How crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones and demagogues like Donald Trump keep poisoning American hearts and minds
I just finished reading Elizabeth Williamson’s new book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, and it really has hit me hard. The book is a tour-de-force dissection of the rise of crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones of Infowars, who, along with a lesser army of self-styled debunkers, gun nuts, and freaked-out young suburban moms, decided that the 2012 massacre of 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, had to be fake, or a government plot to drive the public toward drastic gun control, or both. As Williamson notes, while Americans have a long history of skepticism bordering on conspiracism, this reaction to the Sandy Hook tragedy marks a watershed.
A 2013 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that a quarter of all Americans thought that the facts about Sandy Hook were being hidden, and an additional 11 percent were unsure. Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, tells Williamson that according to his research, as of 2020, one-fifth of all Americans believed that every school shooting was faked. And not just school shootings; Uscinski says virtually all high-profile mass shootings draw this level of doubt.
As a Politifact article on the ongoing skepticism about mass shootings points out, “Search queries for the term ‘false flag’ over the past five years have spiked during mass shootings, including those at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (November 2015) and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (June 2016). Interest peaked during the week of the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017, which inspired widespread false flag conspiracies. And searches for the term shot up again after the El Paso and Dayton attacks.”
One out of every five of us is living in another reality, where mass shootings can’t be real.
I can understand somewhat a suburban mom not being able to believe that something as evil as Sandy Hook actually happened, because it threatens her most precious possessions: her children and their safety. Instead of accepting that, yes, their lives are not perfectly safe, it might be psychologically easier to deny that mass shootings can be real. But cruelty and psychotic behavior are real problems, and when damaged young men (and sometimes older ones) can easily get their hands on killing machines, they’re going to use them. That’s a painful reality about America, the one country in the world where this keeps happening, as the Onion headline puts it.
Still, I find it incredibly hard to accept that so many people could imagine that our government might be that corrupt, or so beholden somehow to the cause of gun control, that it could deliberately enable the murder of children or somehow hire actors to perform for years as grief-stricken parents. While a similar portion of Americans have come to believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden, or agree with the QAnon theory that Democrats are a pedophilic cult, I guess I’ve always read those disturbing facts as the product of Republican political gamesmanship. GOP leaders from Trump down have fanned these fears for political gain, after all. No major Republican leader has ever suggested that Sandy Hook was a hoax.
And yet, as Williamson shows, even if a celebrity-turned-demagogue like Trump never endorsed Alex Jones’ ravings about Sandy Hook, he certainly endorsed Jones when he appeared on Infowars back in December 2015, when the real-estate mogul hadn’t yet won any primaries. Williamson reminds us that their on-air conversation started with Jones affirming Trump’s baseless claim that thousands of radical Muslims had celebrated in the streets of New Jersey after the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11. And later during the same show, after demurring when Jones asked him if it was time to impeach President Obama and prosecute Hillary Clinton, Trump goes all in on Jones, embracing his apocalyptic claims that globalists and crony capitalists were seeking to impose socialism at the grassroots level to control the people. “We can turn it around,” Trump says to Jones. “But I would agree with you that if we don’t get it right this time, I’m not sure if you go another four or eight years with the insanity and stupidity of these leaders, I’m not sure you’re going to be able to turn it around any more.”
After dallying at an earlier point in his public career with running for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination as a liberal, truth-telling independent, Trump understood one key thing about America far better than other Republicans seeking the White House. The 2008 election of Barack Obama, a Black man, represented a profound and unacceptable shock to a large number of white Americans, especially those who identify with the Confederacy. Thus he staked his claim to national leadership on a kind of denialist conspiracy that built him a mainline to that base: birtherism. If Obama wasn’t born in America, he couldn’t legitimately be president, and since he was Black, that made him suspect already.
It’s all connected, after all. They — the Jews with their cosmopolitan values and all their money and power, they want to replace us “legitimate” Americans with hordes of illegal aliens who will stuff the ballot boxes for Democratic pedophiles and baby killers — and the only thing that can stop them are us good guys with our guns. And the merest whiff of doing anything to make it harder for young people or unstable people to get guns, or for law-abiding Americans to get high-powered assault weapons that are only for killing other people, why that just shows why we need to get more guns, to stop the tyranny.
So as it turns out, we should have seen Sandy Hook denialism as the first warning of what was slouching our way.
Williamson offers a somewhat happier ending, showing how a number of parents of Sandy Hook victims fought back against the denialists, ultimately shaming big tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into de-platforming much of their garbage content and also winning several lawsuits against people like Jones. She shows that it is still possible to marginalize and penalize people who traffic in harm-causing theories like Sandy Hook denialism, which is the best we can do with cranks and racists in a free society.
But the breakdown of trust she illustrates hasn’t been healed. Sadly, Google search interest in “false flag” operations jumped again on May 25th, the day after the Uvalde massacre. The “truthers” are still out there, and their paranoia and prejudices are still being organized by politicians and demagogues who want to keep us divided and prevent us from addressing the underlying cruelties in our hyper-capitalist society that can turn a damaged and alienated teenage boy into a deadly mass murderer.