Sandy Hook, Uvalde and the Exploitation of American Paranoia

How crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones and demagogues like Donald Trump keep poisoning American hearts and minds

I just finished reading Elizabeth Williamson’s new book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, and it really has hit me hard. The book is a tour-de-force dissection of the rise of crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones of Infowars, who, along with a lesser army of self-styled debunkers, gun nuts, and freaked-out young suburban moms, decided that the 2012 massacre of 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, had to be fake, or a government plot to drive the public toward drastic gun control, or both. As Williamson notes, while Americans have a long history of skepticism bordering on conspiracism, this reaction to the Sandy Hook tragedy marks a watershed.

A 2013 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that a quarter of all Americans thought that the facts about Sandy Hook were being hidden, and an additional 11 percent were unsure. Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, tells Williamson that according to his research, as of 2020, one-fifth of all Americans believed that every school shooting was faked. And not just school shootings; Uscinski…