New York Times journalist Elizabeth Williamson examines how the tragedy of a mass school shooting became fodder for conspiracy theorists in Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.
You open with a wrenching account of the last moments of the 20 children and six adults who died. Why?
The thing that's really heartbreaking is when the parents tell you the story of those terrible hours, they always ask you, "How much do you want to hear?" Because they know that it's really hard for most Americans to countenance this event. And that's kind of at the core of both what happened here and what happened after. It's such a painful event that people really didn't want to believe what happened. A lot of the first conspiracy theorists were young mothers who had children that age, and just were happy to embrace anything that would suggest to them that this hadn't happened at all. I wanted to establish the baseline truth of what happened for those conspiracy theorists who say it never happened. For the rest of us, I feel like that we owe it to these families not to look away from what happened.
What did you learn about the shooting that surprised you?
The degree to which coverage that day contributed to the material that the conspiracy theorists used for years afterward, to cast doubt on the shooting itself—just the normal mistakes that are made in the course of reporting a crime of this magnitude, rushing to try and get details out as quickly as possible. There were inevitably mistakes. And that really fueled the theorizing that came afterward.
Would the disinformation campaign have happened even without such media errors?
I think so. This was the first mass shooting to generate viral claims that it hadn't happened—that the victims and the survivors themselves were participants in fraud. This was seen by both sides in the gun debate as a watershed moment, for gun control legislation. They all felt like that the fight that was coming in Congress was going to be huge and consequential. And so there was a lot of information warfare out there, even before the theorizing began.
How soon did you become aware of the disinformation campaign?
I really learned the most about it when the first defamation case against Alex Jones was filed in mid-2018. I realized the years of torment that these families had endured, and the more I dug into it, every day was a revelation. Even now, when I talk about this book, it still amazes me how many people don't know the degree to which the families themselves were attacked by these deniers.
Given your contention that the denialism about Sandy Hook led to the denialism about the capital insurrection, do you have grounds for hope?
I do consider Sandy Hook to be a foundational story of how we got to the world of lies we live in today. But I do see cause for hope. People are looking at ways to counter the spread of misinformation, technologically, socially, and psychologically—not only journalists, academics, and policymakers, but individuals wondering, "How can I counter this among members of my own family?"
If the book has a singular purpose, it's to call attention to the purveyors of misinformation—if they can come for the parents of murdered children, they are coming for you too. I think that January 6th showed the degree to which people not only will contemplate and threaten violence in service of a conspiracy, but will actually carry it out.
