Crime Doesn’t Pay: Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook families

Josh Koskoff

TLU New York City | September 20th - 23rd

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On December 14, 2012, at 12 noon central, only two and a half hours after the Sandy Hook shooting and as anxious parents gathered in a firehouse near the school to await word as to whether their children were alive or dead, Alex Jones went to work. Taking to the airwaves from his Infowars studio in Austin, Texas, he decried the shooting as a staged event; a false flag perpetrated for the benefit of “global elites” designed so that the government could confiscate people's guns. This was, after all, Jones Modus Operandi: in the wake of national tragedies like 9/11 and Sandy Hook he would stoke fear, desperation, and hatred by promoting his dystopian world view. His motivation? Money. The more outrageous the narrative, the more traffic to his website, the more traffic to his website, the more products he could sell.

But Jones’ Sandy Hook narrative took an immediate turn on the day after the shooting towards a more specific, darker, more dangerous, and more targeted lie: he told his listeners that the families were actors, that the children didn’t exist, and that Sandy Hook didn’t happen. Thus began a decades long campaign by Jones who returned again and again and again to this lie, launching a continuous sustained assault on these families, driving traffic to his InfoWars empire, and raking in millions. Until the families struck back.

In this presentation, I'll take you through how Alex Jones built his empire and leveraged social media, employed the tactics of dictators and cult leaders, and monetized hate and lies to enrich himself. And I will show you how these families, through their collective courage, took him down. You will see clips from Jones broadcasts, and I'll take you through the ins and outs of the trial that resulted in the largest defamation verdict in American History.