Alex Jones claims ‘psychosis’ made him lie about Sandy Hook

A perennial discussion point in Hoaxtead Research’s comments section for the past four years has been the “mad versus bad” debate: are those who promote the Hampstead SRA hoax motivated by mental illness, malevolent intent, or some combination of the two?

Yesterday we learned that U.S.-based high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has plumped for the former. He has stated in a deposition given as part of a Texas lawsuit that his false claims regarding the children and teachers murdered in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School were made while he was under the influence of a kind of “internet psychosis”.

An American Press article states:

Jones said during the deposition that he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.”

Jones blamed his mental state on “the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much, then everything begins — you don’t trust anything anymore, kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again, well, pretty soon they don’t know what reality is.”

Adam Lanza killed 26 people on 14 December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 six-year-old children. Jones has repeatedly alleged that no children died, and has claimed that the massacre was staged.

In a bizarre three-hour-long video, which was released by the law firm representing the Sandy Hook parents, Jones says he was mistaken in believing (and broadcasting over and over on his far-right conspiracy internet programme, Infowars) that no children died at the massacre. However, he apparently still believes that some sort of conspiracy was involved.

The Hartford Courant** reported that in his deposition, Jones talked about a second shooter:

“And I think there’s a lot of evidence showing there could have been a second shooter. There is the helicopter footage of the man in woods. I still have questions about Sandy Hook, but I know people that know some of the Sandy Hook families. They say, ‘No, it’s real,’ people I think are credible,” Jones said. …

“And so over the years, I’ve — you know, especially as it’s become a huge issue, I’ve had time to really retrospectively think about it. And as the whole thing matured, I’ve had a chance to believe that children died and it’s a tragedy; but there are still real anomalies in the attempt to basically keep it blacked out that generally, when you see that in government, something’s being covered up.”

So basically, Jones is claiming that he has some sort of undiagnosed “internet psychosis” which only became apparent to him once the Sandy Hook parents began launching lawsuits which could cut into the estimated $10 million per year earned by Infowars.

In the words of the Saturday Night Live Church Lady:

In the past, Jones has repeatedly denied that his false claims about the Sandy Hook school shooting have had any negative impacts on the surviving families of the victims. He repeated a variant on this claim during the deposition:

“I do not take responsibility for the entire train of things that lawyers and the media have said I’ve done. So I do not take the responsibility,” Jones said. “I do not take your indictment or your presumed conviction of me as the villain or the star of Homeland because that’s not who I am. And so I reject it.”

Last week, Sandy Hook father Jeremy Richman took his own life. His wife stated the 49-year-old had “succumbed to the grief that he could not escape” when he lost their daughter, Avielle.

And we’ve written before about Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was also murdered at Sandy Hook, and who, like the Hampstead parents, has received multiple death threats and has had to move multiple times to avoid harassment inspired by conspiracy theorists, including Jones.

Pozner is one of the parents who has launched the defamation lawsuit against Jones in Travis County, Texas, where Jones’ media empire is based.

**Readers in the EU may not be able to view the Hartford Courant article without using a VPN or proxy server.