Elizabeth Williamson, author of Sandy Hook, An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, reveals how Alex Jones exploited trauma at the 2016 RNC, where fringe media like Infowars became lifelines for desperate believers. She uncovers his contradictory tactics—denouncing "globalists" while courting celebrity validation—and the psychological reinforcement behind hoaxers like Kelly Watt and Jim Fetzer, who doubled down despite evidence. Williamson’s research highlights how conspiracy narratives thrive on psychic income, shielding adherents from scrutiny, even as Sandy Hook families’ raw testimonies serve as a warning. The episode underscores how misinformation spreads faster now than ever, with algorithms turning fringe theories into viral dogma, while arrests like Enrique Tarrio’s show the legal pushback against such movements. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, in fact, I first got to know both of you, your work, that is, and your show, because Lenny Posner, who is the father of Noah Posner, the youngest Sandy Hook victim, recommended that I listen to your podcast, sort of going back and taking a look at what Alex Jones said on the day of the shooting.
So that was how I first became acquainted with you both and had that whole show transcribed.
And, you know, kind of really studied what you had to say about it.
So that's how you sort of came upon our show, but was that in the context that you had already had it in your mind to write a book about this subject matter?
I got to know Lenny, obviously, at the very beginning of the project because he was one of Two families that sued Alex Jones in Texas in the middle of 2018.
And when I saw that kind of come over the transom, you know, one of our reporters who covers breaking news, put that in the paper.
And I thought, wow, that is a pretty interesting test of the First Amendment.
And at the time, we were really in the middle of, you know, the very beginning of the Trump era, the concept of post-truth and alternative facts.
And this just seemed like.
A real test.
Alex Jones, as you guys have documented for years, often claims, if not always, claims the First Amendment as a defense for what he says.
And this seemed like a great test of, you know, what is free speech?
And do your First Amendment rights cover spreading material that results in significant harm to already vulnerable people?
That is one thing that I enjoyed about the book is, I mean, it doesn't matter how many years we're going to do this.
You still have to write out the entirety of the First Amendment, put it in the book, and then remind people once again, it only protects you from the government.
The thing I think is really fun, too, is that now that has become such a meme, kind of, that is used by people in other countries as sort of a buzzword.
You saw that with the Canadian...
Truck organizers.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's very strange how that understanding has taken off.
But you're somebody who I know, you were writing about Alex, or you had written about Alex prior to this, if I understand correctly, because I know that my first interaction with you was Alex yelling about you.
I had heard him complain about something you had written before we had ever spoken.
I may have heard about him a little bit during 2015, but my first exposure to him sort of in the flesh was during the Republican National Convention in 2016 in Cleveland.
So he and Roger Stone, and I describe this in the book, they were on the stage at the America First Unity Rally on the Cuyahoga River, on the convention, you know, sort of in the convention city, if not on the convention grounds.
And I sat down next to a woman who was a very nice, she seemed like just one of those nice women, you know, she was sitting there.
You know, had a really big smile and kind of a gentle way about her.
She was probably in her early 60s.
And I was asking her the way I was asking a lot of people who were there for that rally.
Alex Jones and Roger Stone were on the stage.
And I was saying, where do you get your news?
And she was saying, Louder with Crowder, Infowars, Ben Shapiro.
And she said, you know.
If you're a journalist, because I, of course, introduced myself as one, she said, if you're a journalist and you're not listening to those shows, you're only getting half the story.
Well, I mean, bridge jumping's pretty hot these days.
That's fair.
There's also a nice irony to that image that you're painting of this rally involving people like Alex and Roger Stone who are so staunchly opposed to government regulations happening on the Cuyahoga River, which is Essentially a testament to the effectiveness of the EPA.
His staffers were telling me that that, you know, one of them described him as, you know, he would always say, you know, as you guys know better than me, you know, Hollywood, the root of all, you know, globalist evil and.
At the same time, he said he was like a girl screaming after the Beatles when it came to, you know, people he was meeting at the convention.
He was really, and also the other thing he was doing, which is, you know, his cameraman who was with him at the time told me for the book that You know, what they were doing is, you know, making their way through media row.
You know, they were inside rather than outside the convention barrier where, you know, Alex Jones would typically be with his bullhorn, you know, always on the outside of the perimeter.
Instead, they were very much a part of things.
He was definitely on the ascendant.
They were, you know, kind of swanning through the crowd.
Creating provocations, you know, on Meteorow, he crashed, sank Uyghur's show, The Young Turb.
And I really did feel like very much an outsider because, of course, as soon as that story went in the paper, I got a lot of, you know, people who listen to Ben Shapiro do not listen to louder with Crowder.
And how could you put them in the same sentence?
And, you know, all of that.
But my broader point, you know, nerdier point, was just that this is a whole group of personalities and shows and sources of information that most of us have never really heard of at the New York Times at that time.
In the intervening time, because I mean, one thing that we talked about with Mark Bankston, who is a solid protagonist in your book, he specifically said, you know, over the years that I've absorbed myself in this case, you know, it has definitely changed some of the way that I think about things.
Do you feel like this has had that kind of effect on you as well?
But he told me once, after one of the, while I was working on the book, we went out to dinner and...
I remember Mark went off to take a phone call, and Bill was talking about how his role in the case was listening to hundreds and hundreds of hours of InfoWars broadcasts to find the points where he references the families so that they could make sure they had every reference to the plaintiffs, to the Sandy Hook families.
And he said, I was seriously starting to lose it.
He said he...
Late one night, he just was listening to his 40th or 50th successive InfoWars four-hour programming stint, and he was saying, oh my God, what if he's right?
But it is true that if you, and that's the sort of frog boil of all of this, isn't it?
This form of propaganda is like Nazi times.
You start with a relatively minor suggestion.
Then you start with something a little stronger.
You have a small lie.
Then you have a little bigger lie.
I mean, the very first lie was about crowd sizes at the inauguration, right?
On the very first day.
And then, you know, look at the size of the lies.
By the time we got to January 6th.
And it really was a kind of continuum like that.
And it was sort of like before we really knew it, you know, we were looking at this and saying, this lie about the 2020 election was unthinkable even a year ago.
And here is a significant swath of Americans who really believe it.
I mean, I suppose my next question then is like, do you feel like this type of propaganda is different?
Because, you know, before 2017, before the inauguration, it wasn't like that's the first time people were believing in things that were clearly and incontrovertibly bullshit.
So do you feel like this is something that you have interacted with in a different way from, let's say, other forms of propaganda?
So I think taking the long view, Jordan, I think the big thing, obviously, that...
Is a big difference, certainly from the Nazi era until now, is social media.
And, you know, the gigantic uptake in social media, even from, you know, say, so I went back and I talked to parents of, you know, the mother of a young woman who was involved in the Virginia Tech massacre.
And she was saying, you know, here was a huge shooting on a college campus in a state.
Where, you know, people would get concerned about gun policy in the aftermath of that.
And there just really wasn't a lot of conspiracy theorizing around that shooting.
But if you look at, you know, how many people had a Facebook account, for example, in 2007, when that occurred, it was 20 million people.
By December of 2012, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, that number was 1 billion.
And I really think that that has accelerated.
I mean, we've spoken together about some of the old cultish things and things like that.
The lone guy on the subway with, you know, a photocopied sheet, you know, about the JFK assassination or, you know, those people were really isolated before.
And now they've found each other and they can speed whatever they come up with around the world in seconds.
Yeah, and I think that through the social media and YouTube, they've found really efficient ways to monetize and create businesses out of the speediness of that messaging.
And that's got to be a pretty negative reinforcement.
the privacy stuff has become so much more clear since.
You know, I think in just my time since I was in college, you know, Facebook went from the Facebook where it was the thing where only college students were on it to being like open and kind of like this interesting way that you could like promote events.
And there's all kinds of possibilities to it to now.
It's like your grandma's on there and she's sending you chain emails.
I mean, you know, I have an 18-year-old, and he got on Twitter maybe in the last two or three months because he's communicating with, you know, his football buddies or something like that.
But even before that, though, no social media accounts whatsoever.
You know, just kind of...
Took it on board that, boy, if you want to go to college, one great way not to get into the school of your choice is to have somebody surface one of your old, you know, awful tweets or Facebook posts, you know, or Instagram posts.
And also, you know, they're just that much more technologically savvy.
You know, they kind of understand how the sausage is made online, which is really interesting.
I mean, and that actually, that knowledge is being used, as I say in the book, you know, there's a series of games now where people can make up a conspiracy theory as a kind of game, as a way to inoculate them against...
glomming on to conspiracy theories and spreading them online without really knowing it before That's great.
How do you make one?
You know, how do you make it spread?
Like, what elements do you put in there to make it really viral?
You know, just responding to the, you know, outrage algorithm and all of that.
So if you see something online and they're studying this, you know, there are people who are looking at this and if they kind of inoculate people in that way by showing them how this is made and how to spread them, then when they run into them online, they're less likely to spread them themselves and to be more skeptical.
Because what is the belief in a conspiracy theory?
It's sort of saying, I possess superior knowledge.
I know something the rest of you rubes don't know.
And so if you can use that in this sort of pre-bunking thing, as they call it, all to the good.
Because talking people out of this stuff, as you guys know, is really hard.
In reporting this book, Just every conspiracy theorist I spoke with.
In fact, there's one in particular, Kelly Watt, whose life I really sort of delve into.
I was just very curious about how does someone with the email handle, great mom, you know, G-R-8, numeral 8 mom, actually get to a place where she's posting on Lenny Posner's memorial site to his murdered son.
And, you know, and then the idea of, so she had a cleaning, house cleaning, house and office cleaning business in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
You know, her sort of unique contribution to this crazy quilt of Sandy Hook theories was, let's find out what company cleaned up the school after the massacre.
And that became one of the more toxic requests that these hoaxers put in to the Board of Ed in Newtown and to the city of Newtown.
You know, we want a copy of the contract and we want receipts and we want photos.
And they were extremely graphic in what they were describing might have been cleaned up from the school.
And the thing that was really interesting is one of Lenny Posner's volunteers in debunking all of this stuff actually found the records, a police report that said this is the name of the company.
I actually called the company.
I had a conversation with them.
They confirmed that, yes, they did, in fact, clean up the school.
There was an extremely detailed record of what was removed from the school and what happened to it.
And so I presented this to her.
Comes the answer after some silence.
Where's the receipts?
So, it's just never ending.
And, you know, there is no...
And I actually think that maybe someone like her, they're so far down the rabbit hole that there would be a level of shame involved.
I think a lot of the parents, you know, enlighten me to this and share this view that in the beginning, this was such a horrific crime that no one wanted to believe it happened.
You know, it was the parents themselves, when they write and speak about it, they talk about waking up in those first days, you know, and saying, oh my God, what a horrible nightmare I just had.
And then realizing that they're living it.
That is their life.
And that did happen.
And there were a significant number of these early...
And one of them, you know, I profile for the book, a woman named Tiffany Moser, who became one of Lenny's most convinced and committed volunteers, who, you know, had had a tragic situation in her past.
She hit a child with her car and that child died.
She had Two children who were around the same age as the children who were killed.
And she went on to the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook page just saying, I am here for whoever can tell me this didn't happen.
I just need to believe that this did not occur.
And that was Jen, too.
She also took a little bit of a true crime kind of approach to the whole crime.
But these were the people who kind of peeled off because they were open to being convinced.
It was more of a gut kind of emotional reaction to the crime itself.
I believe it was actually on the very first day when the news broke, because this is something that I remember specifically when we covered it, is when the news first broke.
Alex did not immediately have a negative reaction.
His first reaction, his instinctive reaction was, I'm sorry.
Just thinking about the differences between what makes somebody who would give up on the conspiracy when confronted with some reality and somebody who sticks to their guns.
I think it really has to do with, I mean, this guy at University of Miami, Joe Ushinsky, who studied conspiracy theories, especially political ones.
And I would call this one of those because gun control was always a factor and, you know, or almost consistently.
And definitely the government planned it, makes it a political conspiracy theory.
But, you know, he will say, you know, even QAnon.
Does not select for politics.
That, you know, it is really your kind of mindset and your personality much more than your politics that determines whether or not you believe these conspiracy theories.
And, you know, initially I was skeptical because QAnon is so much about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and, you know, Democratic stronghold and blah, blah.
If you really look at, you know, the different variants of that, you know, child trafficking theme, you can kind of understand where he's coming from.
And I think, you know, a lot of these people, there's a level of narcissism, as you guys have documented so well with Jones, that, you know, I need to possess superior knowledge.
And then there's a certain, you know, and this is this woman, Kelly Watts' daughter, Madison, explained to me, you know.
My mom never felt like anybody really respected her for having an original idea or making a kind of intellectual contribution or something like that.
It's really important to her to be the sort of very unique truth, which, you know, it's hard to even countenance that.
You think, you know, other people would, you know, maybe like...
The interesting thing about your book that I appreciate is that despite it being very focused on Sandy Hook, it is also...
A really good example of that kind of great conspiracy theory singularity.
So many of these people wound up at Sandy Hook conspiracy theories coming from different motives, different backgrounds, different things that they wanted to be true.
And, you know, as you point out, yoga moms turn into anti-vaxxers five years later.
And it's all the same conspiracy theory, but people are just coming at it from so many different areas.
And, you know, one thing I didn't explore a lot, although I did in talking about Kelly Watt's life and kind of what her life had been, because there's a lot of trauma in her life.
I do think trauma in some of these folks' lives played a role.
You know, like Tiffany Moser, the woman, you know, who had the accident with her car and a child died or, you know, we just had a story in the Times yesterday about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his belief in, you know, just one of the biggest anti-vaxxers, you know, with an enormous following and just like an absolutely divisive force in the Kennedy family.
But, you know, a lot of trauma in that guy's life.
No, I mean, it is it is very much a I find it so analogous to evangelical born again Christians, the ones that come to it later in life because something happened.
Something is like prisoner.
Yeah.
I mean, or yeah.
Well, Roger Stone, of course.
But there is that, like, there's an inciting event that where you're at your lowest, there's a group that love bombs you, essentially, and then you're just in, you know?
So if you're at your lowest point, your business isn't going so well, nobody's helping you out, you find a QAnon website, you're immediately love bombed with, guess what?
Yeah, no, it's, that makes me think of, I think that's a really good point.
It makes me think of somebody like Mike Flynn.
You know, Mike Flynn, when he was in the military, was, you know, people called it Flynnformation, you know, his kind of misconceptions about Islam or radicalism or, you know.
I know, but it's a general, and you're telling me that everybody's like, oh yeah, we know that guy's full of shit, but we're going to continue promoting him.
Yeah, but it was that, you know, that kind of, the thing that really struck me about a lot of these groups, like the Sandy Hook Hoax group, or any of these gatherings, you know, on social media, was how mutually reinforcing they were.
You know, they all made each other feel really smart.
And that's what Kelly Watts' daughter said.
To have a guy like Jim Fetzer, who is a PhD, who is a former professor of...
Wait for it.
Logic at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest Sandy Hook hoaxers out there, praising her for her insights, for her scrappy reporting, for calling hundreds of people in Newtown and never giving up as she sought, you know, the contract, the Holy Grail for, you know, who cleaned up the school.
That makes people feel good.
And if they don't have a lot of other sources for that, it's really hard to...
Yeah, his family was so angry that But it was like crack to him, the idea that he would get yet one more interview and some attention and be able to trumpet his, because he had been successfully by Lenny's lawyers, you know, Lenny, just to fill your listeners in.
He had sued him for defamation and won.
So he won a $450,000 judgment in October of 2019.
And so I went and spoke with him after that.
And after he lost, you know, this was enough to bankrupt probably two generations of his family.
And it was killing him to say that, because it was his wife and daughter, so it just seemed like he had been completely, you know, emasculated by this.
But, you know, it was sort of like, I'll talk to you in the car, so then my wife doesn't see me.
Lenny's sealed videotaped deposition and gave it to the hoaxers and then they put it online and they compared Lenny's ear to his ear in previous photos and decided that the Lenny who testified in that defamation case in the courtroom was an impasta.
When I interviewed him, that was really interesting.
And it was funny because...
After I interviewed him, I had a couple years to think about it before I put it in the book.
So, you know, I kind of listened to it again and again and thought about it and thought about it in the context of everything that came after.
And I think, you know, it was a really interesting window into the man, more so than it seemed on the day of, because at the time it seemed like he was just...
You know, a lot of it.
He called me the next day and then he spoke for two more hours on the phone.
And that was actually a little more real because I think he got he might have called his lawyers and realized he made a mistake.
Yeah, there's such a good little part in whenever you're describing the interview in your book where you say, if he was really trying to intimidate me, he would have come up and put his face right into mine.
And instead, he just kept backing further and further away from you.
His behavior was also really interesting because it was such a...
He'd laugh at Alex's jokes and then sort of check Alex's face to make sure it was okay that he was laughing.
Was that a joke?
Because if you didn't mean it as the joke boss, I don't want to be laughing.
That was interesting.
And then I remember calling back, writing a different story, and he was like, is this Elizabeth Williamson from the CIA who says she works for the New York Times?
Yeah, I've gone back and I realize that one of the things that I've generally missed over the time doing the show is the entire existence of the Infowars Nightly News, the show that Rob was the head of.
I've gone back and watched some of that and it's...
And he is someone who knew that he was inflicting a lot of pain on parents who he had to have known, obviously, that he was inflicting a lot of pain on the parents of children who were his children's ages who were brutally murdered.
And I just...
You know, all the joking aside and all the, you know, the sort of bravado and the kind of, you know, performance, I just, I couldn't really get there.
And it made me think about some of these other conspiracists where, is it that if you actually looked at that and you didn't just deflect the question, could you actually live with yourself?
I mean, I've talked with John Ronson, the Welsh filmmaker who spent a lot of time with Alex Jones from way back.
And he thinks that he was a different person before.
That earlier on, he was not the kind of person who could do something like that.
And the Islamophobia and the racism and all of that.
I mean, that is an interesting question as to what Alex was like in different time periods.
But one thing that John said to us when we talked to Mr. Ronson was he doesn't know if you can really judge Alex based on the way that we would judge other people.
Because maybe Alex is really just a narcissistic psychopath.
And if that's the case, what really do we have to say to a person who is just utterly incapable of giving a fuck about whether or not murdered kids' families are in pain, you know?
It is awfully hard to come up with the how, and not only him, you know, how these people could, it's either, maybe it's that they truly, truly believe it.
In Alex's case, he has already said he thinks children died, so this does not apply to him.
But I think there are some of these individuals who really do believe that.
This didn't happen or it didn't happen the way it was reported.
And then I think there are others of them that there's something they're getting out of this that is much more precious to them than even their reputation.
Or the sort of ostracization that comes from espousing a theory like this.
So they're kind of driven back into their own crowd because those are the only people who will give them the benefit of the doubt anymore, not only as a conspiracy theorist, but as a person.
So, yeah, so he, you know, for him, I mean, he lost his job.
He told me he's an absolute pariah in academia.
You know, he is unemployable.
He has a lot of kids and including a child with a lot of difficulties who needs a You know, medical care.
And yet he doesn't find a road back for himself.
And as I'm getting off the phone, kind of feeling awful at, you know, what he's just described as, you know, his life, he's like, wait, wait, we didn't talk about coronavirus yet.
You know, another government plot.
So there is an element of psychology there that, you know, I think requires some professional training to understand.
I mean, one thing that I struggle with as a writer just in general, just in my day job at the Times, is, you know, that sort of that blank paper kind of feeling.
I will just put something down just not to have to look at that.
And because as long as the page is blank, I can come up with the most amazing things to do to keep me from actually writing.
I organized an entire...
Linen closet during this book project before a chapter, and it wasn't even my linen closet.
So one thing that I did was, and this was on the advice of, you know, a guy who's a mentor to me who's written three or four books.
His name is David Hoffman.
And wonderful, wonderful friend.
And he said, one thing you want to do, bang out a bunch of chapters, or if you can swing it, your whole first draft.
Send it to a group of readers, people you trust, not just journalists, not just people in Washington or in New York or wherever, but like some friends who read a lot of books and, you know, who you trust to give you some honest feedback.
So I printed all that out, you know, at 16 chapters.
I realized that at 16 chapters, and again, there are 26, I was 100,000 words over.
You know, I suppose it was going to be inevitable.
Because when you're asking people why they do what they do and, you know, it's clear that you're not on their team, that they're going to see.
And again, the nature of this was these people are getting so much psychic income from what they're doing that anyone on the outside of that asking questions and saying what you just said isn't true is a threat and an enemy.
So I think that there was part of that.
And then also, you may have noticed over the past several years that the New York Times in general is a pretty handy foil for a lot of, you know, folks who tend to believe some of this stuff.
And then I also, you know, the thing I was always obviously holding close was this idea that, you know, these families and telling me their story, you know, they were trusting me with the worst.
possible day of their life or anyone's life.
And they were doing it not because of anything having to do with me.
They were doing it because they wanted you and all of us to understand that this was something that if these folks can come for the parent of a murdered child, they're coming for all of us.
And that this is A societal warning that they're trying to raise.
And I know that this is a really hard topic.
This shooting is something that a lot of humans, and it's a very human reaction to want to look away from it and not want to relive those details and where you were when it happened and how old your own children were and all of that.
But I kind of feel like we owe it to the families to walk through that with them and understand what happened afterward because they are trying to help by telling this story.
And I know you're going to feel embarrassed that I'm, you know, giving you, but you really deserve so much credit for helping me understand this guy and where he's coming from.
Well, I was thrilled to be able to put this information to use.
Just like you were talking about with Bill Ogden and the experience of watching a ton of Alex's content, it's incredibly painful if you're actually engaging with it and looking at it critically.
And I think going through the process of learning so much about this would be useless.
If it wasn't for something, if it wasn't used for something.
So thank you for providing something of an outlet for that.