Alex Jones begged viewers for donations on his InfoWars show as a jury ordered him to pay $965m to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting on Wednesday.
Jones streamed the verdict live on his programme and reacted with a mixture of sarcasm, frustration, and anger as the damages were read out.
Throughout, however, he implored his audience to help him “fight” back by donating or by buying supplements and other products from the InfoWars site. Among the product Jones hawked is a “vitamineral fusion.”
“I’m almost out of money,” Jones, who is believed to be worth between $135m and $270m, said at one point. He also said that there is “no money” to pay the damages he owes and that he will continue to speak out about other school mass shootings like the ones in Parkland and Uvalde.
“They want to scare us away from question Uvalde or Parkland,” Jones said. “We’re not going away. We’re not going to stop.”
Jones claimed during the defamation trial that he was “done apologising” for his lies about the Sandy Hook shooting, which included the claim that the children killed at the school were “actors” and that the shooting itself was a “giant hoax.” Plantiffs said that Jones’ insistance over years that the shooting was a “false flag” operation led to their being harassed in public by InfoWars listeners and retraumatised.
Jones, a native of Texas, has been one of the far right’s most prominent, most conspiratorial voices for years. He has spread conspiracy theories about about a Washington, DC pizzeria, the yogurt company Chobani, the Charottlesville Unite the Right rally, and more. He has also cast doubt on the legitimacy of the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and called survivor and activist David Hogg a “crisis actor.”
But it’s Jones’ conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting that have made his financial status and that of a number of his companies uncertain.
Earlier this year, three companies owned by Jones filed for bankruptcy in Austin. Free Speech Systems, LLC, InfoWars’ parent company, filed for bankruptcy in July. At a defamation trial over the summer in Texas, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50m to the parents of one of the students killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
In his testimony at that trial, Jones admitted the mass shooting was “100 per cent real.”
