Being a Non American, I have heard a lot about this recently. I know Alex Jones is paying billions of $$ to victims but what happened?
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There was a school shooting, and Alex Jones repeatedly went on the air saying it was fake, and that every victim and crying parent was a hired actor trying to start a discussion about gun laws.
These comments led to harrassment and threats towards the victims and their families – as if they hadn’t been through enough already.
Guy runs/owns a “media company”. He claimed that Sandy Hook was faked and children didn’t die etc. Got sued by parents, lost and now has to pay them damages awarded by court. End of story. The less you know about him, the better you’d be, honestly. He doesn’t deserve attention.
Sandy Hook was a mass shooting at an elementary school, where a number of children were murdered.
Alex Jones took to his platform and declared it was a false flag operation, that the victims were crisis actors, that nobody actually died. He also followed the families of the dead children around and harassed them with his crackpot bullshit, compounding the families grief by torturing them more with his shit.
Did I miss anything?
So Alex Jones runs InfoWars (a website), is a popular conspiracy theorist and made a lot of money spreading right-wing conspiracies. One being the Sandy Hook school shooting, which 26 people were shot and killed, Alex Jones said it’s fake and his followers harassed the kids and parents of the school. The parents sued Alex Jones, whom lost the case and is ordered to by 1B dollars:
[https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/12/alex-jones-sandy-hook-shooting/](https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/12/alex-jones-sandy-hook-shooting/)
On 14 Dec 2012, a young man shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. 26 people died, of which 20 were elemental school kids between ages 6-7.
The shooting re-sparked discussions in the US about gun control.
Alex Jones is a “journalist”. More accurately, he’s a TV/radio personality who operates in the far-right/alt-right sphere. He started his main website, Infowars, in around 2000 – the site has been universally criticised for peddling mostly conspiracy theories and inflammatory hate but is quite popular among its target audience of far-right conspiracy theorists.
Ever since Sandy Hook took place, Alex Jones has been claiming the event did not happen. He openly states that he believes the event was a hoax perpetrated to force a conversation on gun control (Jones is vehemently in favour of no/low gun control). The idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax began to spread through his viewership, who began harassing the parents of the children who died, claiming their kids never existed.
This was, obviously, pretty horribly upsetting for the parents. Many of them got death threats for “perpetrating the lie”.
Over 2018, various parents of children who died in Sandy Hook began to bring defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones.
I won’t go into the specifics of the court dates, but tl;dr the parents won. Alex Jones has been ordered to pay millions in damages to various parents across various cases.
Alex Jones almost certainly does not have enough money to pay all of the damages he’s been ordered to pay. Since around 2022, he’s begun restructuring his various companies and filing bankruptcies in an attempt to avoid paying as much money as possible.
The Sandy Hook parents intervened, basically saying that he should not be allowed to get out of paying this money. This is still going through the courts.
And Alex Jones is still, to this day, claiming that Sandy Hook was a hoax and that this legal action is just a new kind of coverup.
Sandy Hook Elementary School were the location of a school mass shooting in 2012. 20 victims were between 6 and 7 years old. As most of the nations news entertainers did Alex Jones covered this story. But he had a very different twist on it. He claimed that the school shooting was staged by the left wing. He claimed that the 20 affected families were hired actors. Even after the event left the news cycles he continued to bring it up and continued his crazy claims. He was under the impression that if he continued to talk about it some of the families would eventually fold and tell him what he wanted to her. When none of them did he told his listeners to call the families and ask them about how their kid died. He posted phone numbers and addresses of these families. People started calling the families bringing up the death of their kids and telling them they were lying. They started showing up to the houses of the families shouting at them. Some even had guns. Some of these families had to move and all suffered horrible trauma from being harassed by Alex Jones’ followers.
They eventually sued Alex Jones for damages. During the trial they managed to uncover evidence showing that Alex Jones knew that the Sandy Hook shooting was real and that he only made the claims to make himself more popular and to help out the republican election campaign. He even worked with campaign officials and politicians on this so he could coordinate his attacks on the families of the Sandy Hook tragedy with other political events. He were sentenced to pay the families for all the damages he had done to them over the ten years. In response to this he have been trying to hide away his fortunes hoping they can not get to them but so far it looks like he will be forced to pay the families everything he owes and it still does not cover the damages he did to them.
One important thing the other comments haven’t mentioned is that there’s hard evidence that Jones knew that what he was saying was false.
If he was just wrong or dumb, that’d be a defense he could use. These judgments came because they were able to prove that he was slandering these families while knowing that it wasn’t true.
There’s a school shooting that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults, but Jones and his followers claimed that the victims and their family were *crisis actors.* They also said that the shooting was a hoax staged by the government as part of a plot to push for stricter gun control laws.
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Plenty of good explanations here, so I’ll just add my experience to it.
I worked in an elementary school. We had just let the kids out for the day when I found a group of teachers huddled around the TV, and this was on the news.
WITHIN TEN MINUTES of getting home, my parent was ranting about “crisis actors” and how it was all fake so “Obama could take our guns”.
Alex Jones uses fear and skepticism of government to push these insane things, and people eat it up and keep going back.
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