There is another court case going on that you might have heard about, the defamation case against Infowars host Alex Jones for insinuating that the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newton, Connecticut was a “hoax” and a “false flag” event staged by the “government” and aided by parents who willingly allowed their children to pose as “victims” for the purpose of drumming-up support for anti-gun laws. There is a fairly complete overview of the hoax theories, all of them debunked, here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sandy-hook-exposed/.
Many of these conspiracies center around the shooter, Adam Lanza, and whether he was just a patsy who couldn’t possibly have been sufficiently armed to kill 20 children running about and six adult faculty. There were other “suspects,” but these were proven to be innocent bystanders caught up in the law enforcement sweep until Lanza was arrested. But Jones went far beyond that, and has been engaged in conspiratorial thinking from the beginning. Although initially he appeared ready to admit that the massacre actually did occur (but fearing it being used to enact gun laws), it didn’t take long for Jones to give “credence” to every crackpot conspiracy theory.
The reason for that is for all far-right extremists like Jones, his first concern was not about the dead, but about defending the Second Amendment, although for a (very) brief time it was so incomprehensibly heinous that anyone would target innocent six-year-olds that even the likes of Jones could be temporarily discombobulated, and Sandy Hook represented the gravest threat yet to the “right” bear arms indiscriminately. But in time psychopaths like Jones will chase down any feather blowing in a hurricane-force wind that could possibly put the tiniest hint of “doubt” in whether Sandy Hook was a “real” event, instead being a “staged” event, or worse yet, not having happened at all.
In 2014, Infowars latched onto the conspiracy theory that according to the FBI, there were no reported deaths from the “alleged” massacre and this was “proof” that it was a “hoax.” But this was a deliberate misreading of how numbers were tabulated, and the deaths at Sandy Hook were recorded by the Connecticut state police data base as was the usual procedure. From there Jones continued to post articles and videos claiming the massacre was a hoax, and particularly blamed parents for telling lies about their children being dead, and even providing “evidence” that the deceased victims were in fact alive and well, which of course would upset parents still grieving over their loss.
On his radio show in 2015, Jones told a caller who was thanking him for exposing the “facts” that
Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit. I appreciate your call.
Jones also disseminated a horrific personal attack directed at one parent composed by another psychopath named Wolfgang Halbin “suggesting” that if anyone had “died” at the school, that it was the parents who were responsible for “killing” their own children by sending them to a school that allegedly was environmentally “unsafe”—which is odd given that the far-right generally does not give credence to environmental issues and global warming.
In the past year, two separate judges have passed down default guilty judgments against Jones, bypassing a jury trial, claiming that despite being given years to produce documents and ignoring every attempt—by court order or by financial coercion—to do so, they had no choice but assume he was acting as he did because he was indeed guilty, as if that wasn’t obvious to anyone with eyes and ears already. Jones was calling this an illegal witch hunt, and that he was engaging in his right of freedom of speech; but as with Amber Heard, “freedom of speech” doesn’t necessarily mean the “freedom to lie” and defame.
At the present time, the trial in a Texas court is being conducted to determine not Jones' guilt, but the damages he must pay to two of the parents of the dead. The defense played a lengthy video clip in which Jones says "Don't think the globalists who hijacked our country wouldn't stage something like this. Don't ever think this couldn't be staged” but in a later clip, probably in response to anger at this claim, he allowed that someone might have been killed, but still suggesting that it couldn’t be “denied” that it was deliberately staged for effect. But the attorney for the plaintiffs showed that Jones quickly gave credence to every crackpot conspiracy from the likes of Halbig, who was also accused of engaging in identify theft of the personal information of targeted parents and unlawfully distributing that information in an effort to discredit and defame those parents.
We have been told that Jones is on his seventh legal team, and he is really scraping the bottom of ethical barrel; here his latest defense attorney is flipping the bird at the plaintiff’s attorney:
Probably the most interesting testimony (if it can be called that) came from an alleged “producer” of Infowars, Daria Karpova, who seemed to know very little, but was more than willing to offer an “opinion.” Here the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, angrily tells her to answer the questions put to her instead of going off on tangents, and does not accept Karpova’s “apology” for being ill-prepared to answer questions when she was given four months to prepare herself to answer them:
Here is some of Karpova’s unhelpful testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKb-ySKkN5Q. Although she admitted using Halbig as a “credible” source of information was a mistake, she managed to make things worse by hypocritically claiming that Jones could actually have been the Sandy Hook victims greatest “champion” if he hadn’t been lied about, but the plaintiff’s attorney pointed out the nonsense of this claim because Jones invited criticism from the start by giving an air of “legitimacy” to the monstrous hoax claims.
It is interesting to note that Karpova is Russian, and over on Reddit I found that commentators noted that Infowars has a pro-Russia and pro-Putin slant, and that Karpova has appeared on Jones’ show as a “Russia expert” and that she has served as a Russian interpreter for Jones when he exchanges thoughts with Kremlin propagandists. Why should we find this “interesting”? More evidence that the far-right has more in common with Russian authoritarian impulses—and even more “interestingly” is a willing conduit for Russian attempts to encourage divisiveness and undermine democracy in this country.
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