Which is stunning since she spent years tormenting the parents of first-graders.
She told me she always wanted to be a first-grade teacher. Which is why I spent so much time with Kelly Watt, that woman in the book from Tulsa who owns a cleaning business. Q: Which is why it’s so hard to have a conversation with people who believe this.Ī: Right, because the first thing they say is, How do you know it’s not true? The biggest thing, though, is they don’t want to give up their community. (The families) watched these same crazy claims latch on to all these other shootings and they said they need to raise the alarm: This isn’t going away. Because the same thing spread to every high-profile mass shooting after Sandy Hook, and that was new. Also, who are the people who embraced these theories despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary? The families thought at first if they just ignored it. I became interested in how this happened and what it means for the rest of us. You can trace a through-line from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate, QAnon, the violence on Jan. But when I was talking to Leonard Pozner - the father of Noah Pozner, the youngest victim - he convinced me, and then I learned for myself, that Sandy Hook was really a foundational story of how false narratives and disinformation gained traction in America. In the middle of 2018, when I first learned that the families of two Sandy Hook victims were suing Alex Jones, I thought it would be an interesting test of whether the First Amendment, as conspiracy theorists and Alex Jones claim, protects falsehoods spread online by millions of people that then result in years of torment and threats to vulnerable individuals. Q: The story gets so big that I wondered if you had planned on a different book.Ī: I did, yes. When he realizes 20 first-graders were killed, he understands, as did many Americans on the right and left of the gun debate, that this will be a watershed moment and lead to a big battle over gun policy. Within hours of the shooting, listeners were calling and pleading with him: “Tell us this was a false flag, tell us this was a government pretext for confiscating firearms.” There are two guys in Chicago, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, whose podcast (“Knowledge Fight”) would eventually pull apart that initial broadcast, and what happens is that Jones slowly starts to come around to the conspiracy. It starts the day of the shooting, on Alex Jones’ broadcast. Is that the exact moment when this started?Ī: Actually, go back. Q: There’s a scene in your book, just after the shooting, in which one of the parents is answering press questions and clearly nervous and sort of smiling through pain - which is immediately seized on by online theorists as evidence that the massacre didn’t happen.