The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson Based on hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and access to exclusive sources and materials, Sandy Hook is Elizabeth Williamson’s landmark investigation of the aftermath of a school shooting, the work of Sandy Hook parents who fought to defend themselves, and the truth of their children’s fate against the frenzied distortions of online deniers and conspiracy theorists. On December 14, 2012, a gunman killed twenty first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Ten years later, Sandy Hook has become a foundational story of how false conspiracy narratives and malicious misinformation have gained traction in society. One of the nation’s most devastating mass shootings, Sandy Hook was used to create destructive and painful myths. Driven by ideology or profit, or for no sound reason at all, some people insisted it never occurred, or was staged by the federal government as a pretext for seizing Americans’ firearms. They tormented the victims’ relatives online, accosted them on the street and at memorial events, accusing them of faking their loved ones’ murders. Some family members have been stalked and forced into hiding. A gun was fired into the home of one parent. Present at the creation of this terrible crusade was Alex Jones’s Infowars, a far-right outlet that aired noxious Sandy Hook theories to millions and raised money for the conspiracy theorists’ quest to “prove” the shooting didn’t happen. Enabled by Facebook, YouTube, and other social media companies’ failure to curb harmful content, the conspiracists’ questions grew into suspicion, suspicion grew into demands for more proof, and unanswered demands turned into rage. This pattern of denial and attack would come to characterize some Americans’ response to almost every major event, from mass shootings to the coronavirus pandemic to the 2020 presidential election, in which President Trump’s false claims of a rigged result prompted the January 6, 2021, assault on a bastion of democracy, the U.S. Capitol. The Sandy Hook families, led by the father of the youngest victim, refused to accept this. Sandy Hook is the story of their battle to preserve their loved ones’ legacies even in the face of threats to their own lives. Through exhaustive reporting, narrative storytelling, and intimate portraits, Sandy Hook is the definitive book on one of the most shocking cultural ruptures of the internet era.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with our good podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in i'm sure you going to be very interested in the topic we'll be talking about today. We've got an amazing book author on the show. The editor's pick, best books of 2022 so far. We have Elizabeth Williamson is going to be on the

show with us talking about her book, Sandy Hook, An American Tragedy and Battle for the Truth that came out March 8th, 2022. We've been really trying to get her on the show since publishing her book. And she finally got time for us because she's really popular with the stories she told here. So in the meantime, be sure to refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to YouTube.com, Fort S. Chris Foss at the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Fort S. Chris Foss. See everything we read over there. Go see all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big LinkedIn newsletter,

the big LinkedIn group over there. Go see all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big LinkedIn newsletter, the big LinkedIn group over there on LinkedIn. And also go see our new courses and stuff at chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. See that over there. So she is on the show with us today. Her book, once again, Sandy Hook, An American Tragedy and Battle for Truth. You can order up on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold but don't go into those alleyway bookstores they uh they they can they can be dirty and you might get you might need a tetanus shot if you're on the alleyway bookstores you go to the fine bookstores uh she is the author of this amazing book published by dutton she is a feature writer in the washington bureau of the new york times and a foreign member of the new york editorial board. She has worked at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

and spent a decade as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth. How are you? Hey, Chris, I'm fine. I'm glad to be with you finally. And it's an honor to have you on the show. We've had so many people from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all those different places on the show, so we just keep adding to the alumni on the show. So it's great. You guys have all some great, you guys have all these great journalists who put

out great books. Well, thank you. I have to say one thing before we get started, and that's that my son, Charlie Williamson, is a salesperson at Report a Future, a cybersecurity firm. And he was the one who said to me, oh my God, you're going on Chris Foster's grill. I can't believe it. So he's a big fan. I just want to pass that to you., you're going on Chris Foster's grill. I can't believe it. So he's a big fan. I just want to pass that to you. There you go. That's awesome. So let's start with the book. Dot coms, where can people find you and get to know more about you and the book on the interwebs? Well, you can obviously look up the book at Penguin. My publisher, Dutton, which is a Penguin imprint, you can find it there on their page.

And you can look for, I post a lot of material about the book on my Twitter account, which is at NYTLits. Okay, there you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? What struck a chord in you that said this story, I've got a story that we can tell here? Well, Chris, in the middle of 2018, a group of Sandy Hook families sued Alex Jones of Infowars for defamation. And initially, I thought this would be a really interesting test of the First Amendment and whether it, as Alex Jones and

other conspiracy theorists claim, protects people who spread these kinds of falsehoods that result in harm to vulnerable people like the Sandy Hook families. But as I spoke with Lenny Posner, who's the father of Noah Posner, the youngest Sandy Hook victim, he illuminated me to the fact that Sandy Hook and the conspiracy theories that followed the mass shooting in 2012 was really a foundational story of how misinformation and disinformation and false narratives have gained traction in our society. And sure enough, you know, as I began working on the book, it went from, you know, Sandy Hook to conspiracy theories around most mass shootings, Pizzagate, QAnon, Charlottesville,

coronavirus myths, and finally, the 2020 election conspiracies that brought the insurrectionists to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I first became aware of Alex Jones. I was staying with a friend's house in 2011, I think, 2010, 2011. I was visiting a friend down in L.A. for an event, and so I was down there for like a week. And I remember we were sitting and working on our laptops, and we went, okay, let's go to the event.

And he turned off his router, and then he unplugged the router, like the cable and all, from the wall. And I go, what the hell are you doing? And he goes, well, you might think I'm crazy, but just trust me, it's safer this way. And I'm like, I work in IT. Like, never seen this before. Like, take a spin card out of your cell phone.

And so, you know, technically you have to do that if you go to, what, DEF CON? But because you know there's hackers there. And, you know, that's what they're after. But, oh, my gosh. So I said, and I pressed him, and i said wait why do you do this and he goes he goes well i listen to alex jones i'm like who the hell is alex jones and you know he told me about illuminati you know is uh can even if the power's off it's unplugged the illuminati can still activate power in that hub and i'm like you're an unemployed guy who's like a nobody in the middle of nowhere. Like, is the Illuminati really losing sleep at night?

Right. So, you know, then I discovered Alex Jones. When I went to his site, I could see his whole, you know, I could see him selling stuff that was fear-based. Yeah. Monetary system. And I'm like, okay, I know this guy's angle. I know what he's up to. You know, I study religion.

Hey, folks, just a quick break in from the show. Hey, be sure to check out my new courses at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. That's chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com forward slash courses, or you can just click the courses tab. You can see we've got new courses up for how to start a podcast and video training that can get you up to date on everything we're doing. Of course, my speaking, my coaching and everything else, but be sure to check out the new course that we have up for starting your own podcast after 13 years, kind of sharing some of the secrets of what I know. So be sure to check that out at chrisvossleadership.com forward slash courses. So how do you, how did you get into the story? How did you develop it? And what did you find? Yeah, I mean, as you know,

Alex Jones has a pretty ingenious business model. And that's that, you know, he has an audience of tens of millions of people who are deeply distrustful of the government. They're distrustful of the mainstream media. They're distrustful of most official narratives. And they felt like in the case of Sandy Hook, that, you know, this was a so-called false flag, an event that was planned by the government as a pretext for

confiscating Americans' firearms. And so, you know, actually, you know,, didn't happen like that. But what he's able to do is to sell products to people who share that mindset. So it's, you know, alternate medicines and diet supplements for people who dist preparing for the end of times. As you know, untraceable gun parts, ghost gun parts for people who don't want to register a firearm with the federal government. So it really is an ingenious business model, and he's a great salesman. But unfortunately, with Sandy Hook, he did something that was new even for him, and that's that he named the individual parents, not all, but some of them. And that resulted in an absolute tidal wave of abuse and stalking and harassment of them. And it lasted for years. Was there a foundation laid for this with 9-11? Because the first conspiracies i really saw that started

really getting out there and of course it came around the advent of the internet too the awakening of the well 9-11 yeah they came around the advent of the um internet too and it's almost like the crazy people just found other people like them i don't know yeah i mean that was the thing i mean you know we you and i we all know conspiracy theorists, right? You know, they're the person who buttonholes you at the family reunion, they tell you their JFK theories, or they're the person who hands you, you know, a sheet that they, you know, photocopied themselves on the subway or on the street corner. But with the internet and social media, these individuals find each other and they build communities and they become very dependent on circulating and embroidering and spreading this hoax content. And they invent new identities for themselves.

So, you know, in the Sandy Hook book, I interview a number of people who, you know, one of them was a house mover in Florida, had small business. And he sort of reinvented himself as a citizen journalist, as an investigator, as, you know, in investigating Sandy Hook and all subsequent high profile mass shootings and calling all of them hoaxes. There's another woman out in Oklahoma. She had a house cleaning business. She became, you know, an author and a kind of, you know, high profile member of Sandy Hopes group. So it really is hard to dissuade people when they get that much psychic income from spreading and

circulating and doubting all of these official narratives. Yeah. I was going to add to that legacy that you talked about where, you know, they can build these sites and they can do all doubting all of these official narratives. Yeah. I was going to add to that, that legacy that you talked about where, you know, they, they can build these sites and they can do all the stuff. Then they can go that third wave where they make money at it. You know, we, we see a lot of people, you know, who support Trump because they, they make money selling flags and going to the events and selling hats. And, you know, it's a, I don't know if you'd even call it a cottage industry at this point, It seems pretty mainstream. But they could make money doing it.

And a lot of people that I've seen with a lot of conspiracies, especially with the COVID conspiracies that have since awoken, they got COVID, some sort of thing pierced their bubble, and they realized they were spreading false narratives. Even when they finally come clean, they realized that one of the driving factors that I've seen in their interviews is the fact they were making money. Or not only sometimes they were making money, but they were a leader for the first time in their life. It's kind of like that power they get when someone becomes the HOA president for the first time. He's worked at McDonald's all his life. This is the first power he's gotten and suddenly he goes stalinist on the neighborhood yeah no you're absolutely right and what you're saying really makes me think of one of these um conspiracy theorists in particular a guy named wolfgang halbig lives in south florida had been a school administrator a school safety administrator and an educator earlier in his life. He had spent a single year, one year, as a state cop in Florida. He put all of that sort of biography together and kind of declared himself an investigator. He actually offered his services

to Newtown to get to the bottom of the crime. And when his pitch was lost in all of the traffic and all of the mayhem that surrounded the event, he got angry, took it personally, and he decided to call this a hoax. And he's raised more than $100,000 to investigate, to send hundreds of public records requests to Newtown, to the Board of Education, to try and ask for any kind of, you know, camera video, you know, dashboard cam video, transcripts, records,

including some pretty macabre stuff like the receipts for cleaning, you know, blood and brain matter, as he put it, from school. You know, so he just made a really pernicious pest of himself, and he did it for years and still does it, still sends it out. So in your research, you know, you talk a lot in the book about Alex Jones. Has Alex Jones kind of helped found a lot of this? I had another friend. I had finally had to get rid of that one friend with the Illuminati stuff because he would call me up and tell me, you know, Illuminati stuff. Then I had another friend

who started listening to Alice Jones. And I started getting these calls. Uh, they happened, uh, I think it was around, uh, it was when the FEMA things were in new Orleans after the big hurricane. And he's like, they're going to take those FEMA trucks and they're going to put everyone into the, the whole nation's going to go into camps uh in what you might call it camps internment camps and we're going to live in those fema trucks and they're going to cut the nation down from 350 million to 300 uh thousand and i'm like why because all the rich people want to want to make money off of us well don't rich people wouldn't you rather make money off of 350 you know just logically it doesn't make any, but it was in three months it was going to happen.

And then I, you know, I called him up and I'm like, Hey man, we hit the three months mark. What's up, dude? Go, go get help. So is, is we've all known, you know, I grew up even when I was a teenager, I'm 54 years old now. When he was a teenager up here in American Park, Utah, which is kind of backwoods. I grew up in California. There are always these guys with guns, these cowboys in the back. They're all government-bred.

God have guns. There's always that backwoods mentality and anti-government stuff. Now it just seems with the advent of the internet, it's really taken off. I heard a comedian say one time that nowadays with the internet, the dumb people can it's just it's really taken off these i heard a comedian say one time that nowadays with the internet the dumb people can find each other and repopulate

uh well yeah and not only you know conspiracy theorists but the militia groups that you know alex jones was close to from his earliest days so the oath keepers very much involved in the january 6th insurrection, Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, was on Alex Jones's show right after Sandy Hook talking about, you know, whether or not this happened, but more importantly, that people within the school shouldn't have been armed. So he has deep ties to those individuals. And to your earlier question, what he's doing is amplifying the claims of people like Wolfgang Halbig.

So this educator out of Florida who made two dozen trips to Newtown, many of them with an Infowars camera crew in tow. So he was filming his activities with this crew, and then he was a regular guest on Infowars. So it gave him an unbelievable reach just beyond social media. It gave him access to Alex Johnson's audience. And then he's now, I was just reading, I mean, he's really fighting through the depositions. He's moving his assets around, filing bankruptcy, doing all sorts of different plays. He knows he's really in the skids on this.

Do you think he's going to end up with some sort of penalty and end up losing that legal battle? Yeah, so our discussion today is really well-timed, Chris, because on Monday, which would be July 25th, it's the beginning of the trials in which juries will decide how much Alex Jones has to pay Sandy Hook families in damages for these defamation claims. trials that he was basically declared liable by default, meaning he lost the case, didn't have a chance to prove himself or answer for himself in court because he was so obstructive of the process of discovery. So late last year, he lost all three cases. So these cases are brought in Texas and in Connecticut by a total of 10 victims' families. And now these juries will decide in three separate trials, the first of which begins on Monday, how much he needs to pay them. So, you know, as you've seen, you mentioned earlier when we were talking his bankruptcy filing, which failed.

He has moved money around to a variety, a whole web of LLCs within InfoWars. He's doing everything he can to escape a judgment, which really does look like it's finally coming after three years of litigation. Oh, I will roll on the floor laughing. It'll be fun. Do you think there's any chance he can be taken off air? You know, like Peter Thiel took basically Gawker down to where just basically erased them. Is there any chance that this could possibly happen? I honestly don't know. I think it really depends on how successful the families are in locating his assets. And of course, the

first thing that has to happen is that the juries have to decide how much that he must pay the family. So, you know, a bigger judgment obviously would more severely impact his business. So it's really, you know, by the end of September, we will know because the last trial in Connecticut, you know, this is a case brought by eight victims' families. That will conclude by the middle of september so by then we'll really know alex johnson's fate that'll be awesome i'll be i will be gleeful as long as he gets penalized i suppose you know he's technically tried to hide behind uh what you know the press has as a protection in the constitution for free speech and there's a you know yelling fire in a in a theater isn't free speech and uh so i this may is this going to have any implications do you think if they decide on

this to uh to you know weaken free speech or is it just going to maybe define it better that you've got a i mean you can't yell fire in a theater you You know, it's a great question. I think, you know, in a pre-trial conference last week, his lawyer was trying to press the case that once again, you know, your chance to prove that, to use that as your defense and to have your day in court is over because you messed with the court system. You know, he showed absolute flagrant disregard for the justice system. And so he was found liable by default. So he lost. So he no longer has the ability to use the First Amendment as a defense. Does that mean that he won't get on the stand and try? Of course he will, you know, and he'll probably make some other claims about where his hat was at when he was doing this. But as you say, you know, the First Amendment does not protect people who spread known falsehoods, easily disproven facts, you know, as truth,

and that create harm for really vulnerable people. Do you, in your book, what else have we touched on? Do you talk about what the Sandy Hook victims' families went through? Yeah, I mean, what happened was initially the conspiracy theorists turned up on their social media pages. So Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emily Parker died at Sandy Hook, noticed that he'd get a friend request from Adam Lanza, who was the gunman. Or people would show up on memorial pages that the families had created to honor their lost loved ones, and they would call them liars and frauds and accuse them of participating in a government plot to limit American Second Amendment rights. Or then they began to kind of cross the virtual divide, you know, come off of social media where they had kept up a lively, you know, conversation, websites, videos,

thousands and thousands of YouTube videos calling the shooting a hoax. But then they started to turn up at memorial events in the real world for the victims to approach the families at their homes, dig through their trash, look at their windows, confront them on the street. And this happened for years. 18, when Robbie Parfer, thousands of miles from Newtown on a street in Seattle, was accosted by a man who used every word in the book and called him a liar and said, how long have you been doing this? And, you know, how much money did you make? And there was an actual confrontation on the street. You know, and the heartbreaking part of this is these people suffered so much loss already. And then to have to endure this on top of it. Yeah.

It's a pretty significant secondary trauma to these individuals. It's inhuman in some way. And always. Let me ask you this. It seems like the Internet has a lot of this thought to do with this and of course uh alex jones really you know i think a lot of people see his show they want to grow up and be him you know so they go i'm going to be an investigative journalist and you know they see all the money he makes um is some of this the horror of you know it's it's just

it's it's too much to grasp in the horror of it, like 9-11, you know, where a lot of this started, but really about the same time social media was hitting its, its thing with Twitter and stuff. But is it, is it the horror of it or is it just like people are anti-gun and they see that people, you know, oh, they're trying to use this to take their guns away. Is that any part of it? Just the sheer horror of this? Yeah, there are a couple.

Yeah, it's a great question. There are a couple of things in playing here. So early on, some of the people who were believing or wanted to believe that Sandy Hook never happened and that it was some kind of a hoax were young moms who had children around the same age as the first graders who were killed. They were sort of there. I interview one of them in my book. She said she was just there for anyone who could tell her that these babies didn't die in the way that the media said they did. And those women were quickly disabused of that notion and they became actually the first people who began to join Lenny Posner. Again, you know,

the father of Noah, who's the youngest Sandy Hook victim, who had a tech background, who knew how social media algorithms send this content to millions of people. And he began an effort and a nonprofit called the Honor Network that was created to push back against these conspiracy theorists and to push the social media companies to limit the spread of this content. And his first volunteers were these women who had wanted to believe that this was a hoax and were quickly convinced otherwise, and then really wanted to believe that this was the hopes and were quickly convinced otherwise and then really wanted to help him fight back against people who were tormenting the victims families the way these folks were yeah and i guess that would make sense there's a you know you send

your kids to school they're at school you don't want to believe that this could happen in your neighborhood and so you want to plug your ears and eyes and go, you're no evil, see no evil, listen to no evil. I'd heard that from a psychologist years ago that people sometimes struggle with events like this because they're so horrific. Putting their head around it is the thing. And I think that makes them more susceptible to people that, you know, want to make money or people want to be leaders. You know, the Facebook groups must have been extensive that were made off of this, huh? Yeah. And it took years for Facebook to take them down.

One of the biggest ones was a group called Sandy Hook Hopes on Facebook. And it was run by the guy I mentioned earlier, the house mover from Florida, a guy named Tony Meade, who really made a name for itself on this, running this group on Facebook. And these folks would gather every night for hours, you know, chatting into the wee hours of the morning, hundreds of people just sort of, you know, congratulating each other as they unearthed new aspects of the plot as they sort of created and you know as you know some of the first facebook groups when facebook was born were organized around things like knitting and so it reminded me of you know those early groups these people sort of embroidering this massive body of hopes material around sandy hook and later around other mass shootings or around coronavirus

or around QAnon and, you know, building each other up and spreading it and just creating this massive blob of falsehoods. Yeah. You know, we have a lot of journalists on the show. We've had, I mean, everybody from every great format of journalism, I have a lot of respect for journalists. People really should. You know, they usually study ethical journalism. They go to journalism school. They study ethics. Most journalists are really good at trying to keep their personal opinions out of stuff. They're good at interviewing both sides.

And it seems like one of the problems with the internet is in blogging and everything else, you know, cause I watched this grow up. I started on Twitter in 2008, started our blog for the Chris Foss show, I think in 2009, 2008, it turns 13 years next month. You know, I started blogging, but you know, we were talking about tech stuff. But you know, we're always giving our opinion and uh uh it seems like with the advent the start of the internet became this real um this real kind of identification of well suddenly everyone's an expert suddenly everyone's a journalist some suddenly everyone's the smart people in the room. And then between journalists and our scientists, you know, we saw that with COVID. Suddenly, you know, no one believes them because, you know, oh, I saw a meme on Facebook today.

So I clearly know more than some scientists who went to school for 20 years and has been at the IH, the Institute of Health for 30 years. 30 year um and and i'm wondering how much of this you know and and people finding uh finding the suspicions they have you know i've had people send me stuff and i'm like oh here's the 9-11 thing and or you know i i don't know if i got any sandy hook stuff over the years but you know stuff that and i'm like come on man come on you know they'll they'll circle some obscure image and a screen capture and you're like seriously you know i grew up with bigfoot right so okay that was my first my conspiracy theory uh let me ask you this um in your findings you know we've seen the we've seen the advent of of white nationalism and white religion you know we've had a lot of people that

on the show have come and talked about white nationalism and white religion behind it in the trump years and of course the conspiracy and the fake news and false news and stuff that he propagated um the uh does does it did you find any of that behind it that was there was a part of it because a lot of the a lot of the stuff that's come out of these conspiracy things have come out of the religious end of the gop party at least at least in my understanding i could be wrong because i'm not an expert yeah no these conspiracy theories are are really sort of born of a kind of grievance so you know this sense that the government is lying to you that they are pursuing nefarious aims that you don't really know about, that they're covering things up.

And so and the mainstream media is complicit in this. They work hand in hand with the government to press the government line, that type of thing. And then, you know, when you have that sense of grievance, so you have theories that are born, you know, or resurrected, I should say, like the great replacement theory. This idea among white Christians that there are people coming from overseas, that immigrants are out to replace them, their jobs, their lives, their role in society. They're there to outnumber them. I mean, this is what we saw in Charlottesville and the violence there. It was driving some of the support for President Trump and his comments about building the wall and keeping immigrants out. All of these things kind of feed each other.

It's like tentacles that spread throughout. And, you know, and the people who spread these things are obviously they have certain personality traits. And, you know, some of them believe this idea that they're being replaced or that they are a diminished force in their own country. And then they are suspicious of the government and they feel like they need to defend themselves. So they're very worried about efforts to limit the number of guns in this country. So it all kind of shades into each other. And, you know, when you have someone like Alex Jones, he's sort of the apotheosis of this, right? Because he has these ties to these white nationalist groups. He is very pro-Second Amendment.

He's very suspicious of officials and the government and the mainstream media. Infowars' name is not a mistake. You know, he feels like, you know, there is, as he says, a war on for your mind. Is the government going to get you, the Democrats, or are you going to listen to me, Alex Jones, the truth teller? Yeah. Throughout the history of man, there's always been prophets that have always profited off of fear. The boogeyman is under your bed.

He's always going to get you. You know, I'm an atheist. I grew up, you know, it's interesting how these have evolved and what you talk about in your book. But I'm also thinking back to my youth. I grew up in Utah in the Mormon cult. We were always told that the Mormon church was going to, the government was going to fail. I believe Mitt Romney's admitted to this. We were raised in the Mormon church teachings that the government would eventually go bankrupt,

the government would fail, and the Mormon church would be rich enough to take over the country and save save the country it was like you know this whole craziness and for all of our lives we always had um uh food storage so we'd have like a years worth of wheat and crap and yeah you know whatever the hell else and i remember i remember seeing his own shelter in the old days yeah It's a wonder we didn't have one of those too. Um, but we're, we was always the thing that like, you know,

the government's going to end at any time. I remember my father had all these books in his library and went out through and stole all his business books. Um, he had all these books about, you know, the coming in times of next year, you know,

and then for some reason they revised those books every year. I finally figured out. And, uh, but yeah, it seems like this just basically went mainstream with the internet. Like it just, And then for some reason they revised those books every year, I finally figured out. But yeah, it seems like this just basically went mainstream with the internet. Like it just went full out. Do you see it getting better or getting worse? Does Facebook have a lot to blame for a lot of this?

Or are we just getting dumber as a people? Well, we're getting dumber as a people but i do think that some of the dumber theories are you know finding their way to more and more people and we can thank social media for that yeah um and you know as we were talking about a little bit earlier people get a lot out of this we have a lot of people in this country who are feeling isolated and are searching for some kind of community membership in some kind of tribe. And sometimes they coalesce around things that aren't necessarily a force for good. So I think we see that happening. But the, you know, the good news is Lenny Posner, again, you know, the Sandy Hook dad who took this on because he had a tech background, this really became his calling. He has devoted his life to getting this material taken down

and more importantly, to warning the rest of us that this has reached a really critical state. And we saw with January 6th that belief in these kinds of theories and the willingness of these theories adherents to confront and defend these falsehoods with violence has sort of reached a boiling point. And I think that's really important for Americans to understand. The good news is I think a lot of them are, you know, I think there's a big conversation around this information online right now and the impacts that it has on people's daily lives and more importantly on our democratic system. So, you know, is it still out there? Is it still really virulent and powerful? Absolutely. But more and more, there is a

conversation around it and an effort both on the part of academia and by policymakers to try and explore some solutions. Yes. One of the things I, you know, why we love doing the show and have so many great authors and journalists on is seeing, you know, not only the history of this country, you know, starting with the great lie of the shining city on the hill and all the things that has spawned since and all of the issues we've had and we struggle with. Sometimes I wonder if we've talked with different authors and historians about the falling of the middle class, the dissolution of the middle class, the disillusion of the middle class that I started to see when I turned 18. I started seeing that, you know, the Reaganomics really started putting us into a point where the middle class started to disappear. And more and more, we've been at the fences where the middle class has been disappearing and just been under attack. You saw the reason people,

a large part of the reason people voted for Donald Trump, especially in the Rust Belts, where those people wanted their jobs back. I can't remember if it was Eddie Glaude Jr. who was on the show or Jamar Tisby made a comment. It might have been someone else made a comment that basically white people started finding out what it's like to live in ghettos for the first time. And that's why they voted for Trump. And it's almost like as we've gotten more broker and our savings have begun to pleaded, you know, you hear about the economics of this country, you know, wages not going up for 40 years, that the craziness gets more desperate. You know, we had Ruth Bungate on the show with her book Strongman, and she talked about how a lot of these factors play into the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. And we've seen that arc over the last four or five years as to where Germans were run down,

they were broke, recession, and they found a guy who said he'd fix everything, and they're willing to sell themselves out as long as the trains run on time. We're kind of seeing that with Biden now, where people are like, well, I don't know, maybe we can have Trump back if he can get us lower gas prices. People are willing to sell out their freedom and their democracy for

as long as the trains run on time, until they don't, which they usually don't in evangelizing fascism and authoritarianism. So sometimes I wonder if we're not on that track or if January 6th was our pinnacle and, I don't know, we can claw back to... It's a good question. I think it's a question on a lot of folks' minds. And, you know, you're absolutely right. There is, you know, a lot of human suffering behind some of this. And in my book, I did, you know, interview a few people who I noticed, you know, and in their stories that they told me for the book, you know, there's a lot of trauma in folks' backgrounds.

And that sort of leads them to be distrustful. There's a lot of distrust in government right now across the board. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to feel like government isn't working for you or that it's engaged in efforts that really don't benefit you and your family, or that it's let you down, or that the government does lie. It does cover things up. We have historical examples of that. The problem with a lot of these folks is that they will default to the government lies every time. The government is always covering up. The government is always pursuing something under the table and not telling us. And that's, of course, not true. And it also leads you down the path to, well, if that's the case, then there's a kind of nihilism that takes over. We may as well vote for

a would-be dictator, or we may as well blow everything up. We may as well attack the Capitol because there's nothing there for those folks. They're angry. And, you know, if you really believed that your vote in a presidential contest was stolen, if you really believed the lie that, you know, Donald Trump spread and his allies spread that the election was truly stolen from the swath of American people who supported him, you'd be angry too. You'd be in the streets as well. So, you know, this is understandable, but what's shocking and terrible and what really screams out for a solution is the idea that you have so many of these people believing easily disproven lies like this. Yeah.

It's like I have friends. I'll do gaming online. And, of course, we review a lot of gaming products, the Chris Foss Show. So we have a center for that. But I'll have friends that will say stuff on a gaming feed. And I'll just be like, what the ever freaking heck did you? And then I'll be like, okay, have you pulled that up on snopes have you checked snopes have you have you double checked that meme you know it's really interesting to me

how lazy some people are to where they get most of their political education from memes yeah and i'm like wonder like are they are they actually lazy thinkers or is it that more and more of us are looking for outlets that just affirm our point of view rather than genuinely educating us? I mean, it used to be the big three networks, the big national papers, your hometown paper. You could go to those and you knew that you were getting the truth. You might not agree with the various viewpoints presented, but you felt like you were getting a were getting the truth. You might not agree with the various viewpoints presented, but you felt like you were getting a version of the truth. But then when you have people who believe different things or want to believe different things, we have any number now of media outlets that are geared towards satisfying that point of view. If you're on the far right,

you'll turn to Fox News or OAN or Breitbart. If you're on the far left, you'll turn to Fox News or OAN or, you know, Breitbart. If you're on the far left, you'll go to MSNBC. You'll turn to, you know, liberal Twitter. But these are not giving you the real picture of what's actually going on. Yeah. You know, I take my news sources from a lot of different things. I double check my stuff. You know, I'm very careful. Of course, we have a lot of great journalists on the show and we try and vault that up and make sure people understand how important journalism is, ethical journalism

and real journalists, not some guy who's in an RV in Florida. I don't know. I suppose, I don't know. Is there anybody working for the WAPO that's a RV in Florida? It's an RV. I know.

I just did a little mental search. I was thinking of a picture today I got where there's an RV in Florida. Someone sent me a, it's covered in Trump's, uh, photos. Like just, there's nothing left of the RV. It's just Trump, uh, you know, misanderings and memes. But has any of the other school shootings gotten the sort of hate, blowback doxing and attacks like Sandy Hook? Why was Sandy Hook the worst? Sandy Hook was the worst because it came at a watershed moment.

So Barack Obama had just been reelected. There were a swath of Americans who were not very happy about that. They were believing that, you know, draconian gun control was on his agenda. That was one thing. But you really did have was injured in that shooting. And I said, can you take a look at your Facebook page and just tell me, did anyone, because she became very active in the gun control movement in the aftermath of her daughter's injury in that shooting. And I said, did anyone ever call you a liar or attack you or say you were a fraud or you were working with the government, anything like that? And she went

through her page and she was like, no, really nothing. But that was because, you know, there were around the world in 2007, a hundred million Facebook users. By five years later in 2012, the Sandy Hook shooting, there were more than a billion. Twitter had, you know, 5,000 tweets a day in 2007 around Virginia Tech. You know, it was really in its infancy. By 2012, after Sandy Hook, 5,000 tweets every second. So the idea that this hoax was kind of bubbling up out of suspicion of the government, of the Obama administration, that was all there. But then

there was that sort of tinder provided by social media. Yeah. Didn't Churchill say something a lie can get around the world in seconds? Or for the truth. Yeah. And social media tends to amplify it. And especially like, you know, Facebook.

You looked at what Facebook... Am I pronouncing it right? Miramar? And different other things that they've kind of supported to let governments get away with stuff. And they turned a blind eye for a long time to the Sandy Hook stuff, white nationalism. The genocide in Myanmar. Yeah. And it a blind eye for a long time to to the sandy hook stuff white nationalism and violent the the genocide in myanmar yeah yeah um and uh it sounds like you know alex jones is really the proponent that

that shined a light on that and took it to like the next conspiracy level yeah i mean he saw you know he saw the ability in social media to really extend and amplify his brand and his message and his business. So, you know, when he was deplatformed in 2018, you know, when all of these big platforms, Facebook, Twitter, even Pinterest, Pornhub, everybody kicked him off. He did experience a hit to his business. But at the same time, he has some really loyal diehard followers. So they would find ways to get his content onto those platforms themselves. And there were loopholes that they could explore. But nonetheless, yeah, he was, I mean, his videos on YouTube had more than a billion views. So, you know, if only five or six of those are about Sandy Hook families, you know, that's an awful lot of people who are imbibing that content.

And, you know, a small percentage of those are going to act on it. Yeah. And the shareability of social media. I mean, I've had so many, so much stupid stuff shared with me over time, usually 9-11. After a while, your friends kind of get the idea that you're going to call them out. And I've, I've been really, I've been really tough at unfriending and disconnecting from people that want to spread stupid stuff. And I make a big deal of it. I've made a big deal about my feed for a long time. You know, check your sources.

Don't send me some or I'll call you out as a moron. You know, it used to be that comedian did that joke that it used to be that when we had someone stupid in our midst locally without the Internet, we just go, you're a moron. Shut up and go away and go back to whatever you're doing there. But now, you know, they can find each other mate and breed i guess um anything more we haven't touched on in your book that uh that we should throw other teas out so people pick it up uh well i mean if you all would uh post a link to the book

i would love it um that would be great um it's really important to the families who participated in the book that we all kind of get the signal that they're sending. They really felt like what happened to them was a warning for all of us. And, you know, not just in the aftermath of mass shootings, but just the spread of misinformation that's affecting how our elections go, how we govern ourselves at the local level, you know, how we run our institutions. And, you know, this is happening in individual communities to people who, you know, really can't afford to, you know, have any additional trauma or pain heat on them. So, and also to all of us to some degree. But yeah, I mean, you know, there are efforts now to try and grapple with this.

There is some bipartisan will in Congress, believe it or not, to do something to, you know, either inspire or push these social media companies to act a little bit more strongly, to rein in some of this disinformation that's spreading. And, you know, it, it, that's hopeful. I mean, part of it is just having the conversation. And one thing I've noticed is that, you know, as the book's been out these last few months, there are people who say, you know, as they did after the shooting itself, I can't read about Sandy Hook.

It's just too painful. It's too awful. You know, it makes me cry, you know. And to them, the families have said at some of the events I've done, you know, for the book with the family members, you know, please don't look away. Please do grapple with this subject because it's really important that we understand the nature of what's happening here. And, you know, I talk about the shooting, I sort of establish the baseline truth of the shooting, but then I go quickly to the aftermath, to the real message of the book, which is, you know, this is a foundational story of how misinformation is impacting our democracy and our society.

Yeah, and we need to understand what's going on, how it goes on. I'll paraphrase this, but evil survives or thrives when good people don't stand up and say, enough, we're not doing this anymore. And yeah, there are things that are horrible in our life that we need to look at and go, yeah, we need to stop this. We've seen, of course, the shootings in schools and everything propagate, and there's all sorts of like, well, if there was a good guy with a gun, we saw Uvalde. That's not quite the same.

What's interesting to me is how much the big lie and the lies all coming out of this, and Alex Jones was a big proponent of the Trump thing, is how much that took over the Republican Party and still does. We're still grappling with the big lie and the lies uh all coming out of this and alex jones was a big proponent of the trump thing is how much that took over the republican party and still does we're still grappling with the big lie hopefully the january 6th commission seems to breaking through some people's minds i don't know how far they're going but uh it's kind of interesting i remember when the the gop used to be run by the Heritage Society, the Federalist Society and Center for National Policy. And now they're run by QAnon almost, it seems. And Alex Jones.

And you're just like, well, that's not working out good. Yeah. One party that's gone that far off the rails. Yeah, they certainly have a seat at the table. And if you look at Alex Jones' through line, as you just said, Chris, you know, he shows up at all of those junctures. It was an Alex Jones video that brought the gunman to Comet Ping Pong, the pizzeria, you know, that that was targeted by Pizzagate believers just down the street from where I'm sitting right now in Washington, D.C. You know, that was him spreading coronavirus myths. He's done that since 2020, since the very beginning.

And he certainly played a role in inspiring people to show up in the Capitol on January 6th. And his role has been significant. So, you know, this he's a kind of Pied Piper for this type of thinking. And, you know, it's not bringing us anything good in terms of, you know, our survival of our democracy. Yeah. I mean, I,

I grew up with people always telling me, uh, you know, uh, a boogeyman and me having to go, what's the motivation behind your thing? And like I say, first time I went to Alex Jones's site,

I saw all the products for, you know, some of it was stuff. I grew up with the Mormon thing where there was the survival stuff, the food storage stuff. And, you know, the world ends tomorrow. So get your branded knife, you know, whatever. And I saw it and I went, okay, you know, what's the old saying? Tell me your angle or whatever and I'll tell you what you're selling. And, you know, I could see that. And I wish people were more cognitive of that and stuff and going there.

But sometimes they like the message. Sometimes they like being the smart guy. Everybody wants to be that smart guy. It's like I always say, you always have these flat-earther people running around, and they're full of crap. Everyone knows the world's square. It's not round. It's square. It's not round. It's square.

It's not flat. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. Anyway, guys, there's a joke for the day. Um, it's been wonderful to have you on the show,

Elizabeth. The world is not square guys. That was a joke too, by the way. Now somebody starting a Facebook group. Damn it. It's wonderful to have on the show, Elizabeth.

Thank you for coming on and sharing your wonderful book with us. It's my pleasure, Chris. Thank you so much for having me on. And give us your dot coms, if you would please, one more time. Absolutely. You can find information about what I do and about the book on Twitter, which is at NYT Liz. I have information there. And on Facebook, you can find me at Elizabeth Dittman, D-I-E-T-M-A-N-N Williamson. Okay.

Thank you very much. Thanks to my audience for being here. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold. Sandy Hook, An American Tragedy in Battle for the Truth. Please, I know sometimes it's hard to read about these stories, but unless we look, what I always say, look the dragon in the eye, you can't fight him. And we've got to be able to fight these dragons, fight these demons. If you have friends that spread information, either set them straight or, you know, sometimes I just believe in, what's that thing you do in your parent where you give them tough love?

Sometimes you've got to alienate them. You know, my husky mother's taught me that with a husky. When a husky is bad, mom alienates the Husky until the Husky goes off and goes, maybe I shouldn't be bad anymore. Mom will love me more. Which probably my mom did to me. I don't know.

There's a joke there somewhere. I'm just wandering, looking for a joke at this point. So anyway, guys, be sure to pick up the book. Certainly appreciate it. Also go to all of our accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever you find our accounts sold.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.