Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones reacts to liquidating his personal assets, agreeing to demands from the families of Sandy Hook victims to whom he owes more than $1.5 billion in damages over his lies about the 2012 school massacre. CNN’s Oliver Darcy reports.
Open question…
Why did these types focus on sandy hook when there are so many school shootings. What made it different?
TW: I am going discuss some of the specifics of Sandy Hook.
Just conjecture on my part but it probably was because Sandy Hook was a little unique in that there were twenty victims between the ages of 6 and 7 and the shooter was 20 years old. Many American school shootings involve a teenage or young adult perpetrator targeting victims that are of similar or slightly younger age. I suspect that makes it easier for some sociopaths to dismiss these incidents as potentially retribution for bullying or interpersonal drama.
This incident was unique in that it was just a grown man murdering little children. There is absolutely no way to blame the victims in any way, shape, or form. There is nothing a 6 year-old could possibly have done to cause this. Not only that but it holds the ignominious distinction as the deadlist shooting at an elementary school.
So I suspect they targeted this incident in particular because they feared it was going to serve as a powerful catalyst that would sway public opinion in the debate on gun control. By trying to convince people that it was not real they hoped to decrease the impact it might have had.
Thank you
I was following conspiracy theory communities prior to Sandy Hook and Alex Jones stood out because he had a track record well before that event of declaring any big tragedy that hit the news as a false flag event. His audience clearly loved that tactic because just about every day he had a new false flag current event with crisis actors. Sandy Hook wasn’t really given a unique treatment by Jones, as soon as I saw the headline that day, my first thought was that Jones was soon going to declare it to be yet another false flag event, because he always said shootings were faked by the government to take people’s guns away. The difference is in the public response to this one. The public couldn’t ignore the harassment of all these grieving parents the way it ignored the rest of his rants. We are a lot more sensitive to harms towards children than we are towards adults so this story got a lot more traction.