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Very understandably, Alex Jones likes to downplay what he did in relation to spreading conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre, and the impact that his actions have had on the grieving community.
Because he and his lawyers refused to participate in multiple aspects of the discovery process in the civil cases brought against him, Alex lost those cases in a default judgement, thereby depriving the world of having a full accounting of his actions. Alex believes and espouses that, if he had his day in court, he would be exonerated.
I believe the opposite is true. If he had gone to court, the information he would have to address would be far more difficult for him to spin. All along, he knew he would lose the case, and a default judgement saved him from having to make a very difficult public defense of his actions.
When I say that he would lose the case, it is just cut and dry. He had defamed or inflicted emotional distress in the plaintiffs, and it could be demonstrated easily by their stories, and through his words on air.
But that stuff is easy for Alex to protect himself from. That is “free speech stuff.” Is it not his right to question high-profile events? Do you only have the right to speculate about stuff if your speculations don’t hurt anyone?
There are many games like this that Alex can play, but he was quite aware that if they were to face this issue down in court, this defense would not play for a lot of their actions.
Facilitating Harassment
Wolfgang Halbig is a person who engaged in primary and direct harassment of the victims’ loved ones in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting. He stalked grieving family members and bombarded local governments with bogus FOIA requests and other frivolous legal motions. He is the very definition of a villain, but to get into all of his actions would be outside the scope of this post.
For our purposes, what is important to understand is that Halbig was a big-time harasser, and Infowars had every reason to be fully aware of that and chose to work with him anyway.
On Feb. 25, 2015, Halbig copied an Infowars email address on a message responding to the HONR Network, a non-profit started by a victim’s parent, requesting that Halbig stop contacting them:
It may be a strange coincidence, but that very same day, one of Alex’s booking producers, Nico, emailed Halbig to request he come on the show:
This is mere hours after Halbig’s email, refusing to respect HONR Network’s request to stop contacting them. There is no way to necessarily prove that one caused the other, but the timing is interesting.
By this point, in early 2015, Nico and Infowars have no excuse to not know that Halbig is a volatile person who may not be worth associating with. For instance, here is an email from July 8, 2014:
Halbig was trying to get Infowars to help him fundraise, and get someone to cover the trial of one of his associates, Jonathan Reich, a man who made threatening phone calls to victims’ family members, as well as the state medical examiner. Nico was slightly resistant to sending people to cover Reich’s trial, so Halbig decided to get snippy and lash out about Alex getting “in trouble with his bosses.”
This wasn’t enough for Infowars to stop dealing with him though, because the Sandy Hook conspiracies were very popular with the audience, and Halbig was one of the primary figures in that space.
So, by September 2014, Halbig was back in their good graces and sending thank you emails for how much Alex has helped with their legal expenses and fundraising:
From that message, it seems clear that Alex had not personally given any money to Halbig’s cause, but the impact of hosting Halbig for interviews is clearly large.
In May 2015, Alex sent Dan Bidondi to Newtown to interview Halbig and cover a FOIA hearing. On May 7, Bidondi emailed Rob Dew to tell him that Halbig really needed money, presumably to continue his campaign of harassment against the community of Newtown:
Things escalated from here, as Halbig goes on to send a harassing email to Nico about how he needs money, on May 15, which Nico then forwarded on to Rob Dew:
This was a bit of a pattern, as Nico warned Dew about a couple days later:
Apparently harassment and lashing out works, because shortly after this, on May 26, Dew was coordinating with Halbig about an interview where they would help promote his fundraising efforts the best they could:
Halbig had made an ultimatum that Rob Dew and Infowars had every reason to know was coming from an unhinged man, but instead of acting responsibly, they decided to give in to his demands. After this interview aired, Halbig emailed Dew to pass his thanks on to David Knight, since the fundraising effort had been successful:
Rob Dew was directly complicit in fundraising to support Wolfgang Halbig’s activities, as was David Knight and Infowars/Free Speech Systems as a company.
But it is actually worse than just that.
Not only was Dew helping Halbig fundraise, he was forwarding him messages that people had sent to the Infowars Whistleblowers inbox. In the process, he was violating the anonymity of the Whistleblowers email, and potentially exposing this person to harassment from Halbig. Rob Dew is keenly aware at this point that Halbig had a tendency to harass people.
There is no excuse for this kind of behavior, unless you view Halbig not as a source who you are interviewing objectively, but instead as an ally who you are trying to support, while pretending to maintain the appearance of distance.
This is almost exactly how Dew tells Dan Bidondi to approach his next interview with Halbig:
The message is essentially, “I know you’re friends but you need to act like you’re doing a news show.” There are two goals here: pretending to be objective, and giving the appearance of greater seriousness behind Halbig’s story. There is no reason for them to take Halbig seriously, Rob and everyone at Infowars have seen his behavior firsthand.
That message coaching Bidondi how to interview Halbig was sent on July 8, 2015. Three days prior, Halbig sent this subject-only email to Nico:
The next day, Halbig sent Nico another harassing email with no body text:
Throughout this time in early July 2015, Halbig was desperately trying to spin conspiracies about the Sandy Hook choir singing at the 2013 Super Bowl. These harassing emails insulting Alex on July 5 and 6 are in response to Alex not covering this story, which Halbig had demanded on July 2:
Halbig had made this demand that it’s now or never on July 2, then didn’t get what he wanted. He lashed out and sent harassing emails to Alex’s producer Nico over the span of the next few days, and then on July 7, Rob Dew and Alex got on air and covered Halbig’s conspiracy about the Sandy Hook choir:
This strategy worked for Halbig. Infowars, at the highest levels, played into and accommodated his harassing behavior, because they wanted to report Sandy Hook as a false flag event, regardless of who they hurt in the process. There was no consideration of the way that their enabling and fundraising for Halbig could allow him to cause further trauma to a grieving community, because they didn’t care.
They knew he was an unreliable source and that he had a tendency toward harassment, but because what he was saying was convenient and profitable, all of that was ignored. They promoted his fundraising, which led to demonstrable financial assistance, and Rob Dew even forwarded presumably private emails containing “whistleblowers’” private information. They did this because they weren’t just covering a news story with an open mind, they were on Wolfgang Halbig’s team.
It is important to understand that Alex was never “just asking questions,” or “looking at both sides of a controversial issue.” This is part of the fiction he is able to tell about his past, partially thanks to his default judgement allowing much of this side of the story to be obscured.
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