Six years after the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the dirtball broadcaster Alex Jones finally faces his hours of legal interrogation. But there will be no further discussion for Jeremy Richman, who never stopped grieving the loss of his daughter at Sandy Hook, and finally gave up trying.
Richman, 49, who was Jewish, took his own life in the same week Jones was finally forced to answer questions about his continuous tormenting of the families of the murdered children of Sandy Point. Richman’s daughter, Avielle, was one of them.
There were 20 children killed. They were six and seven yearsold. Jones found it professionally useful to question the bloodbath, even as heset loose conspiracy lunatics around the country who then tormented the victims’families so heartlessly that some were forced to move.
The children’s killer was a 20-year-old named Adam Lanza. He used a Bushmaster rifle. But the aftermath cruelty was committed by Jones. He used his microphone and his twisted soul.
In the midst of mass grieving over the loss of so muchinnocence, Jones turned the heartache into a grotesque grab for personalattention. He claimed the killings were “staged.” He said they were thegovernment’s attempt to make a case for gun control. He called the shootings “agiant hoax” carried out by “crisis actors.”
“Don’t think the globalists who control this countrywouldn’t kill little kids, all day, every day,” Jones told his listeners.“Don’t think this couldn’t be staged. Our government kills little kids all thetime.”
Last week, when informed of Richman’s suicide, Jones assumed a familiar posture. He asked his listeners, “Now it’s, well, apparent suicide. I mean, is there going to be a police investigation? Are they going to look at the surveillance cameras? I mean, what happened to this guy? This whole Sandy Hook thing is, like, really getting even crazier.”
Maybe sanity begins to return now. Several of the Sandy Hook families have sued him, and last week we had a video released of a red-faced, fumbling, twitchy Jones trying to explain himself at a legal deposition and getting nowhere.
Where had he gotten his information on the “staged” aspectof the killings? Who were his sources? Well, he said, “sources” could meananything.
“Somebody prints something on a bathroom wall, it could be asource,” he claimed.
Then, his answers got even more desperate and absurd.
“I, myself,” he said, “have almost had like a form ofpsychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged,even though I’ve now learned a lot of times things aren’t staged. So I think,as a pundit, someone giving an opinion that, you know, my opinions have beenwrong, but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people.”
Over the last few decades, Jones has syndicated his bilge tomore than a hundred radio stations around the country. Among his fans isPresident Donald Trump, who has called Jones “amazing.”
There are two highly-disturbing problems here: one is the onslaught of sheer crap that Alex Jones has unleashed on the American public over the years. But the second problem is far more disturbing: the thought that huge numbers of listeners have apparently listened to this garbage — and somehow bought into it
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Commemorations of the Holocaust must transcend the past to include concerns about the present and future, writes Menachem Z. Rosensaft.
Someone needed to tell Donald Trump that his appearance at a UFC fight over the weekend was not a good look, writes Michael Olesker.
Journalists bear a responsibility to go beyond the headlines and social media posts to understand the past and present, writes New York University student Lucia Alonso.