Alex Jones, a dude so full of hateful BS that even a porn site publicly denounced him, swore under oath this week that “psychosis” was the reason he became Sandy Hook hoaxer. (Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was among the children killed at Sandy Hook, says he prefers the term “hoaxer” to “truther.” “There’s nothing truthful about it,” he told New York.) Jones is being sued by the parent of another child killed at Sandy Hook. The “psychosis” quote comes from a transcript of his full deposition, first reported by HuffPost.
Jones: Well, sometimes people claim they’ve been hurt when they haven’t been. So you have to look at the agenda behind things. …
And I, myself, have almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged. So I think, as a pundit, someone giving an opinion, that, you know, my opinions have been wrong; but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people.
Mark Bankston (attorney for the plaintiff): You said false things about Sandy Hook because it was psychosis?
Jones: Well, I’m just saying that the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much, then everything begins — you don’t trust anything anymore, kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again, well, pretty soon they don’t know what reality is.
Jones offered no details about being diagnosed with psychosis and has not spoken publicly about such a diagnosis before. Ask any number of the other folks who spend their waking (and, often, non-waking) hours in the media world and they’ll tell you that “the trauma of the media” hasn’t driven them to start declaring that the parents grieving their children shot dead in their classrooms are liars. Instead, they’ll likely tell you that, while emotionally taxing, what Jones calls “trauma” only inspires them to take their work more seriously and handle it with the utmost respect. Which means not saying you’re being “bullied” by a teenage survivor of a school shooting. (Yes, that happened.) And it certainly means not telling your audience of millions that they should be skeptical about the deaths the 20 children and 6 adults who were gunned down by Adam Lanza in 2012. (The father of a Sandy Hook victim died by suicide earlier this week.)
Before he was kicked off just about every platform you could name — Mailchimp, Pinterest, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Google, and Spotify — Jones and his media outlet, Infowars, spewed dangerous conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook. Jones and Infowars are also being sued for defamation after misidentifying the gunman in the Valentine’s Day shooting in Parkland, Florida.
