“An age of witch-hunts”: the victims of conspiracy theories speak out
What happens to those caught up in the toxic lies of conspiracy theorists? Ed Pilkington talks to three victims of internet mobs
Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics. Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell’s UFOS, the “hoax” moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today’s iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency. Together with their first cousin, fake news, they pose a profound threat to democracy by damaging its bedrock: a shared commitment to truth.
The growing reach and scale of conspiracy theories is astonishing. Recent studies from Chicago and Cambridge universities found that about 60% of Americans and Britons endorse at least one false narrative. The trend began on obscure online forums such as the alt-right playground 4chan. Soon, media entrepreneurs realised there was money to be made – most notoriously Alex Jones, whose site Infowars feeds its millions of readers a potent diet of lurid lies (9/11 was a government hit job; the feds manipulate the weather).
Now the conspiracy theorist-in-chief sits in the White House. Donald Trump cut his political teeth on the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and went on to embrace climate change denial and the discredited belief that childhood vaccines may cause autism. Amid this explosive growth, one aspect has been underappreciated: the human cost. What is the toll paid by those caught up in these falsehoods? And how are they fighting back? I talked to three people who can speak from bitter experience.
Valentine’s Day 2018 was Marcel Fontaine’s day off. He slept late into the afternoon, having worked a double shift the day before. By the time he roused himself, the deadliest high school shooting in US history was already over. A 19-year-old with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle had entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire. Seventeen people had been killed, though Fontaine, who has no cable TV or radio, was oblivious to the tragedy. Then he received a text from a friend. A photo of Fontaine was flying around the internet and he was being accused of carrying out the terrible Florida shooting.
His immediate response was bewilderment. What shooting? Where? He was in Massachusetts, 1,500 miles away. Fontaine, 25, describes himself on Twitter as a “non-binary gay queer autistic commie that loves horror movies and metal!” He was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum as a child and for years has struggled with anxiety and a debilitating stammer. In short, Fontaine is a vulnerable left-wing individual, which apparently makes him perfect fodder for the sadistic mockery of 4chan, an anonymous message board that hosts many extremists.
A few days before the Parkland shooting, a photo of Fontaine wearing a T-shirt of Marx, Lenin, Mao and other communist luminaries dressed in party hats had been grabbed from his Instagram feed and posted by an anonymous user on 4chan, where he was derided as a “lefty dimwit”. The T-shirt was a joke, a pun on communist party. In the conspiratorial bubble of 4chan, it was but a small step from ridiculing Fontaine to casting him as the Parkland shooter. Within hours, the image had been reposted on the bulletin board, now saying: “Florida Shooter Was A Commie!”
From there, Jones’s Infowars leapt into the fray. Its “reporter” lifted Fontaine’s photo from 4chan and, without any attempt at verification, ran with it on the front page. “Shooter is a commie. Alleged photo of the suspect shows communist garb,” the outlet screamed. The false rumour quickly spread from Miami to Beijing. Fontaine was horrified. “I knew a lot about the Alex Jones fanbase – that they were radical extremists who believe every word he says, and that a lot of them hold firearms. I knew my life was at risk.” The first death threats landed via Facebook Messenger by nightfall: “I hope someone throws you out of a rotary aircraft, you commie!” Another made a direct reference to the concert venue that employed him. “They knew where I worked, what I did. It just got me so afraid.”
Death threats and autism spectrum conditions make poor bedfellows. They exacerbated his condition, ramping up his anxiety and social isolation. “I wasn’t able to function, to cook, do basic tasks. I didn’t want to go out.” Over the past six months, Fontaine has slowly pulled himself back together. But he has become less trusting of people and freezes whenever he sees someone dressed in camouflage or wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Do they read Infowars, he wonders. “I get very nervous because they might recognise me and want to actually pull something out on me. Or beat me to a pulp.”
Lenny Pozner, 51, is preparing to pack his bags, again. A few weeks ago, “hoaxers” – as he calls conspiracy theorists – reproduced a map of his Florida neighbourhood with a dropped pin marking the precise location of his apartment. It will be the eighth time in five years he will have been forced to move home as he strives to keep one step ahead of the fanatics who relentlessly hound him. Pozner’s crime, in the eyes of these people, is being
“The first death threats landed by nightfall: ‘I hope someone throws you out of a rotary aircraft, you commie!’”
the father of one of the 20 children who were killed in the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Noah was the youngest of all the victims. He had just turned six.
Within months, conspiracy theorists, egged on by Infowars, went to work. They generated thousands of web posts and a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. Their thesis: the shooting at the school never happened. The 20 kids who died were “crisis actors”. The tragedy was a con. Noah had never even existed, he was a construct of Photoshop. Within a year, it had reached such a pitch that Pozner knew he had to do something. “I agonised about the situation for several weeks. But ultimately I felt I owed it to my son to protect his memory.” He posted on his Google+ page his son’s birth and death certificates and kindergarten report card.
“I was extremely naive. I believed that people were simply misinformed and that if I released proof that my child had existed, thrived, loved and was loved, and was ultimately murdered, they would understand our grief, stop harassing us, and more importantly, stop defacing photos of Noah and defaming him online.” Instead, he watched his son buried a second time, under hundreds of pages of hateful web content. “I don’t think there’s any one word that fits the horror of it,” Pozner says. “It’s a phenomenon of the age which we’re in, modern day witch-hunts. It’s a form of mass delusion.”
Pozner is extraordinarily controlled. His voice is flat and preternaturally calm, as though all emotion has been pummelled out of him. His apartment has the same pared-down, antiseptic quality. “I’ve gotten good at moving, I’ve adapted to it,” he says. He left Newtown for Florida in 2013 with Noah’s mother, his now former wife Veronique De La Rosa, and their two daughters in the hope of rebuilding their lives. He has deliveries sent to a separate address and has rented multiple postal boxes as decoys.
The most serious of the death threats came from Lucy Richards, a Florida resident who was so fervent in her belief that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake that she left messages on Pozner’s mobile phone saying: “You’re going to die. Death is coming to you real soon, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” In June 2017, Richards was sentenced to five months in prison, followed by a further five months under house arrest. But Pozner reserves his staunchest criticism for Jones, who he blames for amplifying conspiracies in the pursuit of profit. In a lawsuit suing Jones for defamation for more than $1m, lawyers for Pozner and De La Rosa chronicle how Infowars baited them over many years: the shooting was “staged”, a “giant hoax”. The school was an elaborate film set. It was all a “soap opera”.
Since 2014, Pozner has made it his life’s work to confront the conspiracy theorists. Through his organisation the HONR Network, Pozner has systematically challenged those who he believes cross that line, forcing moderators to delete posts. In 2018 alone, he reported 2,568 videos to Youtube and had 1,555 of those expunged. What shocks Pozner most, he says, was how alone he was when he began this fight. “I was the only one standing up to the hoaxers, and other than the loss of my son that was my biggest disappointment.”
In October 2016, a month before Trump was elected, James Alefantis found that Comet Ping Pong, his Washington DC pizza restaurant, was at the centre of the mother of all modern conspiracy theories: Pizzagate. Hillary Clinton, so the story went, was masterminding a child-trafficking ring that was holding children as sex slaves in his basement. The rumour-mongering began when private emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, were stolen and released through Wikileaks. In them, Podesta mentioned Alefantis, as well as a fundraising dinner they were planning at Comet Ping Pong.
Soon, conspiracy theorists were arguing that “James Alefantis” was a bastardisation of “j’aime les enfant” (I like children) and that cheese pizza, “cp” for short, was code for “child porn”. The notion that Alefantis was a paedophile working with Clinton to abuse children in the basement of his restaurant (Comet Ping Pong has no basement) hurtled around the internet. Abusive messages were posted on the restaurant’s Facebook page and in Yelp reviews; one online critic claimed to have found a child’s hand in his pizza. But it was not until bigger beasts got involved that it became truly dangerous. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired army general Michael Flynn, fanned the flames by tweeting about Clinton and “sex crimes w children”. Then up popped Jones once more, telling his thousands of Infowars listeners that “something’s going on, something’s being covered up”, exhorting his devotees to “go investigate it for yourself”. So they did. “People came into the restaurant to film or look around. They came by my house, asking neighbours questions. Suddenly you look around and you don’t know who to trust.”
In December 2016, Edgar Welch answered Jones’s call to investigate the satanic child sex ring. He drove 350 miles from North Carolina and burst into Comet Ping Pong armed with three guns. He went table to table, terrifying customers and staff, then shot into a locked closet before giving himself up to police. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Alefantis finds it impossible to talk about that day without tearing up. For a full year after the gunman’s appearance, armed guards were posted at both doors of the restaurant, which remains equipped with multiple security cameras and panic buttons.
Jones eventually apologised for promoting Pizzagate, and in August was barred from Youtube, Apple and Facebook and other leading social media platforms. But for Alefantis, this is too little too late. His extraordinary, petrifying ride has taught him a lot about the modern world. At one point, against the advice of friends, he reached out to some of his assailants and asked them why they hated him so much. “I communicated with them. I realised that they also live in fear. That there’s a sense of abandonment and powerlessness where young people online believe the government is conspiring against them or stealing their children, which is outrageous but real for them.”
Through it all he has held on to positive thoughts, encouraged by the support of the community of pizza lovers that rallied around in his darkest hour. “It feels at times that things are out of control, that hate is on the rise. But I now understand the power of community. It saved this place. There’s no reason it can’t save the rest of the country, or the world.”
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Guardian. © Guardian News and Media 2019.
“Pozner watched his son buried a second time, under hundreds of pages of hateful web content”