The Long Shadow of Sandy Hook

Williamson introduces Jones with some name-calling, dismissing him as “a barrel-chested, useless man” and “a race baiter who protests that he’s not racist.” Her sense of Jones’s inside life will not be at all times coherent. She describes his “perception {that a} totalitarian world authorities, the American federal authorities and highly effective ‘globalist’ enterprise pursuits … aimed to subjugate freedom-loving folks like him,” solely to seemingly contradict herself a couple of paragraphs later by saying Jones “will not be an ideologue; he’s a salesman and a recognized narcissist.” But when Jones’s true nature stays elusive, Williamson is much better at parsing the person’s enterprise technique — which, in fact, doubles as his political technique. Williamson explains that by telling his listeners to do their very own analysis, Jones was driving net site visitors and creating trending subjects that raised his personal present’s score, and presumably the value of his advert time. And she or he is aware of that Jones didn’t act alone: Tirelessly, she follows and debunks a number of different conspiracy theorists, who “swore at members of the family on the road, seemed into their home windows and vandalized their properties and the impromptu memorials to the 26 victims. They despatched them emails demanding, ‘Repent in your sins.’ One mother or father was barraged with telephone calls and emails saying: ‘Your daughter will not be useless. Your daughter is alive.’”

These mini-profiles kind probably the most eye-opening facet of Williamson’s account, during which one type of insanity — the Sandy Hook shooter’s — is eclipsed by a gaggle insanity, a shared delusion too ridiculous ever to have anticipated and too dreadful for many of us ever to ponder. Not each Sandy Hook denier is alike. Whereas some appear cynical, with a political or monetary agenda, others are appearing out of a pathology. “Her feral lack of empathy astonished me,” Williamson writes about one lady, Kelley Watt, who then reveals a bunch of trauma that she should be papering over along with her new life’s calling. However Jones and Infowars, Williamson writes, provided these lone wolves an opportunity to kind a group that, within the custom of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid model in American politics,” united in opposition to a standard enemy. The Sandy Hook households, on this new tribe’s view, weren’t victims, she writes: “They have been threats.” All the better to dehumanize and torment.

As you see Jones provide every of them a megaphone, they usually all begin to work together and assist each other, you get the sense there was nothing these poor Sandy Hook households may have performed. They have been unfortunate sufficient to supply materials to a no-holds-barred propagandist at a second when social media had but to exhibit the total extent of its formidable energy. One tragedy begets a second, thanks to 2 totally different, diseased malefactors — first Lanza, then Jones.

Williamson communes with the heroes on this battle: the households who got here out of hiding, raised the alarm on social media and compelled Jones’s deplatforming. Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son, Noah, was killed, shrewdly compares Jones’s techniques to these {of professional} wrestling. (A lot of his act is staged, for optimum scores, however sooner or later there’s no incentive ever to interrupt character.) Pozner and a second mother or father, Neil Heslin, father of the 6-year-old sufferer Jesse Lewis, lastly haul a few of the deniers into courtroom. When Jones is deposed, he crumbles, proclaiming that he solely lied about Sandy Hook due to “the trauma of the media and firms mendacity a lot.” It’s a ridiculous protection, and even he appears to understand it. “There’s one thing sort of pathetic about him in individual,” Williamson writes. “How tiresome Jones was, and the way harmful. A charismatic, irresponsible man-child with an entourage of paid enablers and an viewers of hundreds of thousands.”

It wasn’t over, although. As soon as he was dropped by Fb and YouTube in 2018, Jones stepped up his conspiracy mongering, accusing Democrats and the “deep state” of plotting to grab energy from Trump. Trump wanted solely to choose up the playbook. Williamson connects the dots like so: Sandy Hook made Jones a star in 2012; Trump embraced Jones, showing on his present and overtly utilizing conspiracy theories as jet gasoline within the 2016 race; and eventually Trump (no stranger to the professional wrestling ethos) adopted Jones’s techniques when he misplaced re-election in 2020. Jones even says he helped elevate cash for the rally that preceded the rebellion on Jan. 6, 2021.