In this installment, Dan sits down with Robbie Parker, author of A Father's Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook, for a chat about grief, his experience with Alex, and paths to healing.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| knowledge fight need money stop it andy and kansas andy and kansas andy and kansas andy and kansas it's time to pray andy and kansas you're on the air thanks for holding I love you. | ||
| Hello! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| No Jordan today. | ||
| He is at home, resting his... | ||
| His throat. | ||
| But I'm excited to be joined by a guest to talk about their new book. | ||
| But I felt like one of the things that I took away from reading their book was how important it is to be able to present yourself in the way that you would like to. | ||
| And the context that you are introduced oftentimes can have an effect on that. | ||
| So I would like to open the floor and let them introduce themselves for the Sure. | ||
| So my name is Robbie Parker. | ||
| A lot of people that know me superficially know that I'm a physician assistant and I work in the newborn intensive care unit. | ||
| Anybody that knows me a little bit deeper knows that my oldest daughter, Emily, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. | ||
| Proudest title is that I'm Emily's dad. | ||
| And another title I picked up recently is that I'm Alex Jones' largest creditor in his $1.5 billion debt to Sandy Hook families. | ||
| Well, those are a series of definitely interesting credits, I would say. | ||
| I think that I didn't want to start the show and say this is... | ||
| A parent of someone who was killed at Sandy Hook. | ||
| Although, as you say, that is your most important defining characteristic. | ||
| You are Emily's father. | ||
| But I felt like if I had said that, it would be putting you into, like, I'm defining you as this. | ||
| This is who you are. | ||
| And I just, for some reason, felt like that would be unfair. | ||
| No, I appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, no, it makes total sense. | ||
| Because that's something I... | ||
| I struggle with, too. | ||
| Ever since December 14, 2012, that's been a big focus of mine. | ||
| And on my other girls, too, right? | ||
| Emily had two younger sisters. | ||
| And wanting to make sure that this is a horrific thing and part of our life story, right? | ||
| But it doesn't define who any of us are. | ||
| And we're going to be more defined by how we respond to these things versus the event that impacted us, for sure. | ||
| So, no, I appreciate that. | ||
| And so you have a new book that you've written that I mentioned, a reference. | ||
| It's A Father's Fight. | ||
| That's available now? | ||
| It'll be out November 19th, officially. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so talk to me a little bit about the decision to write this book. | ||
| It's obviously partially about your experience. | ||
| After the Sandy Hook shooting and your family's experience, very much as a unit, everybody's present in terms of the path that you all go down. | ||
| But it's also very much about Alex Jones and the fight that you've had through the courts with him. | ||
| Is there something... | ||
| With the resolution of the case and things coming to a head that made you feel like getting your story more fully out there was important? | ||
| Yeah, it's funny how this all unraveled. | ||
| I mean, first of all, when I started writing anything, it wasn't meant to be seen by anybody. | ||
| This was purely started back in like 2017. | ||
| I was coming up on five years from the shooting and I was really just trying to process my own grief and see like... | ||
| It's been five years. | ||
| Have I grown at all? | ||
| Where am I? | ||
| Who am I? | ||
| And so writing was an outlet for me to try and figure that out. | ||
| And that was just a personal thing. | ||
| That was just my own healing journey. | ||
| And it just kind of snowballed. | ||
| I started to share some of that with people, and they encouraged me to write more. | ||
| And so I wrote more, and then I realized that that helped me connect with other people and was part of my healing journey. | ||
| But I was always quiet about what I was experiencing from the conspiracists. | ||
| I never talked publicly about conspiracy theories. | ||
| I never talked publicly about Alex Jones. | ||
| My motto at that time was to stay quiet, lay low, and not bring attention to myself because of everything that was happening to us. | ||
| So I started writing a lot about grief and trauma and ended up picking up an agent along the way, and she was trying to help me figure out a way to navigate. | ||
| My story in that way. | ||
| And then she found out that I was part of the lawsuit. | ||
| And she didn't get mad, but she was like, what? | ||
| You never told me about this. | ||
| And so she was like, why aren't you comfortable talking about that? | ||
| And that just got me thinking. | ||
| And so going through the process of litigation and the trial made me realize, I am ready to talk about this. | ||
| And I feel like I need to talk about this. | ||
| So that's how it ended up coming to pass. | ||
| I think that makes a whole lot of sense, based on having read the book. | ||
| It has a very much kind of a processing, healing kind of experience that you're putting on page. | ||
| I would say that it has a vulnerability to it that almost comes somewhat unexpected. | ||
| Reading a memoir that is about your fight against Alex Jones, or at least partially so. | ||
| And so I can totally see how this would be, like, it would be rooted in some sort of therapeutic process that grows into this project. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, the easy, it's kind of funny, almost the easy story to tell is like, yeah, like, how I ended up being... | ||
| An adversary of Alex Jones. | ||
| Like, I could go into that and then I can talk about just this epic battle or whatever. | ||
| But, I mean, that's almost an easier story to tell. | ||
| Really, as the process of all this writing and healing and processing and things was my internal battle was waging way more. | ||
| And the impacts that Alex Jones was having on that and my grief and my healing and all that and my relationship with myself. | ||
| It got really complicated really fast. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that some of that, how it feels at least, intersects a bit with you're saying you didn't, you know, as you were going through this and your agent was talking to you about, like, you don't talk about the conspiracists and you didn't talk about that. | ||
| And it seems to me like, obviously, that's what a normal person... | ||
| It seems like you'd feed the flames and make things worse by arguing with them, maybe. | ||
| But from reading the book, one of the things that I came away with that I didn't fully understand is part of that desire to not fan the flames and engage with them is how much it seems like... | ||
| You had to blame for yourself for the harassment that came. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, that was a huge catalyst. | ||
| I mean, I grew up in a pretty high-demand religion, so shame has always been a big part of my life, right? | ||
| I'm with you on that. | ||
| Just thinking everything has to go through that filter, right? | ||
| And everything's about me or because of me or whatever. | ||
| And so, I mean, your listeners are going to understand this better than most people that I might talk to. | ||
| So I was the person that gave a press conference the day after the shooting. | ||
| I, unknowingly to me, was the first parent that spoke out publicly. | ||
| The reasons why I went to do that are in my... | ||
| Very simple and make a lot of sense, like you're saying. | ||
| And then because I was the first person that stepped out in this, and remember back in 2012, it was a new age, right? | ||
| Social media, like we didn't understand a lot of the repercussions or how quickly things could spread or whatever. | ||
| Like it was kind of a new territory, at least to me at that time. | ||
| So I had no inclination of all of this. | ||
| I just wanted to. | ||
| To say something sweet about my daughter and get the media off our backs. | ||
| That was all I wanted to do. | ||
| And because I was the first person out and I did something that Alex Jones was able to latch on to, then everything about the whole Sandy Hook conspiracy movement, I put on my plate and I put on my shoulders. | ||
| So the harassment that the other families were getting, I felt like was partially my fault and I was to blame for that. | ||
| Split-second moments involving that press conference that are taken out of context that obviously I think any right-thinking person would see and not think was your fault. | ||
| But that dynamic, it's very easy to understand how you would feel that way. | ||
| And so engaging with the conspiracy theorists while you're having those feelings has got to be really... | ||
| I guess what I'm trying to ask is... | ||
| That blame that you had, that you misassigned to yourself for the harassment, how present was that early on? | ||
| Or, like, how aware of it were you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, first it was just, I felt like I had done something wrong and I put my family in danger, right? | ||
| Like, in the very, very beginning. | ||
| But as, because when the shooting happened, we hadn't been in Newtown very long. | ||
| We hadn't lived there very long. | ||
| I didn't know any of the other families. | ||
| And so as I got to know some of them over the next few months and then hearing what they were experiencing and, of course, just being online, if I was on YouTube at any time, seeing videos, not just about me that were being posted by conspiracists, but other families as well. | ||
| So that just started to build and it grew. | ||
| And we have this tendency as humans, or at least I do, of creating a narrative and then all of a sudden adopting that narrative as truth. | ||
| And then once it's solidified as truth in your mind, whether it is or not, it takes root and it holds on tight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I've watched the documentary that you were interviewed in and read the book, and to me, it really did change some of my perceptions of the case as a whole. | ||
| I think the experience of, obviously... | ||
| Full disclosure, I was involved with and in contact with the Texas plaintiff's attorneys during that case, but not so much with your case in Connecticut. | ||
| So I got a bit of an inside glimpse of some of the goings-on there, but the perspective that I have as a sort of inside-outside person is a little bit of disappointment. | ||
| With the way things have gone with that case. | ||
| There's a sense of it's not enough. | ||
| There's a sense of disappointment. | ||
| But from watching some of your interviews and reading your book, it felt to me a lot like there is still something very important that has been, I wouldn't say a victory necessarily, but achieved. | ||
| Through the cases. | ||
| And I think that's a really important perspective. | ||
| And I was wondering if you had some thoughts around that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| First, I mean, first of all, I love that you said achieved, because that feels like the most correct term. | ||
| I haven't been able to come up with how I would want to describe it, so I might use that in the future. | ||
| Because, yeah, from what we went through, nothing's going to feel like a victory, right? | ||
| Like, you know, and so, but it was about what it... | ||
| What it was that we wanted to achieve. | ||
| And I think each plaintiff had their own personal reasons and goals or maybe aspirations of what it was that they wanted to achieve throughout this. | ||
| I knew what mine were before, which kept me from joining the lawsuit. | ||
| I knew what motivated me to finally join the lawsuit. | ||
| And then the process of what achievement or victory looked like for me at the end. | ||
| So I want to answer this question, but I am curious when you said something about a disappointment. | ||
| Was it about the way the trial kind of went? | ||
| Or the way that things have happened after the verdict? | ||
| What feels kind of disappointing to you? | ||
| Because I know what it feels like for me, so I'm curious what you think. | ||
| I think that there's a lot of people who have a feeling of justice not being swift enough, not being complete enough. | ||
| I think that an outcome other than Alex having his business kind of crushed and... | ||
| Being humiliated and sort of forced to be like, alright, this is the way that I handle information. | ||
| I just say bullshit irresponsibly and don't care who it hurts. | ||
| Something short of that feels disappointing. | ||
| Some kind of a public spectacle of, alright, here's the game. | ||
| Here's the game I play. | ||
| I did this. | ||
| I didn't care who I hurt. | ||
| I didn't care about these people in the moment. | ||
| Some kind of... | ||
| I mean, for lack of a better term, some sort of a third act crescendo. | ||
| And I think that people are a little bit disappointed that as this is gone, there hasn't been that cinematic moment or whatever. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| And even going through the process, right? | ||
| I had all these envisionments of like, oh, this is how it's going to play out. | ||
| And this is how I want it to go and stuff. | ||
| And was constantly disappointed. | ||
| One, just because of just the... | ||
| You know, the mire of the process that the judicial system is, right? | ||
| Nothing goes fast. | ||
| Nothing really crescendos, like, dramatically. | ||
| And so that process was really frustrating for me, too, and left a lot of disappointment because I didn't feel like things were happening fast enough. | ||
| And just the fact that it felt like every step, his gameplay and his rhetoric, like, he was still... | ||
| He was lying to the courts. | ||
| He wasn't turning over documents. | ||
| He then would turn around and make himself the victim. | ||
| I've never seen any person in my life, anybody that's been through therapy knows about the drama triangle. | ||
| He owns all three aspects of the drama triangle all the time. | ||
| He's the perpetrator, the victim, and the... | ||
| He's trying to turn it into an octagon. | ||
| He's playing other roles. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| To see him just be able to continue to do that while we had to just hunker down and just... | ||
| Prow through this process and always maintain the high ground. | ||
| That gets old after a while. | ||
| And there was times where I just wanted to come out and just call him out on his bullshit and really couldn't. | ||
| So I hear you on that frustration part, but I think we're getting someplace. | ||
| So to answer your question, though, and I'll even say this, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
like even the default judgment. | |
| So because he was such a bad actor in all the preliminary stuff and never turning over documents and lying to the court, not showing up for depositions and all this kind of stuff, Like the court got so fed up in Texas and Connecticut that both judges put the death sentence thing that you can do on somebody and say, just by your actions alone, it proves that you're guilty of every charge that they're saying. | ||
| So we're just going to find you guilty and do this default judgment. | ||
| Which is a huge win. | ||
| And to be clear, there was every opportunity for that not to happen. | ||
| Along the way, there were so many warnings given. | ||
| There was so much, you're not cooperating. | ||
| We'll put a sanction on you. | ||
| Charge you a little bit for this misbehavior. | ||
| And none of that was able to correct any of the behavior. | ||
| He would get new lawyers whenever it was looking like they were out of options. | ||
| And so now the lawyer, the new lawyer's got to get up to speed on the case to drag things out. | ||
| Just to be clear, because... | ||
| I think a lot of people, maybe not listening to this, but a lot of people do have the perception that this death penalty sanction thing is a capricious thing that the court did. | ||
| And that's definitely not the case. | ||
| No, no judge wants to do it. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| All these tactics, right? | ||
| And what was funny on my side going through it and seeing all these, I was seeing that every single thing that he tried only made things worse for him, right? | ||
| Because he would. | ||
| He would get these sanctions. | ||
| In Connecticut, to the Connecticut Supreme Court, they took it up, and he had a unanimous ruling against him. | ||
| So it just showed that everything he was doing, he just kept making things harder and harder for himself. | ||
| And so that's what was the benefit of doing this, too, is going through the judicial system is because on social media, you have no checks and balances. | ||
| In the court of public opinion, where you are developing this whole tribe that's behind you that just salivates over everything that you say and just... | ||
| You know, gargles it up like they're just, you know, baby birds. | ||
| You know, like, he can puff himself up like that, and he's the master of his own domain. | ||
| He was forced to be put in a system where he's not the master of anything. | ||
| And so, that in and of itself, I feel like, is a huge achievement, because his true colors started coming out, and it showed that he's a detriment not to me, not just to himself, but even to his listeners, right? | ||
| And so, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, if you want to talk about... | ||
| People that have been victimized by Alex Jones, Sandy Hook families are obvious what would come to mind, but you think about for somebody that makes tens of millions of dollars a year off his listeners bilking the products that he does and the things that he puts on them, they have to accept the fact that all he's given them are supplements, that whatever, but that really what you've taken in your life is that now he's given you reasons to hate people, he's given you reasons to distrust people, and that's really... | ||
| Not a natural human nature thing that we have, right? | ||
| And so he's really done a disservice to his own listeners. | ||
| But I'm getting off on a full tangent, too. | ||
| Well, I also kind of think that there's a, like, one of the disservices is that the distrust that he creates is unhealthy. | ||
| And I think that there's a healthy kind of distrust that you can have about, you know, even the government or things that happen. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| A certain amount of cynicism is incredibly healthy, and I think it's important to, you know, assessing information that we get. | ||
| But the version that he promotes is this unhealthy version that doesn't allow you to engage in that skepticism. | ||
| Yeah, healthy dialogue, healthy debate, challenging the system, absolutely. | ||
| And one thing that really opened my eyes to that was I read an opinion piece, and I can't really remember where, so I'm sorry I don't have like a... | ||
| You know, a source to give you, but it was this writer and she was talking about losing my mother. | ||
| And so I was interested in that because I read a lot of people's grief journeys or whatever. | ||
| And she was talking about how around Y2K, she lived in Austin, Texas. | ||
| Her mother was a big, huge Alex Jones fan when he was not, you know, he was little Alex Jones at that point. | ||
| But his rhetoric around, you know, The government and about what's going to happen with Y2K and that you need to buy this, his ability to create a problem and the solution all at the same time. | ||
| And she watched as a little girl her mother go through this transformation process of how Alex Jones influenced her mother's life, the changes in her mom, how it influenced their relationship. | ||
| And she talked about losing her mother, even though her mother, at the time of her writing, had just recently died. | ||
| She talked about losing her mother 20 years previously to Alex Jones. | ||
| That's why I can say, like, the people that listen to him, like, what that woman gave up, the relationship with her daughter, they're victims too, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that kind of sucks about that is that if it wasn't him, it would kind of probably be somebody else. | ||
| Like, it's just a, it's just sort of a figure who's really competent at exploiting whatever that role is. | ||
| And he happened to be in that place. | ||
| Like you're describing, in 2012, when the internet and social media started moving so much faster, and so he's positioned in that place to lead people to have early grief. | ||
| Yeah, and that transitions really good into your question, too, about what I feel like we're able to achieve, because there are lots of people that are like him and want to be like him, right? | ||
| And he happened to be the one that... | ||
| He just kind of was always figuring things out right ahead of time. | ||
| I mean, you have to give him credit for what he was able to accomplish, if you want to call it that. | ||
| But he was always on the cutting edge of things and able to exploit things to his benefit better than everybody else. | ||
| And I think that some of that, honestly, is a bit of like, we've forgotten the failed attempts. | ||
| Because there was like an InfoWars dating site back in the day, and he tried to start his own social media. | ||
| So these things, he's on the cutting edge in a lot of ways because he tries a million things, and then a lot of it just doesn't work and he gives up on it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| One thing he has more than a lot of us is his just ability to be relentless, right? | ||
| So, for sure. | ||
| Persistent, shameless, moving forward. | ||
| Yeah, where I can be relentless with my shame. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Like, he, without that, gives him, like, another kind of superpower, for sure. | ||
| So when we look at the end of it, so, and the reason I bring up the default judgment was because we didn't get a chance in court to prove that his... | ||
| His speech was defamatory, right? | ||
| Like, we didn't get the chance to set a precedent from a legal standpoint that, like, a jury convicting him of defamation because he was always saying that, no, whatever I say is protected by the First Amendment, and we were making an argument that, no, what you were doing isn't, right? | ||
| So we didn't get to set that precedent. | ||
| So that's, it's a huge legal win to get the default verdict if you're suing somebody because you're, like, automatic, you know, just skip ahead and go to, you know. | ||
| Go to the end. | ||
| But that would have been a lovely thing to be able to have accomplished, is to set a legal precedent that then other people that have to follow us, because there's going to be other people like Alex Jones, right? | ||
| And so that's one thing. | ||
| But we are also able to, through what we did... | ||
| Achieve a lot of getting some information from Alex Jones and getting that out into the public sphere. | ||
| Because of our lawsuit, social media companies started actually paying attention to what we had been complaining about for six years. | ||
| I went for six years to social media companies telling them I needed help to get the stuff that's harming us and our family and doing so much damage. | ||
| They never listened to me. | ||
| But once it became public that they were complicit in proliferating Alex Jones's message, all of a sudden they all banned him, right? | ||
| So without our lawsuit, I can make the argument without our lawsuit, that wouldn't have happened at that point in time. | ||
| I would argue that probably because of the association with how toxic it is to have been complicit in spreading this information and the profile of the case it probably led to I | ||
| hope so, right? | ||
| And it sucks because the way things are, it wasn't until they realized it was going to hurt their brand that they made those changes. | ||
| But I had a... | ||
| An opportunity to testify at a Senate hearing committee about social media censorship. | ||
| And there was a representative from Twitter there, and he came up and found me and apologized. | ||
| And he said, I'm sorry for, I know that we at Twitter didn't do enough to protect you, and that me saying sorry is too little too late, but hopefully we were making changes to make that better. | ||
| And then Elon took over and it's all downhill. | ||
| To your point, hopefully what we were able to do did make something better for somebody else, for sure. | ||
| I was going to say, even then, for the achievement and things that were able to come out of it, there's obviously a lot of personal things, too, which are at the core of what the suits you ever brought were about. | ||
| The suits that you brought weren't about creating a culmination where you destroy Alex Jones. | ||
| It's about righting a wrong. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think the sense that I took away from, obviously, as you even pointed out, and I think it can't be said enough, all of you are individuals. | ||
| And though you are co-plaintiffs together in this suit, you don't all have the exact same viewpoint. | ||
| But it seemed to me from reading your book and from your interviews that there is a fair amount of personal... | ||
| I keep saying the word achievement, but that seems to be part of your journey, your healing journey. | ||
| There's something very important about having the case. | ||
| Do you think that's fair? | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely. | ||
| And so for me to even join the case, I had to overcome a lot of my own fears and insecurities, right? | ||
| I had spent years protecting myself and protecting my family from these people. | ||
| And now I was going to, everything I had done publicly, every single time I tried to go out and do something for good or whatever, every single time I did that, I would get a wave of harassment back at me. | ||
| People followed me across the country. | ||
| They knew where I lived in Connecticut. | ||
| They found out where I lived in the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| You know, like, I couldn't get away from it. | ||
| To join the lawsuit and to come out publicly like that, that took a lot of personal growth and overcoming a lot of things. | ||
| My motivations had to be based off of something more personal. | ||
| It wasn't him taking responsibility and holding somebody accountable. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds great. | ||
| I'm going to hold Alex Jones accountable and make him face justice or pay up for the things that he's done. | ||
| But really, That is just part of my healing journey. | ||
| When somebody has wronged you and you're trying to heal from that, if they're not willing to seek out forgiveness or apologize or something like that, accountability is a huge part of what you need to heal. | ||
| If you don't give that to yourself in some form, then you're constantly going to be battling that fight internally. | ||
| One thing that was really interesting about being present for the trial was... | ||
| Throughout all this, the narrative in my head was Alex Jones does these crazy things. | ||
| He's this crazy person out in the ether doing this. | ||
| And I'm experiencing this over here, right? | ||
| And so sitting and watching our lawyers just methodically go through, this is what Alex Jones did on this day and at this time. | ||
| And this is what Alex Jones did on this day and at this time. | ||
| And then I'm connecting. | ||
| This is exactly what happened to me on that day at this time. | ||
| This is exactly what happened to me. | ||
| So it wasn't this. | ||
| Crazy, aloof guy out there just spouting stuff off, and then there's ripple effects. | ||
| There's a direct correlation between what he did and how it impacted me personally. | ||
| And so it turned this narrative for me from, like, I'm receiving the consequences of what Alex Jones does. | ||
| Just natural consequences too. | ||
| This is how he impacted me directly. | ||
| And that was something that was really emotional in court. | ||
| And Alyssa, my wife, was with me one day going through that. | ||
| And she just started bawling. | ||
| And everyone's like, oh, that must have been really hard for you. | ||
| She goes, I was crying because I remembered what happened with Madeline that day. | ||
| When we were in Utah and we went out shopping and what happened with Madeline that day. | ||
| And that was the same day that he was saying this stuff. | ||
| So it brought that home and more direct and more personal. | ||
| And that's what the trial allowed that I wasn't able to get otherwise. | ||
| I think what you're touching on a little bit there is seeing him as a flesh and blood person. | ||
| It's pretty abstract to be like, this figure on this show said this thing that affected me. | ||
| But you have this, you were breathing, you were eating earlier that day. | ||
| You're not that different. | ||
| You're humans. | ||
| I had a similar kind of experience because I went to Texas for one of the depositions. | ||
| I was assisting with their lawyers, and so I was in the deposition room with Alex. | ||
| I'd never met him or seen him before, and when he came into the room, there was a moment of like, I've been talking shit about this guy for some years now. | ||
| And here he is in person. | ||
| And that air went out really fast. | ||
| Like, there was a moment of that, like, whoop! | ||
| This cartoon character has come alive. | ||
| But then as soon as he was alive, I was like, oh, wait. | ||
| You're going to have to go to the bathroom later. | ||
| You're just, you're sitting here. | ||
| And then I was able to see him more, like, this is kind of a bummer. | ||
| You're not able to answer these questions directly because you know the implications of them. | ||
| I know that because you're a person. | ||
| Because we are both just humans, I can see you that way. | ||
| Do you feel like that was something, the humanization, in terms of the court? | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| One, I was talking about that... | ||
| You know, it debunks his argument of like, I'm just saying this stuff. | ||
| I never called him. | ||
| I never did. | ||
| So there is this direct thing. | ||
| No, you did this and this impacted me in this way. | ||
| So you can't create, you know, that directness. | ||
| In the court though, me having my own human experience with him, like, you know, he walks in and he has this air about him, right? | ||
| There's this energy that follows him wherever he goes. | ||
| So you feel that. | ||
| And he had some followers in the court and they're all jazzed and stuff like that, talking shit and stuff. | ||
| And then you look at him and you're like, and I'm not saying this trying to be derogatory, but you watch, he's like bow-legged and he's walking funny because he's in pain and he like, you know, he just looks disheveled and he looks worn out. | ||
| And I was just like, he's just this really just pathetic person. | ||
| And I developed like this. | ||
| I was almost kind of mad at myself because I felt compassion for him and I felt this sense of pity. | ||
| I don't like seeing people suffer. | ||
| I don't like seeing people hurt. | ||
| And you just look at all the stuff that has been wearing on him and he looks like crap. | ||
| And then I had that human moment and then he got up on the stand and he did what he did. | ||
| And I'm like, he doesn't have that same thing back for me. | ||
| It was like I offered that to him. | ||
| I offered him that chance to connect with me on a human level one last time and I didn't know I was giving it to him. | ||
| And then it wasn't received. | ||
| And there's a lot of things I can say, too, about... | ||
| I talk about these experiences that I had with other families from mass shootings, one in particular from a family with the Parkland shooting in Florida, and me realizing I was where they were at six years ago, and I have some perspective now that I can fight this, and I don't want them to fight this. | ||
| I just want them to grieve. | ||
| So it sounds really good to be like, I'm going to join this lawsuit to help other people. | ||
| And there's truth in that. | ||
| But, and it sounds great. | ||
| And it makes me sound very, you know, like more thoughtful of others than I probably am. | ||
| But deep down, it was really about, this is something I learned that I needed to do for myself. | ||
| And so. | ||
| And in the way that you're saying about the, you know, these Parkland families that you're talking to, what it is that you're responding to is the shared inability to greet. | ||
| to grieve that is And because of that disruption, in many ways, becoming part of the case and having this is not, like, it's part of your grieving process, too. | ||
| Like, it's part of you want these other families to be able to grieve and also yourself. | ||
| And I think that's kind of an important piece that can be lost in the disappointment with the legal system, is that those things still happen. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And I don't throw terms like this around just flippantly, but when I say what he did was evil, that's what I'm kind of getting at. | ||
| I, having been through what I've been through in understanding grief, I now understand grief to be a very sacred process. | ||
| And those first moments when you are faced with grief and you're coming familiar with this new character that's going to be in your life forever, right? | ||
| That's the moment, like, those first moments after your loved one dies. | ||
| And so for me, first moments after Emily died, you somehow already know that this is the closest you're going to be to her and with her for the rest of your life. | ||
| And every single day that passes, you're farther and farther away from that. | ||
| So that grieving process of staying close and learning what that means and how that's going to be incorporated in your life is really important. | ||
| And so for me in those first days to have that infiltrated by somebody like Alex Jones... | ||
| He stole that from me. | ||
| He stole that ability for me to learn how to grieve in the way that I should have learned naturally from the beginning. | ||
| And there's two parts to that. | ||
| There's a lot of things that he stole or he inflicted on me. | ||
| But because of that process, too, and how I responded, I ended up giving up a lot of that power myself. | ||
| I disconnected from my family, from the world, and from who I am as a person. | ||
| And I gave a lot of my power over to Alex Jones. | ||
| So going through this process and using the legal system as it's intended to be used to reclaim some of those things, yes, it brings about healing, it brings about accountability, and it brings about kind of setting everything back to the way it should have been. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's something that comes out a bit in your writing in the book is that feeling of, you know, I gave up this to him, and I didn't have to. | ||
| I don't have to live that forever. | ||
| And I think that something that I was shocked by is how vulnerable that is, you know, and how even now, you know, in a book that you're putting out, you know, that is in the same way that, you know, addressing blaming yourself for doing this press conference and how, you know, that brought harassment on you or that perception you have. | ||
| It's a very admirably vulnerable position to take. | ||
| And I think that that was something I was very surprised by in a good way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, and it was interesting because even starting out writing the book, I had an idea of what it was going to be. | ||
| And in the process of writing, it started going in directions. | ||
| And I was like, I don't know if I want to go here. | ||
| And my editor that I was working with. | ||
| She would be like, why did you pull up? | ||
| Like, why did you start short? | ||
| Like, this is where you dive deep. | ||
| And so even her encouragement helping me get to some of those places. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| And in talking about grief and this vulnerability thing, and the main reason I wanted to end up sharing this with so many people was like, yeah, this isn't going to be a John Grisham, like, legal thriller, right? | ||
| Like we're talking about, and there's going to be this, like... | ||
| Big aha moment at the end or whatever, because you already know what the verdict is and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So what is this process like for somebody? | ||
| And realizing how much it connects to what we've all been through, either in our own lives or collectively together as a country in the last 12 years since this has all happened, that healing process. | ||
| And especially with grief, that's not a group that nobody's going to not be a part of at some point in their life, right? | ||
| And one of the biggest things that I took away from my grief journey was how grief connected me to other things in my life that needed healing. | ||
| I needed to heal from Emily's death. | ||
| And I'm going to be healing from Emily's death forever. | ||
| But grief contacted me and connected me back to things from my childhood. | ||
| I was sexually abused by my Mormon bishop when I was a kid. | ||
| And that was something that I'd never processed. | ||
| And it was like, once I started allowing grief to work in me, all of a sudden it was like my body's like, oh, We're processing stuff now, like you're going to deal with things. | ||
| Well, then we needed, you're not going to take another step in this direction until we address this. | ||
| And so, again, that whole journey gets convoluted and it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| I never realized that by losing Emily as a six-year-old was going to connect me to my six-year-old self and give me healing that I needed, that I'd been carrying for 30 years at that point. | ||
| And so, again, that whole process and how sacred and beautiful grief is. | ||
| For somebody to come in and defile it, and I talk about what he did to me, what he did to Emily's name, and Emily's memory, that's all evil and that's despicable. | ||
| But what he was doing with the Parkland family and other people and his listeners, like I talk about, it's really, really awful stuff. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| And I think that there's something really weird because we can take a little bit of an external view. | ||
| Um, and I think it would be hard to say for sure if, like, he knows that. | ||
| You know, like, I don't think when he got on air and, like, I think it was the same day that you did the press conference, uh, got on air and said, this guy looks like an actor, you know, we gotta look into this, you know, all this stuff. | ||
| I don't think he was sitting there thinking, Ah, I'm going to disrupt grief. | ||
| Or if it even mattered, or is even present in his mind in any way, this effect that these denials of tragedy, denials of horrific events, I think that it's just a variable that isn't even considered. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No, I agree with you. | ||
| There's a lot of, that's the thing about lies, right? | ||
| And that's the thing about, you don't get to control the consequences. | ||
| And so, something that I've been applying into my life as of late too is, I heard this, I think I was watching a show, and it was, you know, every lie incurs a debt to the truth. | ||
| And sooner or later, that debt will be paid. | ||
| And so, what Alex did, what Alex Jones did that he knew was, he knew he was He knew he was creating a narrative. | ||
| He knew that he was giving his audience something that they wanted. | ||
| He was on air before I even found out that Emily died. | ||
| He was on air already sowing doubt. | ||
| Look out for mass shootings. | ||
| I told you this would be coming. | ||
| They're coming for our guns. | ||
| He was saying that before I even received news that Emily died. | ||
| The night of my press conference, this was something we were able to achieve in the... | ||
| We got documentation that showed that they had a meeting. | ||
| InfoWars personnel had a meeting that night after my press conference to discuss how can we use this to our advantage. | ||
| That's shocking they had a meeting. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what that actually looks like. | ||
| I don't think there was minutes taken or anything. | ||
| But yeah, we know what his motivations are. | ||
| I don't think his motivation was like, Oh, that Robbie Parker guy that I've never known before now, I want to jump in and interfere with his grief. | ||
| But he doesn't get to choose what his actions, the consequences and the ripple effect of his actions are. | ||
| But his motivation was, we all know, is to booster himself up, make himself be important and build people for money. | ||
| Like, that's obvious. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| I don't think that that was what his intention was, but he doesn't get to control that. | ||
| And he had so many opportunities before the lawsuit was filed to remedy that. | ||
| When he was made aware, and he chose not to. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that I find is almost impossible to deal with, you know, even after all of this has played out through the courts and stuff, is that you really can look at this and think, like, well, didn't have to go to court. | ||
| You know, like, all of this. | ||
| He didn't know, like, let's say, that these lies and this bullshit that he was doing was going to cause... | ||
| He had no control of that, but he's still responsible for actions and behaviors and everything. | ||
| It feels to me like society has lost touch a little bit with the ability to take that criticism of an unexpected effect of the thing you did has caused me great pain and damage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It feels like he's such a... | |
| Prime example of not being able to hear that without defensiveness. | ||
| And that kind of makes me sad. | ||
| Yeah, it is sad. | ||
| So let's boil this down to a personal level, right? | ||
| Because what I talked about, yeah, that quote of every lie incurs a debt to the truth, that's easy to say. | ||
| Yeah, and Alex Jones' debt is $1.5 billion to Sandy Hook families, right? | ||
| But that's not really the debt. | ||
| You paid a lot of that debt. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like the debt that's incurred by lies. | ||
| Sometimes the liar doesn't incur that debt. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Yeah, we have a number to put on this in his case. | ||
| But like, so in my life, right? | ||
| So my coping strategies that I developed as a kid, right? | ||
| The things that I used to try and create safety in my life and to overcome horrific things, you develop these patterns of behaviors, right? | ||
| For your own survival. | ||
| And then you go through life applying that to every situation in your 30s. | ||
| And they don't work anymore. | ||
| And those things actually hurt people. | ||
| So part of my healing journey is me learning the ways that I coped and the way that the behaviors that I incurred and the lies that I told to people that I love and the hurt that that caused them. | ||
| Me having to learn how to take that accountability and repay that debt. | ||
| I can look back and say, yes, I had these things happen and this was an attachment behavior response or a trauma response. | ||
| And those are true, but I'm still responsible for it and I didn't get to pick how it affected people. | ||
| And there's people that I care deeply about that I've hurt very, very much. | ||
| And it's impacted a lot of my relationships and my healing. | ||
| I don't want this book to just come across like... | ||
| Robbie Parker comes out and talks about hard things and how he overcame them because he bats a thousand. | ||
| I'm well below the Mendoza line on batting average on what's successful in my healing journey, but it's gotten to me where I am right now. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that that's something that comes across, you know, is, you know, you're not claiming to bat a thousand. | ||
| And those kind of moments, too. | ||
| It's like I'm sitting there going through the trial, seeing things, and there's moments like there's a lot of like... | ||
| Oh, shit moments. | ||
| Like, I didn't even know that. | ||
| Like, I didn't know that this was that bad or what Alex Jones did connected to this thing. | ||
| But I'm also having a lot of like, holy shit, I can't believe how much like Alex Jones I am, right? | ||
| We're talking about the lies that he's telling people. | ||
| And I'm remembering times at work where somebody saw their aunt post something on Facebook, right? | ||
| And they come to me and they're talking about it. | ||
| And I'm going, yeah, that doesn't bother me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How many lies I told people and to myself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I'm like, I'm a lot like that too. | ||
| I think those are a little different. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But, but yeah, I mean, if I'm going to sit here and hold somebody accountable for not being honest and I'm not being honest with other people and it's, and it is having a negative impact, right? | ||
| It's like the person that I lied to that I told them like, yeah, I'm fine. | ||
| And they're like, oh wow, Robbie's so strong. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, sure. | ||
| I can let them believe that. | ||
| That doesn't really. | ||
| It's not going to set them off on some weird course in life, but it did have a very strong negative impact on me and my family and people that I care about. | ||
| So I wanted to ask a little bit about the, I guess, as somebody who's inside all of this, intimately in the case and the experience of the harassment and everything, What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect in terms of the way that people cover it? | ||
| Because I try and be as fair as I can and try and understand, but I'm sure even the way that I have approached... | ||
| The case and the whole situation is there's probably been things that have been like, yeah, you're a little off on this. | ||
| And I was wondering if there's anything that sticks out to you as the most common or annoying. | ||
| No, I love that question because when I talked about my writing process in the beginning and what I really was trying to hit on are what are the most misunderstood or overlooked aspects of grief, right? | ||
| And so for me in this and how people have covered the trial and everything, you have to come into it knowing despite everybody's best, if they're trying hard to overcome their biases, still have their biases involved, right? | ||
| And you can't deny that. | ||
| You just have to own that and do your best to overcome that. | ||
| Some people in the media can do that better than others. | ||
| Some are just not. | ||
| They have no shame about their biases either. | ||
| So I think what's being missed and overlooked is, like, the simple way to put it is that human element. | ||
| Like, what's really going on here? | ||
| Like, this isn't just about Alex Jones' bombardment and bombastic personality, and you just can't stand the guy and those poor Sandy Hook families that had to put up with him, right? | ||
| What gets overlooked are the things that, like, you don't know unless you have a personal connection and can share. | ||
| And so, like, you talk about how important vulnerability was in... | ||
| In the book, and for you to understand, that's what was misunderstood, right? | ||
| A lot of times, people don't know how to make that connection. | ||
| And the reason why I even decided to share this was because, again, everybody's gone through something, right? | ||
| The worst thing that's happened to you is the worst thing that's happened to you. | ||
| There's no, we're not in a contest here. | ||
| So I don't want people to look at my story and be like, wow, that's so crazy. | ||
| What he's been through is way over here, but I'm just dealing with this, right? | ||
| If it's hard for you and it's been traumatic for you or you're going through something that you've never experienced, we're all equipped with the same bucket of emotions to deal with it. | ||
| And so if I can share what I've shared and be vulnerable, hopefully that can help somebody else become vulnerable too and tap into that. | ||
| And now we can form a connection. | ||
| I talk about our paths intersecting. | ||
| Right now we're so focused on all these differences that we have and how I can't relate to you or you can't relate to me. | ||
| I think about you running a podcast and I don't even know where to begin with that. | ||
| So we can focus on differences, but what's really interesting is the ways in which we can connect with each other where we don't think we have them and the gaps that we feel like or these crevasses that we feel like separate us aren't as wide as they are and there's so many more bridges that are there if we go and find them. | ||
| That's what I want to shine a light on because that's what I feel like isn't understood well or misunderstood or you just don't have the knowledge or experience to know how to build that. | ||
| Sorry, that was a way long-winded answer. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| And I also think that one of the reasons that a lot of people don't want to lead with some sort of vulnerable response to things is the fear of being Encountered by the worst case scenario. | ||
| And I think that your story definitely involves that. | ||
| There's a vulnerability and then you're running into Alex Jones. | ||
| There's a vulnerability of going to the court and then you run into Norm Pattis. | ||
| You could not have a less engaged other side to be Most people would expect in that situation that what you should do is put up as strong of armor as you possibly can because, you know, a ponytail lawyer might insult you and your grief on the stand. | ||
| Unruly ponytail. | ||
| He never combed it. | ||
| I don't think he ever brushed his hair during the trial. | ||
| It was his white tennis shoes underneath his suit that really, like... | ||
| Like, struck me as well. | ||
| Like, even my daughter came with me, my youngest daughter came with me to court one week, and I never said anything, and she was just like, does he ever comb his ponytail? | ||
| Does he have a ponytail? | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that a lot of people had a sort of eye-opening experience with him in the Connecticut court with him. | ||
| I believe, I can't remember if it was the opening or closing argument, making the argument that You all exaggerated your grief. | ||
| Exaggerated and we're turning money into a motive, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that a lot of people were taken aback by how blunt and shitty that was. | ||
| But that's the thing you fear encountering when you don't come in with a big shield and armor. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to get through in the book. | ||
| I mean, I tried that armor route. | ||
| I tried... | ||
| Building up walls. | ||
| I tried doing everything to insulate and isolate my family and keep us protected in this castle, right, that I'm trying to control. | ||
| And it just doesn't work. | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
| And so, again, going down to a more personal level, too, when we're talking about these kind of strong emotions, there were lots of times where people would come and talk to me about, like, so what are you going through? | ||
| Like, you know, how are you doing? | ||
| And I would open up. | ||
| And this is something that's really hard for me. | ||
| And there was times where I would say, This thing happened to me yesterday, and this was really hard. | ||
| And they couldn't meet me there. | ||
| And so I expended this emotional energy. | ||
| I paid this emotional debt, and then it wasn't received. | ||
| And that's a hard thing to encounter. | ||
| And it makes you feel like it's not safe for me to share, because not that that person did anything wrong. | ||
| They can't, you know, I don't expect people to... | ||
| Relate to me on my level all the time. | ||
| But that was a tremendous amount of energy that I had to put forth and I didn't get anything in return. | ||
| And so that message can get solidified if you do that. | ||
| And we suffer in silence because of that. | ||
| So I'm trying to show people that when I've shared and been vulnerable, there's been times where people then felt courageous enough to be vulnerable back with me. | ||
| And there's that connection and there's that bridge. | ||
| And so if we live our lives in a way where... | ||
| We can step over that line from comfort into discomfort and just stay there long enough for just a few minutes until it's not uncomfortable anymore and just listen or be with somebody in that moment. | ||
| And then you can step away from them and go be uncomfortable again because you're like, holy crap, that was insane what that person just shared with me. | ||
| But those moments of shared vulnerability, it's not just about... | ||
| Me having the courage to put this into writing and share it with strangers, right? | ||
| That's not very vulnerable, but it would be more if when somebody's willing to share something with me, if I can show up at the same level of vulnerability. | ||
| But then I also think that there's an element of the vulnerability and the openness of the way you present the book. | ||
| It seems like... | ||
| You have also created a situation where you could be attacked by these same lying forces over this. | ||
| I can imagine a nightmare kind of scenario where the argument now becomes I'm Alex Jones. | ||
| I didn't traumatize you. | ||
| You had this abuse in your childhood and that's why you had such a terrible time with People saying that you might be an actor. | ||
| It wasn't about me. | ||
| I feel like there's such an openness that you take on. | ||
| There's a risk that you take on through that. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| And it was something I had to think a lot about to join the suit. | ||
| I had to go through that process. | ||
| So what it shows for me is the arc of my healing journey and my path. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There was times where I would have never considered doing this. | ||
| Ever, ever, ever, ever. | ||
| And now I'm to a place where I feel like I can. | ||
| And if you look at the narrative of what comes out from people like Alex Jones and his ilk of people that follow him, that doesn't change. | ||
| The things that they say about me are the same. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And they might be able to put it in a new context. | ||
| Like, oh, now he's writing a book and he's just going to make more money. | ||
| And they'll just reference, remember that smiling piece of shit crisis actor. | ||
| So again, what I've been able to reclaim and what I've been able to take away from this journey, and especially through the trial, was like, I don't need to give them that power over me anymore. | ||
| And so I feel like I'm in a place where I can handle that. | ||
| And I know that this is more authentic to who I am. | ||
| This is more authentic to really protecting. | ||
| Emily's memory and my family and myself. | ||
| And it's funny that you bring that up because those things that you talked about, that's exactly what Norm Pattis did in our deposition. | ||
| And that didn't really come out in the trial, but he did use all these things and tried to use them against me in the deposition. | ||
| Did Alex Jones ever... | ||
| Did Alex Jones abuse you? | ||
| How can you tell the difference between your trauma from sexual abuse and the trauma you say that Alex Jones did? | ||
| He threw all of that at me, and I was able to withstand it. | ||
| And so that makes me feel like I can withstand it now. | ||
| I think that that is such a great and awesome point, is that you can withstand it. | ||
| And there's an illustration and demonstration of it in your book and in your experience. | ||
| And I think that's... | ||
| I don't want to say a victory, but I think that there is something very beneficial about that. | ||
| First of all, for you as a person, and then also as a perspective, as a society that we're going to just have to keep dealing with this. | ||
| Reality is, obviously you and all of the people in your community in Sandy Hook, we're not the only people who have been affected this way. | ||
| And not even just the people in Parkland. | ||
| And there will be more people in the future. | ||
| Alex obviously can't stop himself. | ||
| And he's not the only person who does this. | ||
| And so it becomes almost like, I guess, a social responsibility that we have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And part of that comes to not just holding people that do it accountable, but to the people that also help proliferate this, right? | ||
| At one point in time, another defendant on the lawsuit was the company that's in charge of all the affiliations that Alex Jones' radio show has across the country, right? | ||
| I can't remember the term. | ||
| It was Genesis Communications. | ||
| They're the ones that syndicate. | ||
| So they're responsible for the proliferation of this. | ||
| Social media companies are responsible. | ||
| Our crazy aunt on Facebook is responsible. | ||
| So there are areas in which we can do that for ourselves. | ||
| Again, but some of the things that we were able to take away from this, there have been shootings that have happened since. | ||
| Alex Jones doesn't... | ||
| Attack those family members, right? | ||
| He comes up with different ways to try and get his narrative across. | ||
| I can't fix all of society's ills on this topic, right? | ||
| But I feel like doing my part to help push the needle someplace and somebody else doing that, the next people that want to be like Alex Jones are going to know that they're going to have to do it differently than him. | ||
| Because they're going to be held responsible, so they're going to have to do it in a way that's more responsible. | ||
| I'm not going to say it's things that we would approve of what responsibility is, but they're going to have to take steps and measures to do it differently. | ||
| Well, it's kind of a refinement of how do we live in the world that we've created with social media and with information that moves this fast. | ||
| How do we live in that world while there's free speech? | ||
| We can't give up on the fact that there is a right that people have to speech. | ||
| So how do we adjust? | ||
| How do we carve out dealing with how fast speech is and how full of shit so much of it is and how profitable that is to... | ||
| I don't know if you ever... | ||
| I've never talked to you about this, and I don't know if it ever came up in the courts, but like... | ||
| Alex has multiple times said that he was drunk when he was saying a lot of this stuff. | ||
| He's said that he just was, I had a bottle of vodka or whatever. | ||
| You know, like, you can't stop that, necessarily. | ||
| We just have to accommodate. | ||
| And if that was my goal, like, and I know, like, in our opening statement and stuff, it was about, like, you know, we need to stop this. | ||
| We need to shut him down, right? | ||
| And so, like, again, so speaking of, like, my own motivations and everything like that, like, yes, I don't want him saying things that hurt people, right? | ||
| Can I take, you know, can I sue him to have his larynx removed? | ||
| Like, I can't do that, right? | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| You know, can I, can I sue him just to make an apology and tell his, his listeners, like, I lied to you. | ||
| What I said was false. | ||
| And like, you know, I can't do that. | ||
| So we, we had to go through what we went through. | ||
| And then, so part of that process is now, you know, he's in his, his bankruptcy, the bankruptcy courts and going through that whole process. | ||
| And again, like, so there's a couple of things with that, like from the bankruptcy point of view and as like the. | ||
| The culmination of the whole trial is everything he's built over the 30 years plus of what he's done is being broken down and taken away from him. | ||
| He doesn't have control over that anymore. | ||
| He doesn't have control of certain narratives. | ||
| But one of the biggest things that I've come to realize lately, and it was actually a New York Times reporter that shared this with me. | ||
| She was like, what you were able to accomplish is you're not going to be able to mention Alex Jones' name ever. | ||
| Without it being associated with Sandy Hook and the lies he told about Sandy Hook and the harm that he did to people. | ||
| So whether you still believe Alex Jones or not, I don't know if I've converted anybody away from Infowars or not, but regardless of where you are on that, he's forever going to be associated with exactly the type of person that he is and who he was and what he did. | ||
| And so he's never going to be able to shake himself from that. | ||
| So there's a huge victory for me in that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that it's such this interesting... | |
| Interesting, kind of double-edged sword, because I do agree that I think that he'll never be able to disassociate himself from this. | ||
| But then he's able to say, they want to make me the Sandy Hook man, and that's all I've ever done. | ||
| And that is persuasive to some people. | ||
| That's compelling. | ||
| They're trying to make it look like that's my whole career. | ||
| I think that the double-edged sword aspect of it is, obviously, Sandy Hook isn't his whole career. | ||
| It's not the biggest thing that he's done, necessarily. | ||
| He doesn't talk about the shooting all the time. | ||
| But the behavior that he engaged in is indicative of how he has dealt with so many different situations even around the same time. | ||
| The Aurora shooting, the Boston bombing. | ||
| Saying he's the Sandy Hook guy, or having him live with that as part of his legacy, properly understood means, like, the way that you acted with this is how you acted with so many other things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It should be synonymous with, this is the type of person that you are, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I agree, it's not... | ||
| And he talks about, like, we only talked about Sandy Hook this percentage of the time, or whatever. | ||
| So yeah, it's definitely not the biggest... | ||
| It wasn't the biggest thing in his career, but it was by far what we were able to prove was it was the biggest thing for his career. | ||
| I'm not taking away that it was huge for his career. | ||
| I just mean the argument that they filed 20 minutes of video or whatever. | ||
| That kind of defense is always going to be compelling for someone who wants to believe. | ||
| That's frustrating. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| I wish I could. | ||
| You know, hold group sessions with, you know, people that are on the fence about info wars and help them see the light and bring them over to the side, right? | ||
| I'm not out to convert people who have that mentality to believe because they believe for the reasons that they believe. | ||
| You know, we look at somebody who we call, like, crazy, right? | ||
| But really, everything comes down to what's logical for them. | ||
| So, I read the story about this man who, he was in this, it was back in the day, he was in this insane asylum, and he kept trying to break the windows, right? | ||
| So, they would have to tie him down, and one guy finally went and talked to him and asked him, why are you wanting to break the windows? | ||
| And he said, because they're putting gas in here, trying to kill us with gas, and I can't breathe. | ||
| So once you understood what it was that in his world made sense to him, and so if you feel like you can't breathe and you're being gassed, you're going to want to go break a window so that you can breathe, right? | ||
| So it was illogical and it wasn't based in reality, but if you put yourself in his perspective, it's logical, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Believing so many of the things that are unbelievable that he puts out. | ||
| Are understandable if you feel powerless over the way the government operates. | ||
| So many of these things make sense. | ||
| That kernel of the healthy cynicism, healthy skepticism that gets mutated by him into this unhealthy version. | ||
| And they look at me as though I'm just as illogical and I'm just as crazy and evil and stuff like that. | ||
| So I would love for there to be a way for us to find that way to Connect on some level so we can start breaking some of those misconceptions down and everything. | ||
| Yeah, and so I can do what I can as far as that goes and go from here. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that that's people's journey too. | ||
| Because the unfortunate thing is there's no holy water or anything. | ||
| Just in the case of with you and the lawsuit, if you all were just... | ||
| Desperately going for all of his money, he would say they just want money. | ||
| And because there's been a desire to get concessions, like you won't bring up Sandy Hook ever again, he's now able to say you don't want money. | ||
| Either way you go, there's a way for him to make you the villain. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| For the people who take in the content, I think it's... | ||
| If you can't see that no matter what, the same story is going to be told, then it's very difficult to argue unless someone's ready to hear. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's exactly why I put his listeners in the realm of... | ||
| Victims of Alex Jones, too, because he knows what he's doing and why he's doing it, and you're right. | ||
| He doesn't look at it as though he's victimizing them, right? | ||
| But he is, and that is on him. | ||
| And in the same way that he doesn't look at it as victimizing you to say you're an actor and all this, he doesn't care. | ||
| I think that there's the same lack of care with the audience, probably. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, yeah, why would you? | ||
| Why would you take away that fountain of what it is you're seeking, right? | ||
| And just, again, it even just points to everything that he's sought in his life to fill whatever it is that he feels like needs to be healed or reconciled or whatever. | ||
| Like I was saying in the trial or in the litigation process, everything he did actually went against him. | ||
| And everything, whatever pain or hole it is that he has in his heart that makes him unable to feel. | ||
| Every way that he's gone about trying to compensate for that hasn't worked either. | ||
| And it's been at the cost of a lot of people. | ||
| Well, one of the things that I think didn't come up nearly enough in the trial is how much he believes he's fighting the literal devil and that God has sent him on the campaign that he's on since childhood by giving him prophetic visions and all of this stuff. | ||
| Which, I mean... | ||
| You know, that makes up for a lot of, you know, like, obviously you or I or someone else would see, like, ah, you can't feel, and you're not attached to this at all. | ||
| You're not attached to reality and what other people are experiencing. | ||
| But for him, he's attached to the ultimate reality, which is that he's facing up against a giant horned demon being. | ||
| Every time that there's some sort of consequence, like... | ||
| The default judgment or the bankruptcy or any of this stuff. | ||
| It's just proof that he's that much more dangerous to the devil. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So when you say everything went against him, all of these things went against him, that is true from our perspective. | ||
| But he's created a world where he can turn consequence into virtue. | ||
| And so maybe you protect yourself that way a little bit. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| It's a hard nut to crack. | ||
| And you see that in lots of realms in life, right? | ||
| You look at cult leaders and you look at even mainstream religions. | ||
| I talked about being raised in a very high demand religion. | ||
| And that is every time you feel persecuted, it's just more like zeal for you to be like, that's proof that I'm on the right track and God's looking out for me because why would people attack me for doing the right thing? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| What you're saying is... | ||
| Somehow creating just at least a little bit of separation or distance just to be able to get turn your like, you know, can't see the forest for the trees, your one foot view on the world, and just to get at least 100 foot perspective can do wonders. | ||
| And so, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I really appreciate your time. | ||
| And we should probably wrap this up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Because I don't want to keep you all day. | ||
| Before we go, is there anything else that's front of mind for you that you'd like to talk about? | ||
| Anything we didn't get to? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, again, the real reason of me putting this book out there is because, again, I know that there's a lot of people who went through something very similar to me as far as... | ||
| Bad things happen, and you suffer in silence, and it's hard to find connection or hope again. | ||
| And that's out there, and that's available for you, and to do that, and connect with yourself, and don't lose track of that. | ||
| And that sounds very generic and kind of just kumbayash, but it's been the world of difference for me, and I've seen it affect other people as well. | ||
| That's really what this is about. | ||
| We're all sharing our one chance at life together. | ||
| We're all sharing either this time in history together or on this planet together. | ||
| Let's really work hard on making it the best we can for each other. | ||
| I think that's a great message. | ||
| I appreciate you sharing it and getting to chat with you about it. | ||
| Thank you again. | ||
| People can find your book. | ||
| It's Father's Fight. | ||
| Is the name of it, right? | ||
| A Father's Fight, Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook. | ||
| People should check that out. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| No, it's been a pleasure. |