Infowars founder Alex Jones lashed out as he testified in a tense Connecticut courtroom Thursday as part of a defamation trial that will determine how much he should pay to the relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.
The far-right conspiracy theorist and host, known for emotional outbursts on his shows, appeared frustrated at several points and said he would not make further apologies for popularizing the false claim that the shooting in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax.
“Is this a struggle session? Are we in China?” Jones asked, referring to Maoist rallies where people were publicly humiliated, after an attorney for the plaintiffs, Chris Mattei, pointed out the victims’ family members in the courtroom. “I’ve already said I’m sorry hundreds of times, and I’m done saying I’m sorry.”
The fatal shooting of 26 people, including 20 children, sustained headlines for years on Infowars and other fringe websites that propagated the baseless assertion that the victims’ family members were “crisis actors” involved in a government “false-flag operation” designed to curtail Second Amendment rights. Jones has subsequently acknowledged that the massacre was “100 percent real” and that it was irresponsible to say otherwise.
Jones was ordered in August in a separate Texas trial to pay more than $45 million in damages to parents of a Sandy Hook victim. He lost the Connecticut trial after Judge Barbara Bellis ruled in November that he was liable by default after...
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