On 14 December 2012, an armed man entered Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. He shot and killed 20 children aged between six and seven and six members of staff.
It is impossible to imagine a worse thing, isn’t it? The massacre of children and those trying to protect them. And yet it did get worse, thanks to a rightwing bloviator with merch to sell. The Truth vs Alex Jones maps, in painful, unsensationalist detail, the additional suffering the bereaved families were caused when Jones began to call the shooting a hoax. This, he told viewers of his “alt-right” internet show Infowars, was the “false-flag operation” he had been warning them about – a fake shooting orchestrated by gun control advocates to give the left the leverage it needed to come for patriots’ weapons. Conspiracy theorists took everything he said and ran with it.
