Newtown, Conn, Shooting (2012)

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    Alex Jones’s Infowars Will Be Auctioned Off to Pay Sandy Hook Families

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    A sale of the Infowars website and other property is set for November, and could determine the conspiracy theorist’s fate as a broadcaster.A Houston bankruptcy judge ruled on Tuesday that assets from the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars empire can be auctioned off to help pay families of the Sandy Hook mass shooting victims the defamation awards he owes them.The auction, set for mid-November, will include Infowars’ website, social media accounts, broadcasting equipment, product trademarks and inventory owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.Mr. Jones’s fate as a broadcaster most likely depends on who buys his business. Though the Infowars name and assets are potentially of interest to a range of entities on the far right, under the terms of the sale anyone can bid.Mr. Jones spent years spreading lies that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 first graders and six educators was a hoax aimed at confiscating Americans’ firearms, and that the victims’ families were actors complicit in the plot. The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.Relatives of 10 victims sued Mr. Jones in 2018 for defamation and were awarded more than $1.4 billion in damages in trials in Texas and Connecticut. But the most the families are likely to ever see is a small fraction of that, and they have been divided over how to equitably distribute the money.As the cases headed to court in 2022, Mr. Jones’s company declared bankruptcy. Mr. Jones declared personal bankruptcy soon afterward.Since then, the families have been wrangling in bankruptcy court over assets and revenue that are far less than they originally envisioned. Mr. Jones’s personal and business assets combined are worth less than $10 million, according to independent valuations presented in court. His lawyers and other bankruptcy professionals will be paid first, leaving even less for the families.The Connecticut and Texas sides divided sharply over how to go after Free Speech Systems. Lawyers for the families who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut — the relatives of eight victims — favored shutting down the company and liquidating its assets, with the money distributed among the family members.Lawyers for families who sued Mr. Jones in Texas favored a settlement in which he would pay them a percentage of his income over the next decade, most likely netting more money for each relative. As a condition of the latter deal, Mr. Jones would have had to agree never to mention the shooting again.The asset sale is probably the least lucrative option for the family members, though its potential for shutting down Infowars appealed to some. Juries in the two lawsuits awarded individual relatives widely varying amounts, and lawyers from the Connecticut and Texas sides have been dueling over how to fairly allocate the money.The situation is further complicated by the fact that a jury has yet to decide how much in damages Mr. Jones must pay Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner died in the shooting. More

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      JD Vance to Appear With Tucker Carlson, Who Amplified False Holocaust Claims

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      Not long ago, candidates running for national office spent much of the general election distancing themselves from the fringes of their parties.But on Saturday, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will share a stage with someone on the fringes of his.Mr. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is scheduled to appear in Hershey, Pa., as the special guest of the “Tucker Carlson Live” show, just weeks after Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, praised and aired the views of Darryl Cooper, who falsely claimed that the Holocaust was not an intentional act of genocide.Mr. Carlson described Mr. Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In Mr. Carlson’s interview with him, which was posted on social media this month, Mr. Cooper falsely claimed that the Nazis’ systematic killing of European Jews was an accident of history carried out by a German military overwhelmed with prisoners of war — not an act of premeditated genocide. In fact, the Nazis’ killing of almost six million Jews was meticulously planned and documented.Mr. Cooper also called Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, “the chief villain of the Second World War” for declaring war on Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland.Mr. Carlson’s promotion of Mr. Cooper drew criticism from the Biden White House and from some conservatives.A Vance campaign spokesman said this month that Mr. Vance did not share the views of Mr. Cooper but “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.”Mr. Vance has defended his decision to keep his interview with Mr. Carlson, saying that Republicans believe in free speech and debate. “Tucker Carlson is not affiliated with the campaign, so I don’t think what Tucker Carlson does is a distraction or is not,” Mr. Vance said this month. “He’s going to do what he wants to do, and we can disagree or agree with the viewpoints.”Tickets for the events ranged from $35 for upper-level seats to $1,600 for a “V.I.P. Meet and Greet Experience” that included access to a reception with Mr. Vance, a photo with Mr. Carlson and a seat in the first five rows.Mr. Carlson is in the midst of his first live tour, a national, monthlong run of shows with some of the most well-known and controversial figures in conservative politics. His guests have included Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point Action, and media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Dan Bongino.Later this month, Mr. Carlson will be joined by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has been ordered to pay over $1.4 billion in defamation damages to the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest child and the host of the podcast “Triggered.” More

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      Ronda Rousey Apologizes for Reposting Sandy Hook Conspiracy Video

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      The former U.F.C. star apologized after Reddit users asked her about the video she shared 11 years ago. She called it “the single most regrettable decision of my life.”The former mixed martial arts superstar and professional wrestler Ronda Rousey apologized on Friday for reposting a video in 2013 that spread conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, calling it “the single most regrettable decision of my life.”Ms. Rousey, who was one of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s biggest stars, explained in her apology that she “watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reposted it on twitter.”Ms. Rousey said the news media never asked her about the post, which has since been deleted. She said she considered apologizing for it many times, including in her memoir, but worried that doing so might “lead more people down the black hole” of conspiracies.“I deserve to be hated, labeled, detested, resented and worse for it,” she said in her apology, adding, “I apologize that this came 11 years too late.”Ms. Rousey’s apology came days after she hosted a Q. and A. session on Reddit.A user asked her if she should apologize for “sharing a video that you called ‘must-watch’ and ‘interesting’ that had claimed the Sandy Hook School Massacre was part of a government conspiracy.” Other users also asked about her old post.On Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle walked into the school in Newtown, Conn., and killed 26 people, 20 of them children.In the years since, false conspiracy theories about the event have proliferated on the internet.In 2018, relatives of Sandy Hook victims sued Alex Jones, a media personality who spread conspiracy theories about the shooting through his company Infowars, for defamation. They were awarded more than $1.4 billion in damages, though what the families might receive is unclear as further legal battles drag on.In a post dated Jan. 15, 2013, Ms. Rousey wrote, “asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told,” apparently in response to backlash she received about the video she had shared, according to a 2013 article on Bleacher Report, a sports news website.A 2013 analysis in The Huffington Post said the video, which appears to have been removed from YouTube, made a variety of false claims, including that some of the people in the school were paid actors.A lawyer and agents representing Ms. Rousey did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.Her apology has been viewed more than seven million times, and has received more than 2,000 comments, many of which appear to be supportive.In 2018, Ms. Rousey became the first woman to be inducted into the U.F.C. Hall of Fame. She also won a bronze medal at the 2008 Olympics in middleweight judo and for years was one of the biggest stars for WWE. More

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      ‘The Truth vs. Alex Jones’ Review: How Conspiracy Theories Work

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      Directed by Dan Reed (“Leaving Neverland”), the documentary offers a lesson in how conspiracy theories work and shows how parents confronted Jones in court.Even though the legal battle between Sandy Hook families and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been thoroughly covered, it is still hard to watch him in the documentary “The Truth vs. Alex Jones” without experiencing a wave of nausea.Directed by Dan Reed (“Leaving Neverland”), the film methodically lays out the horrors that families in Newton, Conn., faced on Dec. 14, 2012, when a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary. Parents of the victims share memories from that morning before their children left for school. Daniel Jewiss, the lead investigator, walks viewers through how the slaughter unfolded.Then the documentary shows how, just as the parents were dealing with unfathomable grief, Jones, through his Infowars broadcasts, began promoting the idea that the shooting was a hoax. As he continued to spread falsehoods, people who latched on to such claims harassed the families. Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed at Sandy Hook, describes the harassment as coming in waves. “It was almost like I knew when Alex Jones said something,” he says in testimony excerpted in the film.If there is value in seeing these events recapped, it is in the power of seeing the parents confront Jones in court. (Over two trials, in Texas and Connecticut, they won more than $1 billion in damages.) It is also in the horror of seeing just how confidently Jones deflects questions and tries to steer proceedings to his advantage — denying the families what Alissa Parker, Emilie’s mother, calls “a moment of reflection” from him.“The Truth vs. Alex Jones” offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.The Truth vs. Alex JonesNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Max. More

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      Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. But the Misinformation War Continues.

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      False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More

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      Why Canada Races on Gun Policy When America Crawls

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      As Congress once more struggles through acrimonious and so far fruitless negotiations over gun reforms in the wake of a mass shooting, Americans may find themselves looking north in befuddlement.Canada’s government has begun moving to ban handgun sales and buy back military-style rifles — dramatic changes in a country with one of the world’s highest gun ownership rates outside of the United States, expected to pass easily and with little fuss.Ask Americans why Canada’s government seems to cut through issues that mire their own in bitterness and frustration, and you might hear them cite cultural differences, gentler politics, even easygoing Canadian temperaments.But ask a political scientist, and you’ll get a more straightforward answer.Differences in national culture and issues, while meaningful, do not on their own explain things. After all, Canada also has two parties that mostly dominate national politics, an urban-rural divide, deepening culture wars and a rising far-right. And guns have been a contentious issue there for decades, one long contested by activist groups.Rather, much of the gap in how these two countries handle contentious policy questions comes down to something that can feel invisible amid day-to-day politicking, but may be just as important as the issues themselves: the structures of their political systems.Canada’s is a parliamentary system. Its head of government, Justin Trudeau, is elevated to that job by the legislature, of which he is also a member, and which his party, in collaboration with another, controls.If Mr. Trudeau wants to pass a new law, he must merely ask his subordinates in his party and their allies to do it. There is no such thing as divided government and less cross-party horse-trading and legislative gridlock.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada with government officials and gun-control activists, during a news conference about firearm-control legislation in Ottawa, Ontario, on Monday.Blair Gable/ReutersCanada is similar to what the United States would be if it had only a House of Representatives, whose speaker also oversaw federal agencies and foreign policy.What America has instead is a system whose structure simultaneously requires cooperation across competing parties and discourages them from working together.The result is an American system that not only moves slower and passes fewer laws than those of parliamentary models like Canada’s, research has found, but stalls for years even on measures that enjoy widespread support among voters in both parties, such as universal background checks for gun purchases.Many political scientists argue that the United States’ long-worsening gridlock runs much deeper than any one issue or the interest groups engaged with it, to the basic setup of its political system.The Perils of PresidentsThe scholar Juan Linz warned in a much-discussed 1990 essay, as much of the developing and formerly Soviet worlds moved to democracy, that those countries not follow what he called one of the foundational flaws of the United States: its presidency.“The vast majority of the stable democracies in the world today are parliamentary regimes,” Dr. Linz wrote.Presidential systems, on the other hand, tended to collapse in coups or other violence, with only the United States having persisted since its origin.It’s telling that when American diplomats and technocrats help to set up new democracies abroad, they almost always model them on European-style parliaments.Subsequent research has found that parliamentary systems also perform better at managing the economy and advancing rule of law than presidencies, if only for the comparative ease with which they can implement policy — witnessed in Canada’s rapid response to gun violence or other crises.Gun control activists during a rally in Washington last week.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAmerica’s legislative hurdles, requiring cooperation across the president, Senate and House to pass laws, are raised further by the fact that all three are elected under different rules.None represents a straight national majority. Presidential elections favor some states over others. The Senate tilts especially toward rural voters. All three are elected on different schedules. As a result, single-party control is rare. Because competing parties typically control at least one of those three veto points on legislation, legislation is frequently vetoed.Americans have come to accept, even embrace, divided government. But it is exceedingly uncommon. While Americans may see Canada’s legislative efficiency as unusual, to the rest of the world it is American-style gridlock that looks odd.Still, America’s presidential system does not, on its own, explain what makes it function so differently from a country like Canada.“As long as things are moderate, a presidential system is not so bad,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist who studies political reform.Rather, he cited that America is nearly alone in combining a presidency with winner-take-all elections.Zero-Sum ContestsProportional votes, common in most of the world, award seats to each party based on its share of the vote.Under American-style elections, the party that wins 51 percent of a race controls 100 percent of the office it elects, while the party with 49 percent ends up with nothing.This all but ensured that politics would coalesce between two parties because third-ranked parties rarely win office. And as those two parties came to represent geographically distinct electorates struggling for national control, their contests took on, for voters, a sensation of us-versus-them.Canada, too, has winner-take-all elections, a practice inherited from Britain. Still, neither of those countries hold presidential contests, which pit one half of the nation against the other.And in neither country do the executive and legislative branches share power, which, in times of divided government, extends the zero-sum nature of American elections into lawmaking, too. And not only on issues where the parties’ supporters disagree.Mourners gathered at Newtown High School in Connecticut in 2012 for a service for those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesIn 2013, shortly after a gunman killed 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., polls found that 81 percent of Republicans supported background checks for gun purchases. But when asked whether the Senate should pass such a bill — which would have required Republicans to side with the then-Democratic majority — support dropped to 57 percent. The measure never passed.The episode was one of many suggesting that Americans often privilege partisan victory, or at least denying victory to the other side, over their own policy preferences, the scholar Lilliana Mason wrote in a book on partisanship.“Even when policy debates crack open and an opportunity for compromise appears,” Dr. Mason wrote, “partisans are psychologically motivated to look away.”Unstable MajoritiesStill, there is something unusual to Canada’s model, too.Most parliamentary systems, as in Europe, elect lawmakers proportionally. Voters select a party, which takes seats in the legislature proportional to their overall vote share. As a result, many different parties end up in office, and must join in a coalition to secure a governing majority. Lawmaking is less prone to gridlock than in America but it’s not seamless, either: the prime minister must negotiate among the parties of their coalition.Canada, like Britain, combines American-style elections, which produce what is not quite a two-party system in those countries but is close, with European-style parliaments.As a result, Canada’s prime minister usually oversees a legislative majority, allowing him or her to breeze through legislation even more easily than in European-style parliaments.Handguns on display in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.Jennifer Gauthier/ReutersThis moment is an exception: Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party controls slightly less than half of the House of Commons. Still, his party dominates a legislative alliance in which he has only one partner. Canada also includes a Senate, though its members are appointed and rarely rock the boat.But the Canadian system produces what Dr. Drutman called “unstable majorities,” prone to whiplashing on policy.“If you have a 52 percent margin for one party, and then you throw the bums out because four percent of the vote went the other way, now you’ve moved completely in the other direction,” he said.Gun laws are a case in point. After a 1989 mass shooting, Canadian lawmakers passed registration rules, but phased them in over several years because they were unpopular among rural communities.Those rules were later abolished under a Conservative government. Though Mr. Trudeau has not reimposed the registry, he has tightened gun laws in other ways.In a European-style system, by contrast, a four-point shift to the right or left might change only one party in the country’s governing coalition, prompting a slighter policy change more proportional to the electorate’s mood.American liberals may thrill at the seeming ease with which Canada’s often-left-leaning government can implement policy, much as conservatives may envy Britain’s more right-wing, but similarly rapid, lawmaking under a similar system.But it is the slow-and-steady European model, with its frustratingly incremental advances, that, over the long run, research finds, tend to prove the most stable and effective. More

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      Congress Is Paralyzed on Guns. Here’s Why Chris Murphy Is Still Hopeful.

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      The Democrat from Connecticut, who has spent his decade in the Senate trying and failing to enact gun safety bills, says his party should make the issue the core of its 2022 midterm message.WASHINGTON — It did not take long after the racist gun massacre in Buffalo for a familiar sense of resignation to set in on Capitol Hill about the chance that Congress would be able to muster the will to act on meaningful legislation to combat gun violence in America.In emotional remarks at the scene of the mass shooting on Tuesday, President Biden made no direct call for Congress to take such action. Afterward, he told reporters that he intended to do so, but was frank about his belief that persuading lawmakers to move would be “very difficult.”Around the same time, top Democrats on Capitol Hill were publicly conceding that their paper-thin majority in the Senate meant there was little they would be able to do to prevent the next tragedy.“We’re kind of stuck where we are, for the time being,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, playing down the chance that even a modest bill to strengthen background checks for gun purchases could overcome a Republican blockade.Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, shares his colleagues’ skepticism that any legislation can move. But he is also concerned that Democrats may squander a chance to turn the issue of gun safety into a rallying cry for the midterm elections.For a decade, the issue of gun violence has defined Mr. Murphy’s career; the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., took place a month after he won his seat.Mr. Murphy spoke to The New York Times from a Senate cloakroom about the chances for legislative action on guns, what Mr. Biden should do and why he thinks Democrats will lose control of Congress if they don’t make combating gun violence the core of their 2022 appeal to voters.The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when 20 young children and six adults were killed, did Democrats and President Barack Obama miss the opportunity to pass meaningful gun safety legislation?There was this popular meme in 2013, which said that if the killing of 20 children didn’t result in any action, nothing will. That’s fundamentally the wrong way to look at how Washington works. There are few epiphanies here. It’s all about political power, and political muscle, and we’re in the process of building our own.The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby was ready for us, and for those parents, in 2013. The anti-gun-violence movement was essentially nonexistent, and the N.R.A. was at its peak power.From Opinion: The Buffalo ShootingCommentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.The Times Editorial Board: The mass shooting in Buffalo was an extreme expression of a political worldview that has become increasingly central to the G.O.P.’s identity.Jamelle Bouie: G.O.P. politicians and conservative media personalities did not create the idea of the “great replacement,” but they have adopted it.Paul Krugman: There is a direct line from Republicans’ embrace of crank economics, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.Sway: In the latest episode of her podcast, Kara Swisher hosts a discussion on the role of internet platforms like 4chan, Facebook and Twitch in the attack.We needed time to build up a movement that is stronger than the gun lobby.My worry is that a lot of my colleagues still believe in the mythology of 1994, when everyone thought Democrats lost Congress over the assault weapons ban. That’s not true — that’s not why Congress flipped. Ever since then, Democrats are under the illusion that it’s a losing issue for us.It’s one of the most important wedge issues, and if we don’t talk about it, then we’re going to lose.Many are urging Senator Chuck Schumer and Mr. Durbin to bring up a bill to expand background checks. Even if it couldn’t pass, it would force Republicans to defend their opposition to a policy that polls show has broad support. Should they?There are times when show votes help define the parties. I’m not confident this is one of those moments, given the fact that it’s already pretty clear which side Republicans fall on and which side Democrats fall on.My main recommendation is for Democrats to go out and run on this issue, proudly and strongly. My worry is we would have a vote on the Senate floor, but then Democrats would not be willing to go out and talk about that vote in campaigns.The only way we actually change the dynamic on this issue is to make Republicans show we believe this is a winning electoral issue. That’s what we did in 2018. My worry is, we don’t feel the same confidence in this issue as a winning electoral issue in 2022.I don’t know why we don’t learn a lesson from 2018, that when we run strongly on the issue of guns, universal background checks, banning assault weapons, we turn out voters that otherwise would stay home in the midterms. I’ve talked to Senator Schumer about bringing a vote to the Senate floor. I’m not interested in taking a vote on the Senate floor if we don’t talk about it.If legislation can’t pass, what executive actions are you pushing the administration to take?There is still a ton of harmful gray area around the question of who needs to be a licensed gun dealer. There are a lot of folks peddling guns online and at gun shows who are truly in the business of selling guns, and should be required to do background checks. President Obama put out helpful, but not binding, guidance. The administration could put some real meat on the existing statute and define what it means to be in the business of selling guns.Have you pitched that to them?I have. There has been significant interest from the White House in pursuing that line of policy. I don’t know that they have made a commitment or issued any directive to the Justice Department.Do you support eliminating the filibuster in order to pass gun reforms?One hundred percent. The reason we can’t get this done is the rules of the Senate, not because the American people haven’t made a choice.Guns were one of the most important issues for voters in 2018; it ranked second behind health care. When voters came to the polls in 2018 and elected a Democratic majority in the House, it was with the explicit purpose of getting gun legislation passed. The same voters came back and elected a Democratic president. It’s simply the rules of the Senate that stopped the will of the American people from becoming law.Is there anything happening in terms of discussions with Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, about trying to revive their bill to tighten background checks?There’s nothing new happening now. Manchin-Toomey doesn’t have 60 votes. I spent much of the last two years trying to find a piece of Manchin-Toomey that could get 60 votes. Ultimately, we couldn’t find a landing place. I’ll continue to try any creative avenue to find an expansion of background checks.Does a weakened National Rifle Association create any opening for Republicans to move off their opposition to gun safety measures?This N.R.A. stamp of approval still really matters to them. Inside a Republican Party that has become bereft of big ideas, they’ve only got one left, which is the destruction of government. Nothing signals that more than the endorsement of the organization that supports people arming themselves against the government. In this era of anti-government fervor, it’s more important than ever.Eventually, we have to figure out a way for Republicans to show how much they hate government other than the N.R.A. endorsement. Maybe I should be rooting for the Club for Growth to be a more effective voice within the Republican Party.Can guns really be a winning issue for Democrats in a year when Republicans are attacking your party over inflation, rising gas prices and not meeting the basic needs of American families?I think voters are emotionally moved by the slaughter of innocents. And I think they find it a little weird when Democrats who claim to care about this don’t actually talk about it.We live in an era where authenticity is the coin of the realm. You just have to show voters who you are. I don’t think there’s any more potent means by which to translate who you are, and what you care about, than this issue. I think when you leave this out when you list your priorities as a candidate, it causes voters to scratch their heads a bit.What grade would you give the Biden administration on this issue?The administration could have moved faster on executive actions and the appointment of a new A.T.F. director. I want them to keep going. There’s still more regulatory and executive action that this administration can take and more things the team can do to use the bully pulpit to make sure this is an election issue.Would you give the administration a grade?No.A number of gun violence prevention organizations have called on Mr. Biden to open a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Do you think that would make a difference?I do. It’s become clear to me we need a specific, driving focus on gun violence. The president is clearly personally committed to this issue, but he’s stretched thin due to myriad international and domestic crises. He would be best served by a high-level senior official who wakes up every day and coordinates the issue.After another mass shooting like the one in Buffalo, do you find yourself becoming resigned to the idea that nothing can be done on gun violence?I’ve studied enough great social change movements to know they often take decades to succeed. It was a full 10 years from the shooting of James Brady to the passage of the Brady handgun bill. I think I am part of one of these great social change movements, and I’m confident that you have to put up with a lot of failures before you’re met with success.I also don’t think democracy can allow for 80 percent of the American people to not get their way, forever. Eventually we will be able to break through. We just have not been able to find that pathway yet.This is an exhausting issue to work on, but I have this very deep sense that I will see my time in public service as a failure if I don’t meet the expectations of those parents in Sandy Hook, and Hartford and Bridgeport. And fear is a powerful motivator. More

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      Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny

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      The Infowars host tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect President Donald J. Trump. His role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is now of growing interest to congressional investigators.The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.It is part of a reckoning Mr. Jones faces on multiple fronts. He is still fighting a half-dozen defamation lawsuits filed by the targets of his false claims, including the relatives of 10 Sandy Hook victims. Late last year the Sandy Hook families won four default judgments against him after he for years resisted court orders, and in upcoming trials, juries will decide how much he must pay them.For Jan. 6, Mr. Jones helped secure at least $650,000 from a Publix grocery-store heiress, Julie Fancelli, an Infowars fan, to underwrite Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse the morning of the attack, $200,000 of which was deposited into one of Mr. Jones’s business accounts, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack said. The night before the riot Mr. Jones was at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, where Trump aides and allies had set up an outpost. He has longtime ties to at least a half-dozen people arrested after the riot, including the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, still a regular guest on Infowars, and Joseph Biggs, a former Infowars employee and Proud Boys leader.The House committee has subpoenaed Mr. Jones, and included a three-page list seeking his related communications and financial records. The panel is also seeking Mr. Jones’s communications with Mr. Trump, his family and anyone from the White House or Congress in the days before the riot. Questioned by the panel this year, Mr. Jones invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, and is trying to block the committee’s demand for records in court.Whatever the outcome of the Jan. 6 investigation, Mr. Jones’s journey from Sandy Hook to the assault on the Capitol is a reflection of how conspiracy theories in the United States have metastasized and corroded public discourse in the digital age. A defender of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a former regular on RT, the Kremlin-funded international television outlet, Mr. Jones espoused such extreme views of American democratic society — he has cast airport security screenings as a plot to usurp Americans’ freedoms — that in 2011 RT stopped inviting him on air.But after Mr. Trump appeared live in an interview on Infowars’ website in December 2015, Mr. Jones traveled from the fringes to become part of a newly radicalized Republican Party. Infowars grossed more than $50 million annually during the Trump presidency by selling diet supplements, body armor and other products on its website, records filed in court indicate. During and after the Jan. 6 riot, Infowars promoted its merchandise alongside graphic videos, including footage by an Infowars cameraman of the shooting death of a pro-Trump rioter, Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol Police officer during the attack.Mr. Jones did not respond to messages seeking comment. His lawyer, Norm Pattis, said his client had done nothing wrong on Jan. 6. Video footage from the Capitol that day shows Mr. Jones using a bullhorn to try to discourage people from rioting.“Over many years Infowars has become a go-to source for people deeply suspicious of the government, so it should come as no surprise that many of the attendees at the rally had passed through Infowars’ doors,” Mr. Pattis said. “But that doesn’t mean any of them are guilty of criminal conspiracy or misconduct.”Dan Friesen, whose podcast, “Knowledge Fight,” explores Mr. Jones’s place in America’s conspiracist tradition, said that people should not be shocked by what happened on Jan. 6, given Mr. Jones’s history. “This kind of flare-up just seemed inevitable,” he said.A Trump campaign rally in Dallas in 2019.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Jones owes some of his core conspiracy themes to Gary Allen, a speechwriter for the former Alabama governor George Wallace who in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the far-right John Birch Society’s most revered writers and thinkers. As a teenager, Mr. Jones found Mr. Allen’s 1971 “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” on his father’s bookshelf, and came to share Mr. Allen’s view that a cabal of global bankers and power brokers, not elected officials, controlled American policy. Mr. Allen, who died in 1986, sold his theories by mail order in books, filmstrips and cassettes, a marketing model later adopted by Infowars.Mr. Jones got his start in broadcasting in the early 1990s with simultaneous shows on the Austin radio station KJFK and on Austin community access TV. In 1993, a siege by federal law enforcement ended in an inferno at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, killing about 80 Davidians and four law enforcement officers. Mr. Jones asserted, evidence to the contrary, that the sect and its leader, David Koresh, were a peaceful religious community marked by the government for murder. He raised $93,000 from his listeners to rebuild the compound’s church.The deed made Mr. Jones a celebrity among “patriot” militia members, including some involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. In 1995, Mr. Jones pushed bogus claims that the government plotted the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, had also expressed rage at the Branch Davidian compound’s destruction.Mr. Jones and his wife at the time, Kelly Jones, founded Infowars around 1999, when they began producing feature-length, conspiracy-themed videos that they sold by mail or gave away, urging people to pass them around and spread the word.After December 2012, when Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government pretext for draconian gun control measures, traffic to his website surged. In 2013, at a gathering in Dallas marking the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Jones met Roger J. Stone Jr., a Trump friend and adviser shunned by mainstream Republicans.Mr. Stone, who saw a valuable new constituency for Mr. Trump in Infowars’ disaffected audience, joined the show as a host and brokered Mr. Trump’s December 2015 interview with Mr. Jones. In that interview, broadcast on the Infowars website, Mr. Trump joined Mr. Jones in casting America as a nation besieged by “radical Muslims” and immigrants, and predicted he would “get along very well” with Mr. Putin. He ended by praising Mr. Jones’s “amazing reputation.”The next year Mr. Jones was a V.I.P. invitee to Mr. Trump’s speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where the Infowars broadcaster stood on the convention floor with tears streaming down his face as Mr. Trump spoke.Mr. Jones on the first day of the Republican National Convention in 2016.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe Trump era also brought Mr. Jones new scrutiny. In 2017, he dodged a lawsuit by publicly apologizing and removing from Infowars his shows promoting Pizzagate, the lie that top Democrats were trafficking children from Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria. The conspiracy theory inspired a gunman to enter the restaurant and fire a rifle inside. No one was hurt, but the episode shocked the capital and many Americans. By 2019, Mr. Jones had been barred from all major social media platforms for violating rules banning hate speech.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The potential case against Trump. More

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      Rioters Followed a Long Conspiratorial Road to the Capitol

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRioters Followed a Long Conspiratorial Road to the CapitolThe Capitol extremists and their cheerleaders did not make a giant leap to “Stop the Steal.” A pathway of conspiratorial steppingstones led them there.The Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was animated by Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJan. 27, 2021Updated 9:41 a.m. ETWhen Brendan Hunt was arrested and charged with demanding the “public execution” of Democratic leaders this month, students of American conspiracy theory could hardly be surprised.Two decades ago, Mr. Hunt, a 37-year-old sometime Shakespearean actor, had spread misinformation around the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A decade later, he falsely implicated the federal government in a cover-up of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which killed 20 first graders and six educators. He sowed conspiracy theories around the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and disseminated anti-Semitic tropes on social media. Finally he reached the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump by a vast conspiracy of power brokers in both political parties.For many of the Capitol rioters and others who believe Mr. Trump won, it was not a large leap to “Stop the Steal” from a pathway of conspiratorial steppingstones that included the “Pizzagate” claim of 2016 that Democrats were running a child sex ring in the back of a popular Washington pizza parlor, the debunked allegation that a low-level Democratic National Committee aide was murdered for leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails and many more.Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, which animated the riot on Jan. 6, have reassembled — virtually, anyway — a cast of characters that go way back. Other conspiratorial theorizers that mass shootings were false flag operations by liberals to promote gun control included Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia; the Infowars impresario Alex Jones; the fired Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy; and the retired University of Minnesota Duluth professor James Fetzer, all of whom then embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless fraud claims. “If you look at these Sandy Hook folks, it’s not like they slipped on a banana peel and believe in Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. This is an expression of a whole worldview, or an expression of personality traits,” Joe Uscinski, an assistant professor at the University of Miami and an author of the book “American Conspiracy Theories,” said in an interview. “You’re not going to change someone’s mind. And even if you did, it wouldn’t matter because you’re going to end up in a game of Whac-a-Mole.”Mr. Hunt visited Newtown, Conn., after the 2012 mass shooting, filming the fenced perimeter and the woods around the abandoned elementary school and going to the home of a man who had sheltered six children who ran from the gunman.Mr. Hunt worked as an assistant analyst in the New York Office of Court Administration’s attorney registration unit. He is the son of a retired family court judge. In December and January, he allegedly posted videos calling for violence in Washington.Brendan Hunt in a picture from his account on the video-hosting site BitChute.According to a Jan. 18 complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York, two days after the Capitol riot Mr. Hunt, who was not in Washington that day, posted a video to a video-sharing site urging violence during President Biden’s inauguration.“We were aware of Brendan Hunt back in 2013 when he was attacking Sandy Hook families,” said Lenny Pozner, whose son was killed at the school, and who founded the HONR Network, an organization of volunteers who seek the removal of harmful online content. “I’m not surprised that he became more radical.”“Once people buy into the concept that the government is an evil organization trying at every turn to harm them, it is easy for people to essentially radicalize themselves and find others who agree,” he added.Mr. Hunt has been assigned a public defender, who declined to comment on Tuesday.Sandy Hook was the first American mass shooting to ignite viral, fantastical claims that it was a phony event staged by the Obama administration as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms. Since then virtually every high-profile mass shooting has generated similar theories.Ms. Greene, elected to Congress in November, has for years circulated bogus theories, including around mass shootings. On Tuesday, CNN reported that in 2018 and 2019, Ms. Greene indicated support on her Facebook page for commenters recommending violence against Democratic leaders. In January 2019, CNN reported, Ms. Greene “liked a comment that said ‘a bullet to the head would be quicker’ to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” In response, Ms. Greene posted a statement on Twitter attributing the inflammatory content to “teams of people” who “manage my pages.”During her 2020 campaign, Politico mined her social media accounts, finding Islamophobic conspiracy theories and the false claim that George Soros, a wealthy Democratic donor, is a Nazi. After calling the 2020 presidential vote a “fraudulent, stolen election,” Ms. Greene voted on Jan. 6 with 146 other Republicans against certifying the Electoral College count that officially declared Mr. Biden the winner. The day before the Capitol riot, she referred to the Stop the Steal protests as “our 1776 moment.”In 2018 she wrote on Facebook, “The people in power stop the truth and control and stall investigations, then provide cover for the real enemies of our nation.”When a follower from Jamestown, N.Y., posted false claims about the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and said Sandy Hook was “staged,” Ms. Greene responded, “This is all true.” The post was surfaced last week by Media Matters for America, a liberal group that monitors conservative news and media posts.Ms. Greene’s spokesman, Nick Dyer, did not address her false election claims. He referred to her statement on Twitter last week acknowledging the Parkland shooting and blaming “‘gun-free’ school zones” for the massacre.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, elected to Congress in November, has for years circulated bogus theories, including around mass shootings.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Politicians and Hollywood celebrities are the first to protect themselves with armed security, as you can clearly see by the military fortress around the Capitol,” Ms. Greene wrote.Mr. Jones, another purveyor of election disinformation, spread false Sandy Hook conspiracy claims to millions through his Infowars radio and online show. He has falsely labeled most mass shootings “false flags,” and baselessly claims that the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City were government inside jobs.Last week, the Texas Supreme Court allowed three defamation cases filed by Sandy Hook survivors against Mr. Jones to move forward. The lawsuits say Mr. Jones spreads false claims in part to sell merchandise geared toward a conspiracy-minded audience preparing for the end of times.Those suits did not stop Infowars from staging a rally in Washington the night before the Capitol riot. Then on Jan. 6, Mr. Jones broadcast live near the Capitol while an Infowars cameraman filmed the rioters from inside the building, even capturing the moment when one of them, Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.“Our own cameraman followed the crowds into the Senate, and I watched them execute an unarmed woman,” Mr. Jones said.Mr. Jones brought Ali Alexander, a Stop the Steal organizer and a leading election conspiracy promoter, onto his show.Mr. Jones’s ex-wife, Kelly Morales, said she sent video of Mr. Jones’s broadcasts during the riot, most of which she said had since been removed from his website, to the F.B.I. She has been posting excerpts on her Twitter account, @realkellyjones.“Just like Sandy Hook and Pizzagate, Alex knows his actions culminate in violence and harassment,” Ms. Morales said in an interview. She and Mr. Jones are engaged in a court battle stemming from their 2015 divorce.After the Sandy Hook shooting, Mr. Jones repeatedly invited Stewart Rhodes, a founder of the far-right militia Oath Keepers, onto Infowars to discuss the massacre, which they viewed as a threat to the Second Amendment.During one appearance, Mr. Jones suggested that “the solution is to get involved in Oath Keepers.”Now federal law enforcement is investigating the group as central to the Capitol attack. Mr. Rhodes had appeared on Infowars just before the November election, vowing that his members would “stand up and protect people on Election Day” against Democrats who he claimed would be “stealing the election.”At least a half-dozen people arrested after the Capitol riot have been linked to the Oath Keepers. Those arrested include three people charged with conspiracy to commit federal crimes, after recordings emerged that suggest members of the group planned and coordinated their role in the Capitol attack.Infowars and Mr. Jones did not immediately respond to emails and text messages requesting comment.Mr. Tracy, a former journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, also questioned Sandy Hook, leading to his firing in 2015. He did not protest in Washington on Jan. 6, but he has latched onto 2020 election falsehoods.“The fake news media that have been complicit in U.S. ‘regime change’ over the past four years are now acting as the ideological agency to enforce the unfounded legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election,” he wrote on his blog.In an interview, Mr. Tracy said he also thought the Democratic nomination was stolen from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and insisted that “the truth movement” is “becoming much more mainstream.” On his blog, Mr. Tracy posts wild theories about the health risks of 5G networks, communist revolution in America and the Covid Tracking Project.Mr. Tracy contributed to the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook,” coedited by Mr. Fetzer, the retired University of Minnesota Duluth professor. Mr. Fetzer moved from Sandy Hook in 2012 to the Boston Marathon bombing a year later, helping to write another book titled “And Nobody Died in Boston, Either.” Mr. Fetzer helped found an outfit called Moon Rock Books, which published false conspiracy theories related to Sept. 11, the John F. Kennedy assassination — longtime obsessions of Mr. Fetzer’s — as well as mass shootings in Parkland, Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla.In late 2019, Mr. Pozner won a $450,000 defamation judgment against Mr. Fetzer. But he has continued to pursue other conspiracy theories, including around the 2020 election.“There actually is a deep state, and they really do not honor the election results nor the will of the people,” Mr. Fetzer wrote on his blog last week. He also posted his approval of Ms. Greene’s Parkland conspiracy theories, saying, “No member of Congress has been willing to speak the truth about it.”Chris Cameron More