I recently finished Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson. It was a very well put together and engaging book about one of the worst things to happen in modern memory. The elevator pitch is that The Sandy Hook mass shooting and the hoaxer groups and grifters that followed were a watershed moment in discourse in the United States. The information space after Sandy Hook was a web of misinformation and disinformation without any foundation in shared reality. The lack of foundation leads to harassment of families of victims and real harm from online spaces. The book tracks the the tragedy itself in great detail; the immediate aftermath at the fire house; arguments and angust about how to receive and distribute aid to victims and the community; the first conspiracy theories and theorists to come out days after the event; the grifters that profited off of the abstract idea of tragedy; the real harm that the hoaxes and hoaxers caused; and the lawsuits that brought down the biggest profiteers.
My main way into the subject is through the podcast Knowledge Fight. The show catalogs and dissects the misinformation narratives coming from the well spring of Alex Jones and InfoWars. The hosts, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, are THE experts on Alex Jones and InfoWars. Friesen is the intellectual researcher and Holmes is the loud id of aware listeners. Or, in their words: "We are the world's only comedy podcast dedicated to analyzing Alex Jones and celebrating Celine the cat."
Alex Jones was the megaphone of the Sandy Hook Hoaxers. Jones platformed and elevated voices of Wolfgang Halbig and Jim Fetzer, two of the people who spearheaded the hate and vitrole campaigns against the Sandy Hook families. Fetzer co-edited and contributed the to horrible book "No One Died At Sandy Hook" and Halbig carroled the theories of the Hoaxers. All this was done on Facebook and Youtube in the taming of Web 2.0.
The above is a preamble to my reading of the book. The first six or so chapters are horrifying accounts of the tragedy itself; the perpreture, Adam Lanza; and the grief and pain a tragedy like Sandy Hook causes survivors. It was difficult to read but compelling nonetheless. The first third of the book is very much how violence breaks people. Not just emotionally but from breaks people from reality. The first hoaxers were parents with young kids around the age of the victims. These hoaxers were looking for meaning in tragedy. Once facts were out and aggreeded (Adam Lanza went into an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut and killed 26 people with an automatic weapon. He was disturbed individual that was enabled and unchecked by his parents and social circles) or the abstract was dealt with by wouldbe hoaxers, the remaining people found something new in the facebook chats and google+ pages: community and purpose. They abstracted away the actual harm that Lanza caused and rallied around a key idea that parents and kids were "crisis actors" and decided to expose them as such. They doxed, digitally vandalized, stalked, and physically confronted the survivors. Their actions were reinforced by their hoax groups and given voice by Jones, Halbig, and Fetzer. Many people who felt that they were getting a bum wrap in life or were not being appreciated for their intellect were getting praise from 'smart' people.
As time moved towards the present I found the book easier to read. The tragedy becoming history in both the the books telling and in my life made dealing with the emotions a lot more bearable. I can deal with Jones being a loud piece of shit. I cannot deal with the pile of dead fourth graders. Through the lens of Knowledge Fight and watching the Heslen and De La Rosa trial live (I saw the 'Perry Mason moment live on the internet) I could deal with the hoaxers being giant pieces of shit. I could extend empathy to the point of them not giving up when facts were abound. But I could not deal with Neil Heslin or Lenny Pozner talking about their dead sons. I can understand the HONR network and DMCA and copyright. I was distributed and had trouble reading about with the harm hoaxers caused these victims' families. The reality was, while reading the book I was engaging in abstraction much like the hoaxers. The people affected by the shooting were not people: they were characters in the story. The families lost all agency and depth once the media took over coverage of the tragedy. After that the hoaxers picked up pieces dropped by the reality they no longer saw a Jewish child buried with an open coffin - they saw a target to literally dig up proof. They didn't see a months long clean up operations - the hoaxers say a missing piece of accounting. Basically - the hoaxers saw pixels on the screen and deliberately decided to write new stories about the pixels. If I was to believe that the hoax was real, then what? I would believe that the world was categorically evil. I would also not be able to engage with other people. The abstraction allowed me to deal with the feelings of horror and grief of reality. The abstraction allowed the hoaxers to deny others - to keep making up stories about pixels.
Alex Jones in all of this is a mix of megaphone and improv partner. He boosted these asshole hoaxers and without him the of it worst would have died down quickly. However, he kept feeding the fire because it kept him fed (or drunk if you follow his manic spiral). If there were real questions from Jones, Fetzer, Halbig, or any of the hoaxers, they should know how to answer them. They saw an opportunity to make money and pretend to take a stand. They are all cowards and internet bullies.
The book came out before the over 1 billion dollar judgment came down against Jones and his operation, Free speech system. Who knows what would have changed if the book came out after the first two trials. All I know is that Lenny Pozner said it best "I'm ready to move on...I've won."