiracy theory of the paranoid style in American politics, right, that you have the code, you have cracked of the code, you know something they don't want you to know.
[170] And we've seen that as a through line to, I mean, almost every one of these other conspiracy theories that you, you link to this foundational moment.
[171] Yeah, conspiracy theorists, you know, serial conspiracy theorists, whether they are on the political right or the left, tend to have that personality trait.
[172] You know, there's a form of narcissism at play here.
[173] They do like to be sort of, if you talk to them, they're very smug and their superior knowledge.
[174] You know, they have the inside track.
[175] They're eager to educate you, you know, to kind of like talk you out of, you know, your sort of sheep -like adherence to the official narrative.
[176] There's a Machiavellianism.
[177] It's a personality type.
[178] 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 anti -social conspiracy theories like the anti -vax stuff, the, you know, the coronavirus myths, the mass shooting myths.
[179] It's a personality issue and a sociological phenomenon as much as it is or more than it is a political one.
[180] Do you see this playing out now in the Nancy Pelosi attack truthorism where people think, aha, I know what really happened there.
[181] I'm not going to accept the official line.
[182] And the fact that even when you have the police reports and the charging reports, that there's no way for the truth to catch up with a lie.
[183] I mean, 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.
[184] And we're seeing it like right now in real time.
[185] Do you agree?
[186] Yeah.
[187] You know, what did Steve Bannon say?
[188] He said, it's not about persuading somebody about, you know, whether your narrative or this alternative narrative is the right one.
[189] Some of this is just, as he called it and sorry for my, you know, vernacular here, but he called it flooding the zone with shit.
[190] Yeah.
[191] If you can flood the zone with shit and have people arguing and talking about, well, is this narrative right or is that narrative or debunking people?
[192] who are spreading falsehoods in the aftermath of whether it's a, you know, the attack on Paul Pelosi or a 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 are established facts online, usually, or they just sort of throw up their hands and say, I have no idea what the real narrative is.
[193] And I think in our political season, that's the temptation.
[194] Annihilation of truth.
[195] Yes.
[196] Yeah, that's what Hannah Arend described as the annihilation of truth.
[197] And that is the world that we live in right now.
[198] I mean, that project is succeeding, right?
[199] Yeah, yeah.
[200] And then, you know, there is something in the human psyche that Aaron also speaks about.
[201] And that's that, you know, people can't tolerate.
[202] And Thomas Pynchon writes about this, too.
[203] People can't tolerate a sense of randomness or a sense of not knowing.
[204] 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 lone loser just shot the president, you know, that kind of thing.
[205] So they develop a body of facts around that that helped to, you know, assuage their insecure feelings that rise out of those random acts.
[206] Well, I was thinking back during that period from 2012 when this occurred to about 2016.
[207] And one of the changes that I saw was, and I was on, you know, conservative talk radio for many years back then, that up until 2015, 2016, I felt that I was able to push back against false information or, you know, stories like this.
[208] And if you, if you sent somebody a fact check, people go, hey, thank you.
[209] I'm not going to forward that email anymore.
[210] And that all began to change in 2015, really accelerated in 2016, where it became impermeable.
[211] And one of the tipping points, at least to me, as I think back on how we got from there to hear, is something that you highlight in the book, which is when Donald Trump, running for president, fully embraced Alex Joan in the midst of the Sandy Hook truthorism, that he never explicitly endorsed the Newtown theory, but he helped to amplify Jones, and he appeared on his show back in 2015, and he expressed his enthusiasm for Jones telling him, Your reputation is amazing.
[212] I will not let you down.
[213] 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?
[214] Absolutely.
[215] So in 2015, you know, as everyone knows in late 2015, Donald Trump went on in full wars.
[216] And as you just said, you know, praised his audience.
[217] Alex Jones's audience was identified by Roger Stone, who was already a regular on Info Wars, and, you know, erstwhile advisor to former President Trump, he was looking for that audience to be a vital constituency for Donald Trump.
[218] I mean, at that time, you know, he was an outlier in a very crowded Republican primary field.
[219] Most, you know, famously, John McCain would never remember that in 2008, taking them, literally taking the microphone from a woman who said, you know, Obama is an ARAB.
[220] I don't trust him saying, no, no, no, we don't go down that rabbit hole.
[221] It's not happening.
[222] Republican politicians did not embrace that element was always, I mean, the John Birchers were all about the globalists, but those people were shunned by mainstream republicanism.
[223] Yes, very much so.
[224] And Alex 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.
[225] Well, and by the end of 2016, 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.
[226] Outlets like the Drudge Report were, you know, constantly linking to Alex Jones.
[227] So this had come into the mainstream.
[228] And I was thinking, again, thinking back on all this because the fact that he was lying about the dead kids seemed to be so completely disqualifying.
[229] 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?
[230] Right?
[231] I mean, once you've kind of broken that glass.
[232] Exactly.
[233] Yes.
[234] Yeah, they're kind of reaching a point of no return.
[235] 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 it actually happened, you know, sitting in a courtroom, watching these families break down on the witness stand, reliving this, and just going outside and saying it never happened.
[236] Well, you do spend some time highlighting the heroes of this story, which are the parents, you know, like, and you've mentioned several times Larry Posner of the follow of six -year -old Noah.
[237] It's interesting that he actually originally, originally tries to reason with the trolls by releasing Noah's death certificate, his kindergarten report card.
[238] They wanted his body exhumed.
[239] I mean, this is the world or in.
[240] So eventually he gave up on the trolls and decided he was going to try to do something else.
[241] Yeah, he, Lenny has a tech background.
[242] He knew the algorithms of social media that propel this kind of material, you know, that that cause it to spread so swiftly.
[243] He also had a window into the mind he thought of a conspiracy theorist because he had sort of embraced to him, conspiracy theories were like the Da Vinci Code, you know, just something interesting, sort of entertaining.
[244] He had heard Alex Jones's show before he had listened to it from time to time.
[245] So he felt like he had an ability to reason with these individuals.
[246] So, yeah, one night he joined one of the biggest Sandy Hook Facebook groups, you know, Sandy Hook Conspiracy Facebook groups called Sandy Hook Hoax.
[247] And he brought those documents, Noah's death certificate, his birth certificate, some of his school records, and actually his post -mortem report, which is extremely painful reading.
[248] And he tried to convince them.
[249] But there were some individuals.
[250] I mentioned earlier, those moms, you know, who really just didn't want to believe that these children had been killed this way.
[251] He did convince some people.
[252] But a lot of these people, the ones who were most invested in this, who were getting something out of it, whether it was profit or psychic income, they cast him out of that group.
[253] 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.
[254] So Jones was de -platformed in 2018 from Facebook, Apple.
[255] Spotify, YouTube, and yet, you know, he continues to have his audience.
[256] So I was reading the Washington Post review of your book, and they write, it's not too much of a leap to see the line to the Americans who sack the Capitol on January 6th, you know, believing that the election had been stolen from Trump, despite all of the evidence and the court rulings.
[257] And the woman who reviewed your book, Barbara Demick, said that your book was the scariest book she's read because of the persistence of delusion behind it all.
[258] And I think that's kind of the heart of it.
[259] And 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.
[260] I don't want to be too negative here, but it feels at the moment that you and I are speaking, though, that we may be losing this fight.
[261] That's a worry, isn't it?
[262] Because I mean, how do you fight against this?
[263] How do you fight against 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?
[264] I think we have to reach a point, and I know this is going to sound really negative, but I think we have to reach a point where it is no longer profitable, whether monetarily or otherwise, for politically, for people to spread this stuff, where they suddenly realize, you know what, there is an enormous downside here.
[265] I thought the January 6th hearings were going to be one of those moments.
[266] And maybe they still will be.
[267] 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.
[268] That really is the message of the book.
[269] This is a problem that is systemic now.
[270] It's not a one -off.
[271] Sandy Hook was not a one -off.
[272] It was the beginning of a progression that January 6th showed us could only get worse.
[273] And on the right, there's tremendous pushback against this by saying that, you know, big tech is trying to censor us.
[274] And there's a tremendous move to re -platform many of these figures.
[275] We have Elon Musk, who claims to be a free speech absolutist, now controlling Twitter.
[276] there have been legislated.
[277] And he spread a false claim about Paul Pelosi's attack last week?
[278] In his first 72 hours in charge.
[279] Right, right.
[280] Which gives you an indication of where we're going.
[281] So the trend line is not like, okay, we've all gotten our act together and we are not going to spread this pornographic hate and builds, right?
[282] No. And so you wonder where you're going.
[283] Now, you mentioned the profit motive, obviously, which brings us back to this court case, because I think that there was some wishful thinking that losing a one, $1 billion 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?
[284] Will he ever pay that judgment?
[285] Does it bankrupt him in reality?
[286] And are other people going to be dissuaded?
[287] What do you think?
[288] Well, I think these are early days.
[289] One thing I can tell you is that if this experience has taught these families anything, it has taught them patience and resolve.
[290] They are not going to go away.
[291] They will pursue Alex Jones, who is right now, you know, trying to hide his assets.
[292] The Fitt Sandy Hook families say, you know, he's declared bankruptcy.
[293] His parent company has.
[294] He has yet to declare personal bankruptcy.
[295] But I'm confident that we'll leave no stone unturned.
[296] It has never been.
[297] about the money.
[298] 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.
[299] So for them, that's going to be the reason to pursue.
[300] 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.
[301] And if you think you're profiting from it today, you will not be tomorrow.
[302] 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?
[303] 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.
[304] Absolutely.
[305] Yeah.
[306] When you are targeting an individual, whether it is a grieving parent or a company that, you know, what was their crime?
[307] They make voting systems.
[308] You know, then you get yourself, as the Texas lawyers put it in the trial in Austin against Alex Jones this summer, speech is free, lies you pay for.
[309] And that is our system.
[310] So that is what all of these legal actions rest on, that no, your right to free speech does not protect you when you spread knowing adjudicated falsehoods in the public square.
[311] 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.
[312] It doesn't.
[313] You pay for that.
[314] So here's a question that I don't think you'll probably have an answer for.
[315] 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?
[316] No, I don't.
[317] I wish he did.
[318] But no, I think any acknowledgement of the pain he's caused, any acknowledgement of the fact that this tragedy actually happened has been strategic on his part.
[319] It's been at the behest of his lawyers.
[320] Alex Jones is a diagnosed narcissist 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.
[321] And so rather than, you know, these proceedings kind of convincing him that he's caused a lot of pain.
[322] He's, first of all, avoided talking with the families or even appearing in court largely, except when he had to testify.
[323] But he's also, you know, doubled down and said that he'll be questioning more shootings in the future.
[324] So by holding him to account, these families in Alex Jones's mind have reinforced his own sense that he's being persecuted by them.
[325] 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 don't even think in terms of the pain they cause or right and wrong or truth or falsehood.
[326] You know, it is just either a game or a grift or a tactic in order to get what they want to inflict pain on the people that they want to inflict pain on.
[327] And that becomes harder to deal with, that you can't engage then in persuasion or hope that there's going to be reformation, all you can do is use, you know, the blunt force of the courts or the electoral system to push back against them and to reduce the incentive.
[328] Yeah, I mean, you're hoping people's conscience would stop them.
[329] Right.
[330] But if it doesn't, then we have the courts.
[331] The book is Sandy Hook, an American tragedy in the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.
[332] Elizabeth Williamson is feature writer in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.
[333] Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Liz.
[334] Thank you, Charlie.
[335] I really appreciate it.
[336] The Bullwork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri.
[337] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[338] Thank you for listening to today's Bull Work podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow and do this all over again.