Psychotic? Or Just Plain Evil?
The Ukrainian grandmother was clear. While being interviewed minutes after crossing to safety in Poland, she was briefly interrupted by her grandson - speaking Russian. “No! No Russian! Russia, go to hell! Putin, damn him to hell!” Her hatred was visceral.
Medieval Benedictine monks were perhaps History’s greatest hurlers of curses. As he directs rocket attacks against maternity hospitals, against the Mariupol Drama Theater in which hundreds were desperately seeking shelter and against schools and apartment buildings across that now forever war-scarred nation, we can almost hear them loosening their well-deserved bile against Vladimir Putin:
From the bowls of Hell may you beg for the mud of the Ukraine to ease your thirst.
In the depths of Hell may you hear the keening of your children – grieving that you ever touched them.
May you never know the mercy of God who dwells in the lives of those whom you have attempted to destroy.
Were they here today, those same cowl-covered monks might hurl their maledictions against radio and television performers and shameless bloggers and “academics” with their lies about mass shootings, “false flags,” “tragedy actors,” “fake news” and “stolen” elections:
May you know for all eternity the soul-deep pain of those whom you have injured.
May your children turn from you and your descendants for all time be overwhelmed by the shame that comes from the mention of your name.
May the courts of the land reduce you to penury, so that you must beg the un-coming alms of the poorest of God’s poor.
In June 2019, Wisconsin’s Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank D. Remington ruled that James Fetzer, a co-author of the 2016 trash pile Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, had defamed the twenty first- and second-graders and six teachers and administrators who were killed in the 2012 mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In December 2019, a jury awarded still-grieving Leonard Pozner, father of Noah, $450,000 in damages – more than Felzer’s total net worth. Months later, an unrepentant Felzer leaked Mr. Pozner’s sealed deposition transcript and the judge awarded another $650,000 in damages – bringing the total to $1.1 million.
One can almost imagine the Benedictines dancing for joy at the thought of the purveyor of such cruelty being reduced to perpetual poverty. To further balance the scales of emotional justice, the University of Minnesota Deluth, where Fetzer was once a member of the Department of Philosophy, has attached a “position on James Fetzer’s conspiracy theories” to his curriculum vitae – academic/professional resume - noting that he is a “conspiracy theorist” and “His theories are his own and are not endorsed by the University.”
This conspiracy theorist argued that the Sandy Hook shooting was a staged political scheme and that Leonard Pozner had fabricated Noah’s death certificate, that Noah, six-years-old and the youngest person to die in the Sandy Hook massacre, was not a real person and/or that he was not Pozner’s son. Fetzer, a tragically flawed man, repeatedly argued that the deadliest mass shooting at an American elementary school and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history was a Barack Obama administration “drill where no kids died to promote gun control.”
The list of dishonestly self-described “truthers” – they are, in fact, “hoaxers,” often making thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars through Web sites, blogs, the sale of books and movies purporting to delve deeply into our nation’s great griefs – is endless.
Wolfgang Halbig, who claims to have raised more than $100,000 through fund-raising sites like GoFundMe, has plagued police agencies and the families of Sandy Hook with ceaseless Freedom of Information Act demands for photos of the murder scene, the children’s corpses, and receipts for the disposal of “body fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45 to 60 gallons of blood.” He has demanded to know “Why did the parents of the two children who died at the Danbury hospital not allow their children to donate their organs to other children for the gift of life?”
[Halbig offers a simple tool for evaluating his personal character and his veracity: He has repeatedly claimed:
“The greatest honor this old man of 70 ever had and will take to my grave is when I worked as a Florida State Trooper… I was assigned to Dr. Martin Luther King who was in St. Augustine, Florida during a March on the beach. I had the privilege of driving him… I was young when he died by gunfire he made me become a better teacher and school administrator when leaving the Highway patrol.”
The problems: Halbig joined the Highway Patrol in 1974 – ten years after the St. Augustine Beach march and six years after Dr. King was assassinated.]
At best, Halbig is delusional – even about his own history. At worst, he’s a fabulist, prevaricator and spinner of lies.
And, if there is an archdemon – a Lucifer – of the purveyors of hoaxes and outright self-serving, self-enriching lies, by the grace of God, Alex Jones may soon receive – at least from civil courts – the rewards he so richly – or impoverishingly – deserves.
While raking in millions of dollars from his all-believing audience huckstering dubious “nutritional,” products, water purifiers and virility enhancers, Jones has spent decades peddling outright lies, including:
The myth that the Air Force created “floods in Texas” that “killed thirty-something people in one night.”
“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children… and the Pentagon has developed ‘weaponized perfumes’” that “will make men attracted to other men, and they want you to do that so you don’t have kids.”
Michelle Obama is a “tranny” and Barack Obama is gay.
“They’re now saying sex with machines or sex with cars or sex with appliances – there’s a whole big movement where people are marrying their cars, marrying their toasters, marrying their dogs, their cats, their horses. I’m not kidding… They’re catching people in public places – you see it all the time – trying to have sex with a Ferrari or trying to have sex with a ’57 Chevy.”
The Boston Marathon was an inside job.
But Jones reached the sinful point of soul-deep-ugly with his attacks on Leonard and Veronique Pozner and the other families of those who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, claiming the shooting was “completely fake” and staged in order to promote more restrictive gun control policies. He initially called the murders a “hoax” but later claimed to believe it “really happened,” while still insisting that the families suing him were agents of the Democratic Party.
In November 20221, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis found this despicable hoaxer liable for damages in defamation lawsuits brought by the families of eight of the Sandy Hook victims. Jones repeatedly refused to turn over documents as ordered by the court and Judge Bellis found him liable by default, echoing the September findings of a Texas court in lawsuits filed by victims’ families. In coming weeks, juries in both states will determine the damages due to the long-suffering families.
For those who believe Jones’s reason-defying assertions over the years, statements from his deposition in the Texas case are critical. He claimed that he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.” He blamed his mental state on “the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much, then everything begins – you don’t trust anything anymore, kinda like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again well, pretty soon they don’t know what reality is.”
In short, Jones is telling those who have followed the leader down the rabbit hole “Either I’m a child of lying and abusive parents or I’m just plain psychotic. But keep listening to me and sending money.” Once his (hopefully) financial ruin appeared on the horizon, the man who profited by inflicting immeasurable pain on the families of Sandy Hook murder victims dares to say, “Never mind! I’m crazy!”
To read New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth is – or should be for any emotionally healthy human being - to experience a level of anger bordering on hate. Hate for those who inflicted unimaginable pain on the Sandy Hook families. Williamson’s work gives insight to the words of Thirteenth Century Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas
He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral.
Why? Because anger looks for the good of justice.
And if you can live amid injustice without anger,
you are immoral as well as unjust.
Those who have profited and profiteered through their lies, hoaxes and conspiracy theories deserve all the anger showered upon them. Williamson exposes the unrelenting emotional brutality of so-called “truthers” in a masterful account of the families’ pains, Jones’s self-serving and self-enriching lies, and the profound pathologies of those who have followed his lead with claims of “crisis actors,” “false flags,” “assaults on the Second Amendment,” “take away your guns,” “fake news,” “alternative facts,” “genderism,” and “woke.”
Williamson also introduces us to Harmony Square, developed by Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist who directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Van der Liden and his colleagues worked with the U.S. Department of State Global Engagement Center and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to build this ten-minute game that invites players to wreak havoc on a fictional small town by using the type of disinformation techniques employed by Halbig, Fetzer, Jones and others.
It's a quick – and non-pain-inflicting – way to understand how hoaxers and would-be hoaxers are trapped in worlds of lies and disseminate those lies to others.
Harmony Square is available for free at HarmonySquare.
Thankfully, Williamson also gives her readers a second gift: an introduction to HONR Network, a non-profit organization focused on protecting people from online abuse. HONR Network reminds us that, a decade after the Sandy Hook murders, “the families of victims 6 and 7-year-old children and their teachers are still being targeted, harassed, and humiliated online by conspiracy theorists and hoaxers. They are not alone. Survivors and victims’ family members from every mass casualty incident, school shooting, and high-profile crime are being targeted on line.” The Network is “dedicated to ending their online harassment and terror.”
Within hours of the murder of twenty first- and second-graders and six teachers and school administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary, Alex Jones was telling the world “My gut is, in the timing and everything that happened, this is staged.” In 2015, Donald Trump told this _____ (fill in the blank with any word/words you think are appropriate), “Your reputation’s amazing.”
Both were wrong. Jones is a hoax and hoaxer. That is and should forever be his reputation or, as the Ukrainian grandmother hissed, “Damn him to hell!”