Publicly skewered by the truth – but the lies continue

In the history of satisfying comeuppances, few can compare to the one that Alex Jones received in a Texas courtroom in 2022. The conspiracy “kingpin” – who for years had spread wilful lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre – was unbraided by the judge for telling lies under oath (“this is not your show!”).

Parents of the child victims of the shooting had sued Jones for defamation after he alleged the incident was staged and that the families involved were “crisis actors”. The judge eventually ordered that Jones be ordered to pay $41.5m that a jury had awarded the family of one victim, and a further $4.5m in compensatory damages.

Those amounts were themselves dwarfed by the further $1.4bn that eight families and a first responder were awarded in a Connecticut courtroom.

There would be no hiding for Jones in bankruptcy, and no hiding from the camera. His just desserts, like his terrible misdeeds, had been televised.

And yet, as detailed in Dan Reed’s superb new documentary, The Truth vs Alex Jones, the right- wing blowhard still hasn’t paid the money owed. He’s still in business, inviting the gullible down his noxious rabbit holes, and coining it in the process.

In the most depressing sense, it seems little has changed.

Reed begins his show telling of Jones’s ascent from the outskirts of public radio and public access TV in Austin, Texas.

He stood out, says a former colleague, because he had a “thicker skin” than others, and would “rant and rave”. People thought this was “f**king hilarious” – and one of his keys to success was a blend of over-thetop anger and humour.

Jones created the website InfoWars in 1999, and Reed charts the sudden explosion of its popularity following the 9/11 attacks. The internet amplified his reach, even as conspiracy theories around that atrocity became common currency.

When other incidents happened, such as the Fukushima nuclear accident, Jones leveraged the fear in California to sell iodine supplements to frightened people there.

By the time of the Sandy

Hook school shooting a decade later, a seemingly increasing segment of the US population was already primed for Jones’s snake oil.

Reed never names the perpetrator of that attack, denying him a little part of the infamy he apparently craved, but through the through the testimony of family members, he details the fate of the 20 children and six adults whose lives were ended on what should have been a normal school day. Jones seized upon the apparent nervousness of one of the bereaved parents, Robbie Parker, whose smile minutes before addressing press was interpreted as evidence that Parker was an “actor”.

An army of evil cranks were unleashed on grieving families by Jones – and though it’s tempting to dismiss them as outliers, a stark statistic cited in the film is that, at one point one in five Americans actually believed Sandy Hook had not really taken place.

At a tight two hours, this thought-provoking documentary doesn’t waste a minute and is a reminder of the flabbiness of many serialised documentaries. It has on-camera moments that have never been seen before, such as the time when Jones realised his lawyer had sent the prosecution his entire text message history in error, and the shocking moment when Jones, off the stand, tries to deny his culpability to the parents’ faces.

Jones himself has since admitted that Sandy Hook “100pc happened” and remains mired in litigation – but some still cling to his toxic theories.

One of the difficult but brave decisions Reed makes is to interview some of these holdouts. One of them, a supposed expert trotted out by Jones, says that if he’s wrong he should go to a mental hospital – but the intransigence of others is startling.

Their brazen insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre did not take place, is perhaps the most depressing part of the whole story.

To the wilfully disbelieving, the goalposts always move and no proof will satisfy them.