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I was at the news company’s Christmas luncheon when word spread of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. I was sitting in the lobby of the dorm at Georgia Southern University when I heard of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. These two incidents alone should’ve caused a massive overhaul of the country’s use of firearms and sales. But it only increased between April 1999 and December 2012.
When I went on vacation once, the person who held down the fort did a story on the rise of gun sales with one dealer calling President Obama the best advertisement for guns sales. I know people who in 1999 considered themselves conservatives but didn’t have firearms in their possession. Thirteen years later, their rhetoric had changed as if they were a totally different person. Thirteen years? It’s a bad luck number. And in both cases, the majority of victims were kids. We can lie to ourselves and say they’re were some 18-year-olds at Columbine but they were still kids with their whole lives ahead of them.
If you had told people in 1999 that the events of Columbine which happened 25 years ago this past April 20 were the result of a conspiracy by President Bill Clinton and the Democrat Party, a good number of people would’ve thought you were crazy. I don’t know why conservatives and Republicans think Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to take away firearms. Repealing an Amendment in this day and age is almost as impossible as approving one. And I don’t think many people would do such a thing for firearms even though Columbine isn’t even in the top 10 of the worst mass killings ever in this country.
People like Alex Jones have been around for years, decades, centuries. Most of the time, we just didn’t pay them much attention because they couldn’t get their message out as much. Most of the people who have smartphones in 2012 didn’t even have computers in their home in 1999. It had become a different world and for some reason, things had gotten worse. I’ve always wondered if Mitt Romney had won the Presidential election 2012 if people still would’ve thought it was a hoax by Obama (who would’ve still been in office one more month) and the Democrat Party. They probably would.
People were so filled with hate and animosity (as well as extreme racism) toward the Obama Administration it didn’t matter what he did or said in the aftermath of Sandy Hook or Hurricane Sandy, they found something at fault. A guy my brother went to school with whose pics on Facebook looked like he was angry to press 1 for English criticized Obama for calling it “Newton” instead of “Newtown.” I don’t think Obama did this but someone from the South has no right to criticize how things could be mispronounced.
A week after the general election, I was sitting in a waiting room where a woman was commenting about a new story about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. She said the people in New York and New Jersey deserved the devastation for voting the way they did. It was fucking insane. I thought of saying something but I just rolled my eyes. Someone that dumb doesn’t understand much. Trying to explain anything to them would be a waste of breath. It’s because we as a society stopped correcting people for being wrong and saying stupid things, people feel they not only have a right to say it but they are themselves right for saying it.
Yep, I would see people like Alex Jones on street corners or such every now and again growing up screaming his nonsense. They’re usually always men. One time in my hometown, some guy going through town on a flatbed trailer with others spewing some nonsense. Jones was at the peak of his InfoWars in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. And Jones quickly begin spreading the lies that it was all fake and there were crisis actors at work. Jones isn’t interviewed by filmmaker Dan Reed in The Truth vs. Alex Jones, currently streaming on HBO Max, but there’s enough archival footage of the noxious blowhard that it wasn’t needed.
Also, it would’ve taken the attention away from the true focus of the documentary – the murdered children and their families. Reed thankfully doesn’t mention the killer and neither will I. Instead we get a horrifying summary of the events with each name of the murdered be pronounced clearly and with emphasis on each one. At the time, one out of five people polled believed it was fake. Their argument was over the lack of paramedics/EMT and medical examiners at the school. You don’t need paramedics to work on dead people. Need I remind people that the killer made sure the children only age 6-7 were dead by shooting them in the head?
People were looking for a reason not to believe but I wonder why. One women suggest they exhume all the bodies to prove they were buried. Did they believe something so awful as the slaughter of 20 kids was too hard to believe that it must be made up? (Seeing the body of a murdered child is something you won’t ever forget, let me tell you. There’s no reason to make it up unless you’re very sick in the head.) Six faculty/staff including the school’s principal was also killed. Including the killer’s own mother, that’s 27 people murdered. How are you going to fake that many murders?
And how do you get an entire community like Newtown, which currently has a population of about 27,500 and probably about the same a decade ago to lie about the murder of friends and their loved ones? The reason most conspiracies don’t work is that the more people involved, the less likely they are to keep a secret.
Apparently, a fat fuck like Wolfgang Halbig is interviewed and I give Reed the journalistic integrity of not wanting to whack him across the face with a boom mic. Halbig is the type of loser that Jones seems to appeal to. He was also a guest on the show InfoWars and continued to badger and harass people of Newtown. He’s a sad, old man who looks alone. He was arrested in 2020 on allegations he had the unlawful possession of identification of one of the victim’s fathers, Leonard Pozner.
However, the only difference between Jones and Halbig is that Jones isn’t being used by Halbig. Jones’ main goal on InfoWars is to make money and he sells merchandise on his website. It’s typical gift shop mentality. If someone sees something when they visit a site, they might want to purchase something. And Last Week Tonight With John Oliver focused on this as well how Jones sells merchandise. The fact that all of this makes Jones nothing more than a snake oils salesman for the digital information age will make your skin crawl more. He’s been using events like Sandy Hook and others where people have died or been killed to get rich.
Jones has even admitted that he believes Sandy Hook was 100 percent real. But he backtracks with the typical “it could’ve been the truth at the time” excuse. And while many journalists, media and broadcasters are afforded the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking because they can use words like “accused” “allegedly” and “reportedly” as long as it pertains to getting information from a certified law enforcement agency or lawyer, most still err on caution. I’ve had to print corrections and clarifications on stories and take the L. It happens.
Jones was pulling a playbook typical of the modern-day Republican playbook. If you know you can’t win, make sure you have as many people question the results. He makes a mockery of the civil suit trial proceedings. And Jones seems to be acting like he couldn’t influence the people who harassed and threatened the victim’s family and friends but he did. That’s how the trial proceedings make Jones look like the kid in every classroom who thinks if they blab long enough, they can keep the teacher from doing their job.
And you can see the patience quickly leave Judge Maya Guerra Gamble as Jones does stupid stuff as he views the proceedings more like a part of his show. This anger and bravado came about in the 1990s during the rise of the Angry White Man stereotype, which is the time Jones started. Rush Limbaugh and others started it People like Jones have to be right all the time. It’s like the line from Roald Dahl’s Matilda: “I’m right and you’re wrong, I’m big and you’re small, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Even as the judgments come down, Jones mocks them on his show claiming that he’s broke and doesn’t have the money. I don’t think the families really cared about the money. The idea is to send a message to other people like Jones that there’s only so far you can go until you can’t hide behind the First Amendment anymore. You can’t threaten to kill a President. You can’t scream “Fire!” in a crowded room if there isn’t one. You can’t threaten violence while talking to a shrink. Coming at is as Congress wants to ban TikTok and the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments over whether Donald Trump is liable for any criminal activity he might have done while in The White House, it’s obvious people like Jones feel the rules don’t apply to them.
What do you think? Please comment.