Parkland killer and Infowars fabulist finally face reckoning

A mass murderer and a serial liar faced long-delayed justice this past week.

The cases in Florida and Connecticut concern two ghastly school shootings. One proceeding will decide the fate of a deranged shooter; the other will calculate the monetary damages owed by an internet radio broadcaster who spread the cruelest of lies.

Jury selection began Monday in Fort Lauderdale in the sentencing trial of confessed killer Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 students and employees at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School four years ago.

Then on Tuesday, conspiracy theory huckster Alex Jones finally showed up for a court-ordered deposition he had been dodging for weeks. Apparently, Jones was persuaded by the $25,000-a-day fine ordered last week by the judge presiding over a defamation lawsuit brought by the victims’ families and an FBI agent who had responded to the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Even before the funeral of 20 children and six teachers, Jones was already spreading outlandish allegations via his Infowars online radio and website, claiming that the massacre never happened; that the grieving parents were lying, that their dead children were props in “a complete fake.”

Cruz, 24, pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder on Oct. 20, leaving jurors with only one question (though it may take months to reach a decision): Will his history of mental instability convince jurors to spare him the death penalty and allow him to live out his life in prison?

The only question left in three defamation lawsuits against Jones — the Connecticut case and two others filed in his home state of Texas — is how much Jones must pay. Judges in all three cases have already decided that the far-right provocateur defamed the Sandy Hook parents, survivors and the FBI agent. The deposition had been originally scheduled last month to give the plaintiffs’ lawyers insight into his finances, which may be considerable. Apparently, Infowars subscribers gullible enough to believe his fantastic conspiracy theories are gullible enough to buy the muscle-man dietary supplements, fake COVID cures and end-of-civilization survival gear that he hawks on his show.

Jones similarly misled his audience about the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy, dispatching the shameless Laura Loomer, a Florida-based far-far-right political activist (and occasional congressional candidate) to Parkland, where the Infowars correspondent, camera running, claimed that surviving students’ accounts of their ordeal had been scripted by government agents. “It’s obvious these kids are reading a screen or notes someone else wrote for them,” she said.

Infowars had also provided a platform for another Floridian conspiracy monger after the Sandy Hook murders. Seminole County’s Wolfgang Halbig traveled with an Infowars camera crew to Connecticut, where he badgered Sandy Hook parents and first responders with accusations that the shooting, the carnage, the grief, the funerals with so many tiny coffins, had been staged. Halbig demanded that local police provide him photographs of the bullet-riddled children’s bodies. He couched their refusal as proof the kids had never existed.

It was beyond crazy, the notion that parents and classmates of murdered children, more than the actual shooters, were the villains behind the two school massacres. But Infowars believers embrace conspiracy theories like biblical revelations. The mob inundated surviving students and parents of murdered children with threats and insults. Parents were harassed on the streets, even accosted at memorial services for their lost kids.

In 2017, Lucy Richards admitted in a federal courtroom in Fort Lauderdale that she had been swept up in the frenzy and sent a series of death threats to a father who had lost a six-year-old son at Sandy Hook. “This is reality and there is no fiction. There are no alternative facts,” U.S. District Judge James Cohn told her as he sentenced the 57-year-old woman to five months in prison and another five months of home detention. One of the terms of her sentence, later referenced in the defamation suits against Jones, prohibited her “from viewing Infowars programming.”

Once, such behavior would have been unfathomable in the aftermath of national tragedies. But after Sandy Hook and Parkland, reckless liars like Alex Jones were happy to exploit the distrust and seething resentments of so many disaffected Americans. Especially if the disaffected Americans were buying Infowars merchandise.

Jones remains unrepentant, even as courts in Connecticut and Texas are calculating the damages he owes in the defamation cases. Instead, the Infowars website now complains that defamed parents who sued him are using their dead children “as a club” to beat down his First Amendment rights.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.