Alex Jones, the great liar who lost in court, but not entirely

Nothing is worse than the pain of losing a child, but what followed for the parents of the elementary school children slaughtered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2012 was a parallel hell: a campaign of harassment and threats unleashed by the master of all hoaxes.

The last thing the parents of the 20 children killed in Newport, Connecticut needed was for a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones to accuse them of staging a hoax. Jones ran the toxic misinformation website Infowars. On his channel, which was broadcast on the platform, Jones repeated, over and over again, that the massacre had been a set-up, that the parents were method actors, that the whole thing had been staged by the government in order to ban the possession of guns by ordinary citizens. Jones’ histrionic speeches prompted his followers to harass the suffering parents on the street, and threaten them with violence and death and even desecration of the graves of their loved ones.

The HBO documentary The Truth Vs Alex Jones is gut-churning and will make your blood boil. It chronicles the rise and fall of one of America’s great ultra-right misinformation disseminators, from his early days as a TV presenter to the two trials that brought him down.

Before the Sandy Hook massacre, Jones had already insisted that the government was involved in the 9/11 Twin Towers attack; that fluoride in tap water can kill; that radiation from the Japanese Fukushima plant had crossed the Pacific and contaminated California (it had been detected, but in minimal quantities). Each story came with a remedy from Jones’ teleshop. For example, iodine supplements would save the thyroid from the nuclear fallout. Some of his followers say that they saw him as a comedian, a funny, cheeky guy; more believed what they heard: a quarter of U.S. citizens believed Jones when he said the Sandy Hook shooting had been staged.

When 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot his mother at home and proceeded to slaughter 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook school, it didn’t take Jones 48 hours to give his deluded version of events. And he went on and on. He examined every gesture of the parents of the dead in a bid to prove they were agents of a conspiracy. He showed them on screens, gave their names and email addresses. He turned them into a target. One follower sneaked into the home of grieving parents looking for the child who, according to Jones, would be alive and simply in hiding. These parents were then faced with the absurd challenge of having to prove that their son had existed and was now dead — a useless exercise as believers in conspiracies rarely allow themselves to be convinced.

The documentary includes the memories of the torn families and the lies of a deranged Jones. The story ramps up in dramatic intensity during Jones’ two trials for defamation. One trial took place in Texas and the other in Connecticut. Both were filmed and at times come across like a movie. The confrontation between Jones and Scarlett Lewis, the mother of a murdered six-year-old boy, is worthy of any courtroom drama. “Do you think I’m an actress?” she asks him. “No, I don’t,” he replies. “I know you believe me, but when you leave this courtroom you’ll say the same thing again on your show,” she concludes. And she was right.

Jones’ attitude and gestures are puzzling. In the first trial, he tried to be awkwardly empathetic, apologizing in his own way, and making out he had not lied knowingly. In fact, he accepted the shooting as “100% true.” But this didn’t wash as before and after the courtroom sessions, he would stand in front of the camera and insult the court and repeat his lies. He was ordered to pay $55 million to the first parents who sued him. At the second trial, he became more insolent and presented himself as the guardian of free speech. The judge becomes exasperated with his evasions and inconsistencies not to mention his lies under oath. This second trial cost Jones $965 million.

The families have not received the compensation because Alex Jones declared insolvency and Infowars was declared bankrupt. The documentary ends with a bitter victory for truth, but there is no happy ending. And what has followed has only served to rub salt into the wound: Jones re-opened his account on X, thanks to Elon Musk — the prominence of people like Jones on X is now a good reason to move to Bluesky. Vice President-elect J. D. Vance said in 2021 that Jones was someone who “speaks truths.”

Infowars was part of the fake media ecosystem that helped dial up the ultra-right noise as early as 2016 — along with Steve Bannon’s Breitbart. Now that Donald Trump is back in office with a free rein, people like Jones will flourish — Jones and the demagogue Tucker Carlson, the worst of the Kennedys, and the other anti-vaccine, QAnon and pizzagate conspiracists. And, above all, the biggest troll on the networks, Musk himself, Trump’s right-hand man.

While the bankruptcy proceedings were being finalized, Infowars continued to spread hoaxes and sell pseudo-pharmaceuticals. Jones fueled the delusions of his followers almost uninterrupted. But the court has ordered an auction to sell off Infowars and, in an ironic twist, the bid was won by The Onion, a satirical and progressive website that intends to turn it into a parody. It is not yet a done deal: Jones has appealed it. It would be a joke if that were the only price Alex Jones had to pay. But winter is coming. A dark era looms.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition