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Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, “pretty much in a catatonic state”, the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the “New World Order global elitists”.
So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: “Fake kid”, “Didn’t die”, “Fucking liar”.
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The week before our interview,
a judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Lucy Richards. She is alleged to have sent messages to Pozner, including one that read: “Death is coming to you real soon and nothing you can do about it.” That was bad, Pozner agrees, but not necessarily the most unsettling. After all, others have put photos of his house on the web and reported him to child-protection services. “This is the world I deal with now,” says Pozner.
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Pozner himself used to be into conspiracy theories. When he lived in Connecticut, he often had to commute to New York and would listen to rightwing radio hosts such as Alex Jones and Michael Savage on the long drives. “I’m self-employed, an entrepreneur. I was always looking for more information so I could get an edge on the next guy, to get a better idea of the geopolitical perspective,” Pozner says. Once he got used to Jones’s “raspy voice” he liked him especially: “Alex Jones appears to think out of the box. He’s entertaining.”
Arguably, more than anyone, Jones is responsible for spreading the theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake. His radio shows and website,
InfoWars.com, have an audience of more than eight million, and they specialise in the kind of conspiracies that had intrigued Pozner: was 9/11 an inside job? Was the US government involved in the Oklahoma City bombing?
On 27 January 2013, Jones told his audience: “In the last month and a half, I have not come out and said this was clearly a staged event. Unfortunately, evidence is beginning to come out that points more and more in that direction.”
“I wasn’t very verbal at that point, but I managed to send Alex Jones an email,” says Pozner. He wrote: “Haven’t we had our share of pain and suffering? I used to enjoy listening to your shows. Now I feel that your type of show created these hateful people and they need to be reeled in!”
He got a reply from Jones’s assistant, who said: “Alex has no doubt this was a real tragedy.” But Jones’ thinking
seemed to change. In 2015, he
told his audience: “Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely fake, with actors; in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids, and it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”
The year before InfoWars.com ran a story headlined: “
FBI says no one killed at Sandy Hook.”
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In 2015, Donald Trump went on to Alex Jones’s show for a half-hour
interview. At the end of the show, Trump said to the man who once claimed the government is putting chemicals into the water to turn people gay and stop them from having children: “I just want to finish by saying your reputation’s amazing. I will not let you down, you will be very, very impressed, I hope. And I think we’ll be speaking a lot ... You’ll be very proud of our country.”
Trump is very comfortable with conspiracy theorists. Steve Bannon, of course, made his name with Breitbart News, the conservative news website known for its hyped-up reporting of conspiracies. His original choice for national security adviser, General Mike Flynn, was notorious for tweeting
conspiracy theories, such as that Hillary Clinton was involved with child-sex trafficking, and he
claimed the Democrats wanted to impose sharia law in Florida. His adviser, Roger Stone, has
claimed that Chelsea Clinton had multiple plastic surgeries as a teenager to
disguise her true paternity. Trump’s deputy campaign manager,
David Bossie, made a 2008 documentary,
Hillary: the Movie, which reported the allegation, among other things, that Hillary Clinton
had the cat of a woman who made claims of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton killed.
Mike Cernovich is another conspiracy theorist who, by rights, should only be known among the most misogynistic and angry. He was one of those responsible for spreading the so-called “pizzagate” story, which claimed that Hillary Clinton and other top-level Democrats were running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlour in DC. In December, a man
fired a rifle inside the restaurant, determined to find the alleged child sex slaves he had read about online. In early April, he published a blog claiming the former national security adviser Susan Rice had engaged in illegal surveillance activity. In fact, his blog revealed nothing more than that there were longstanding and well-known concerns about surveillance. Nonetheless, he received
an endorsement from Trump’s counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, and Donald Trump Jr
tweeted: “Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story. In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
And then there is Trump himself, a man whose greatest political triumph before winning the presidency was promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory, which revealed only Trump’s apparent inability to believe black people can be born in the US. In the months since he was inaugurated, he has merrily promoted conspiracy theories with the enthusiasm of a devoted InfoWars fan. These have included: 3m votes in the election were cast illegally; the media is covering up acts of terrorism; Obama tapped his phone while president. Then there are his longstanding theories about vaccinations (“AUTISM”) and climate change (“a hoax”).
Earlier this year, the Newtown school board sent Trump a letter, asking him to denounce Alex Jones and the other Sandy Hook hoaxers, and to state definitively that Sandy Hook happened: “Jones repeatedly tells his listeners and viewers that he has your ears and your respect. He brags about how you called him after your victory in November. He continues to hurt the memories of those lost, the ability of those left behind to heal,” the school’s board wrote. Two months on, they have yet to receive a response.
Pozner says this doesn’t bother him, not really: “I don’t want to have anything to do with
Donald Trump or the crowd he surrounds himself with.”
I ask how he feels about stories such as pizzagate going mainstream. “It feels like I’ve been proven right – hoaxers need to be handled, not ignored. It’s like a brushfire: you need to shape it and direct it. But if you leave it alone, it will burn down your forest, and it has reached all the way to the White House,” he says.
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