At long last, Alex Jones, star of his own ultra right-wing radio show called Infowars, is found ultimately responsible for lies, slander and defamation against parents whose little children were shot to death at school. After the mass shooting in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Infowars, starring Jones, erroneously claimed and maintained all these years that it was a leftist plot to change gun laws. Jones figured the Black U.S. President Barack Obama was hated enough for the Infowars’ audience to believe Sandy Hook didn’t happen. It was so horrible, it couldn’t have happened, he knew millions of Americans would believe. Some disturbed young man, depicted in MSM with the same peculiar grainy black-and-white photo, and dubious past never thoroughly analyzed even in a TV series or movie? It’s simply made up. No way could a skinny guy use a military-style assault rifle and successfully shoot open a locked steel door, kill every brave adult (principal, counselor, teacher) who got in his way then calmly proceed to his old classroom where as a youngster he was allegedly bullied—and shoot, repeatedly, 20 little kids unknown to him. No, that just didn’t happen, Jones angrily pressed … over and over and over again—his listeners in total agreement. No way a 20-year-old guy takes loaded firearms into a school and shoots a bunch of students until stopped or shooting himself.
Practically every one of the deceased school children were shot five to six times, their bodies red meat. They were no longer recognized as human beings.
And so because they did not resemble real children, perhaps that is the reason millions of Americans chose to believe a lie. No way did this school shooting happen. Besides, Connecticut is so very far away from Texas, the base of Jones and his Austin business.
When I heard of the elementary school shooting, whispered by a fellow teacher in the halls of the elementary school where we taught, and that the dead were little children, tears welled in my eyes. I knew it happened. No doubt. School shootings not only occur on a regular basis, our nation continues to do nothing to stop them.
The message to troubled adolescents is this is normal instead of abnormal. America has made school shootings a part of life at school for at least one generation.
Strong delusion
But school shootings are not the only repeated nightmare Americans live through. Believers of the gospel according to Alex Jones chose to pursue the parents of all those dead little ones in a school called Sandy Hook. (What kinda made up name is that? And Newtown? The whole thing sounds fake. Fake news! Government conspiracy! There’s no other explanation).
So from the get-go, Infowarriors went after the grieving parents with a vengeance. They shouted them down in public, mocked them as ‘crisis actors,’ questioned their tears. The warriors said the parents never had a child attending Sandy Hook Elementary School. They’re all Democrats, Jones’ warriors presumed, and therefore are in on the big government plan to confiscate every Americans’ guns or just the military-style assault rifles that kill and maim lots of people in seconds. The Infowarriors took to social media, harassing the Sandy Hook families, as the sad parents with dead children from this school shooting came to be known. Not a stone was left unturned in the private lives of those parents. The parents were yelled at while mourning their children at the funerals, scorned at their children’s gravesites, stalked everywhere they went. Their homes were repeatedly vandalized, their addresses and phone numbers and workplaces made public for even more crazy Americans (the manic types with a lot of time on their hands and minds) to stalk and harass and intimidate them—for years, all these years. Parents moved from home to home, from town to town, state to state, trying to get on with their lives and, yes, take the high road in avoiding the crazed and ignorant Infowarriors but to no avail.
They had no choice but to sue, and they sued the Big Fish. Let the police deal with the little people who harassed them and vandalized their homes and property. Then the plaintiffs waited for the slow wheels of justice. They were in the right. They deserved to live in peace after their children’s murders.
Their story, every bit of it, is true.
So Alex Jones owes the Sandy Hook families he tormented on air with spiteful words and sarcastic self-assured cynicism—all of it an ‘act,’ he told the Texas judge presiding over a child custody battle with an ex wife. He’s just an entertainer, he said on the stand—and Infowars, just his current gig. He can’t help what his fans believe is truth and bluster and therefore can’t be responsible for their actions toward real people he constantly and loudly defamed on air. He maintained his right of free speech even if lies with terrible consequences.
But the Sandy Hook parents, who like any parent of a murdered child, could care less about the millions of dollars they may or may never get from Alex Jones. Today and in the foreseeable future, they contact parents whose children are shot to death in American schools—because the same Infowarriors use social media to bully, harass, intimidate and in the end terrorize any parent whose child is killed in a mass school shooting. The same bunch went after the parents of Uvalde immediately after that elementary school shooting this year. (Uvalde, what a made up name. A Texas town? Yeah, right. Never heard of it. Can’t be real. Never happened. Government just wants our guns! Never!)