Four years after his daughter was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut, Robbie Parker was confronted in Seattle by a stranger who screamed at him, demanding to know how much the US government had paid him to pretend his daughter was gunned down and where she was hiding.
Last week Parker was among the 15 parents affected by this tragedy, in which 20 schoolchildren and six teachers were shot, who were awarded a collective $1bn from Alex Jones. This vile man has spewed false stories that those bereaved parents were “crisis actors” paid to be part of a “false flag” operation to increase gun control. Jones called Parker’s televised obituary of his daughter Emilie “disgusting”.
Jones’s weird and blatantly untrue ramblings through his InfoWars website, which is mostly a way to sell his white-label range of vitamins and supplements, have come back to haunt him. Though a rational person would hope this would punish the disinformation peddler, he had the gall to say about the judgment: “They covered up what really happened, and now I’m the devil. I’m actually proud to be under this level of attack.”
It is unlikely that Jones will be able to pay the full $1bn, but it will send a signal that lying does not pay
He may not be contrite, but he’s now broke — and for real. In August Jones said his company, Free Speech Systems, was bankrupt, which is being disputed in court. The same month a forensic economist calculated Jones’s worth at $270m, after he made $50m a year selling his supplements (made by another company but carrying Jones’s label) as well as survivalist and gun gear. Jones knows his market and has made money from his supplements.
Jones was deplatformed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but not before he ran his hate campaign for years, causing emotional damage to the parents of US school shootings. These included the tragedy in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for which the gunman was last week sentenced to life in prison.
It was after speaking to a parent from this school that Parker, who was awarded the highest figure with $120m in damages, realised Jones was doing to these victims what had been done to him and his family. He then joined the court case in Connecticut. “Every day in that courtroom, we got up on the stand and we told the truth,” Parker said. “Telling the truth shouldn’t be so hard, and it shouldn’t be so scary.”
It is unlikely that Jones will be able to pay the full $1bn, but it will send a signal that lying does not pay.
Given Jones’s unrepentant “now I’m the devil” comments, it seems improbable that he will stop. He spent most of his time in Connecticut outside the court, claiming the case was a “deep state” attempt to smear him.
What we can be thankful for is that the big social media platforms finally took him down, albeit far too late. His hurtful and toxic campaigns may have set the bar low, but now the networks can’t feign ignorance about the destructive effect of misinformation. They were willing enablers of InfoWars and Jones because they peddle outrage, and he delivered it in billions of dollars’ worth of advertising traffic.
As Parker said of Jones and his delusional followers: “For anybody that still chooses to listen to that man, just ask yourself: what has he ever given you?”
*Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and publisher of Scrolla.Africa
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