Combating conspiracy theories is like a game of whack-a-mole: debunk one person, take down one post, and five more pop up in its place. It is constantly mutating, becoming endemic in a society that deals in “alternative facts”. Near the end of the book, Ms De La Rosa compares conspiracism to a virus. Perhaps the most eloquent voice in Ms Williamson’s account of Sandy Hook is Veronique De La Rosa, whose six-year-old son, Noah Pozner, was killed in the shooting. Many of the same websites and conspiracists that spewed nonsense about Sandy Hook abandoned truth in service of the “Big Lie” that Mr Trump actually won the presidential election of 2020. Some of Mr Jones’s associates are members of the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, far-right groups that stormed the United States Capitol building on January 6th 2021. One of the book’s most revealing conclusions is not about the massacre at all, but conspiracism’s place in America today. If outrage begets clicks, and clicks beget influence and money, then hucksters including Mr Jones are incentivised to follow their worst impulses. Third are the social-media platforms, whose algorithms facilitated the spread of outrageous and hateful content because those posts boost engagement. The second are conspiracists such as Mr Jones, who either truly doubted that the massacre happened, or used the episode to gain money and influence (Mr Jones’s riches come from peddling diet supplements on Infowars). The first is the shooter himself, who killed his mother, 26 people and finally himself. There are three kinds of villains in the story. The author nudges readers to think broadly about who is responsible for perpetuating the idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax. David McCraw, a lawyer for the New York Times, told Ms Williamson that the legal proceedings were tantamount to “fake news on trial”. Late last year judges in Texas and Connecticut ruled that he and Infowars are liable to pay damages to the families of ten victims. He has lost several defamation lawsuits by default after refusing to hand over documents required by the courts. For years, beginning on the very day of the shooting, Mr Jones variously asserted that the massacre was a government plot, that it never happened and that grieving parents were “crisis actors”. In the middle of Mr Jones’s rise was Sandy Hook. As the internet took off, social media and audio streaming catapulted him to national fame and, later, into the orbit of Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, who was interviewed by Mr Jones for Infowars in 2015. Mr Jones was a local eccentric in the 1990s, a creature of radio and public-access television in Austin, Texas. Ms Williamson convincingly argues that no one person epitomises conspiracism’s leakage into the mainstream more than Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy-monger and creator of Infowars, a website. But until relatively recently these ideas swirled at the fringes of society. Kennedy’s assassination, and the twin towers were brought down on September 11th 2001 by explosives rather than hijacked planes. Some believe the footage of the moon landing was faked, Lyndon Johnson was involved in President John F. America is no stranger to conspiracy theories.
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