Alex Jones arrived at his second Sandy Hook defamation trial on Tuesday morning just long enough to climb out of a car, flanked by security, and yell about how unfairly he’s been treated in court. Mashing his metaphors into a fine paste, Jones compared himself to a victim of China’s Cultural Revolution or perhaps something non-specific out of South Africa, said the trial against him is “a travesty” and a “murder of American justice,” and called the judge herself a “tyrant.” Jones continues to try to make a spectacle of his legal troubles, completely unchecked—and also keeps turning that inflammatory commentary into monetized content on Infowars.
Jones is set to testify in the Connecticut trial, which, like the first one in Texas, is a damages trial to determine how much he owes a group of Sandy Hook families whom he defamed by calling the shooting that killed their loved ones a “hoax.” (Jones lost a series of Sandy Hook cases by default after judges in both states ruled that Infowars failed to respond meaningfully to discovery.) The bulk of Tuesday’s testimony was from Clint Watts, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, who testified about the mechanics of how Infowars stokes fear and anger to increase engagement.
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Jones and Infowars covered the first trial endlessly, making baseless and inflammatory claims throughout; they’re doing the same thing this time, with even less pushback from the courtroom. (In the first trial, Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble admonished Jones and Infowars host Owen Shroyer from the bench after they appeared on air together to analyze the trial, a violation of basic civil procedure since both men were testifying in court).
Jones hasn’t testified in this trial yet; he seemingly arrived outside the courthouse on Tuesday solely to yell in front of a welcoming bank of TV cameras, telling one reporter, “I don’t want to be the Sandy Hook man. It was a small part of what we said and did,” and claiming he’s being attacked for “exposing the Great Reset,” both of which are grotesque lies. “I didn’t kill the children,” he added (which is, at least, true). Another reporter pursued Jones down the street as he went to get back in his car—an enormous Escalade-looking vehicle—and asked him, pointlessly and leadingly, if the trial is a “kangaroo court.”
“Buddy, it’s all kangaroos and railroads,” Jones responded, over his shoulder, as he fled. “You’re damn right.”
Infowars then used these interactions outside the courtroom as part of a clip that immediately aired on the channel. In the first part of the clip, standing in an idyllic field somewhere in Connecticut, Jones said that having the Sandy Hook parents confront him in court—“They’re going to stand there and point at me and say I’m bad,” he growled—was similar to a so-called “struggle session,” a public denunciation rally used during China’s Cultural Revolution.
“I’m not allowed to say I didn’t profit from Sandy Hook,” Jones continued, incredulously. “We don’t sit there and do news items to profit. We have the news we cover and then we sell products to fund ourselves.” Moments later, with no small amount of irony, he cut to an ad for the commemorative coins he’s been insistently selling on air, which he said are “funding the information war against the globalists.” (The coin displays an image of Teddy Roosevelt, presumably because he’s too dead to object.)
As usual, Jones was bending the truth; he’s not being allowed to present testimony that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook because Infowars failed to turn over Google Analytics data to the plaintiffs, showing it kept a close eye on traffic and sales numbers. The plaintiffs’ attorneys have indicated they’ll argue that Jones and Infowars continued to cover Sandy Hook for years on end because it drove traffic and made them money; in one text shown in court, an Infowars employee bragged to Jones that the company had made $800,000 in sales in one day. They also showed that Infowars’ revenues jumped overnight on September 24, 2014, after they ran a bogus story claiming that the FBI found that no one died at Sandy Hook.
Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, meanwhile, has said in court that he intends to cross-examine the Sandy Hook witnesses in an effort to show they’re “exaggerating,” as he put it, their injuries as part of a political vendetta or an anti-gun control crusade. In the meantime, Jones remains able to spin, monetize and capitalize on the trial, juggling coins, lies and half-truths, the center of his own, profitable three-ring circus once again.
