Alex Jones: The Rise and Fall – Part 3

The staple of the Alex Jones conspiracy buffet is the “False Flag Attack.” According to writer Merrill Perlman of the Columbia Journal Review, “False flags are (usually) far-fetched conspiracy theories launched by far-left or far-right groups seeking to deflect blame to the opposition.” False Flag sentiments have been echoed in instances like the riot at the Capitol on January 6th or the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Republican lawmakers like Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Ron Johnson along with Alex Jones said that the Capital riot was the work of Antifa or the FBI to criminalize President Trump. However, false flag conspiracies are most prevalent in the cases of school shootings, and Alex Jones was not afraid to exploit that notion. 

On December 14th, 2012, 20 year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother before taking his high powered rifle to Sandy Hook Elementary school. Once there, Lanza opened fire, killing 26 people, most of them children, before taking his own life. It still remains as one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. Even a decade later families still grapple with the struggle of losing their child in such a senseless tragedy. Alex Jones, however, did not see it this way.

Beginning around 2014, Jones began his crusade to prove that Sandy Hook was a “false flag operation”. In one InfoWars broadcast from January 13th, 2015, Jones exclaimed “Yeah, so Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they had killed some real kids.” This quote is from Fred Zipp’s affidavit in the InfoWars lawsuit. Now if Jones was just some internet sleuth calling the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting fake then it probably wouldn’t have registered on anybody’s radar. Unfortunately, people on the internet do like to spread these conspiracy theories either out of genuine belief or as a twisted joke. Jones however was becoming popular through the InfoWars show and his deplorable beliefs were quickly picked up by parents of the Sandy Hook victims and the mainstream media, and new followers found it as well.