CRISIS ACTORS
“Hitler took the guns! Stalin took the guns! Mao took the guns! Fidel Castro took the guns!” Alex Jones, red-faced, his eyeballs bulging, is screaming at Piers Morgan, a British anchor who had a show on CNN called Piers Morgan Live at the time. Jones has labeled Morgan a “redcoat.” In a rare turn of events, Morgan is dumbfounded and can’t get a word in edgewise.
“How many—” he starts, but Jones steamrolls over him.
“Hugo Chavez took the guns! And I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there begging for them to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them! Do you understand?!”
It is less than a month after 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, and shot and killed 20 first-grade children ages six and seven, six adult faculty members, and then killed himself as police arrived on the scene. Morgan had wished for a sensational debate about gun control, but after releasing Alex Jones from the genie lamp, he is having trouble shoving him back inside.
Jones had been so incensed at Morgan’s suggestion that guns should be regulated that he had started an online petition titled “Deport British Citizen Piers Morgan for Attacking 2nd Amendment.” The post read “we demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.” The petition got more than 110,000 signatures before the White House addressed it, saying that they would not be deporting Morgan.
In the decade that had passed since Richard’s arrest, Jones’ stature as a conspiracy influencer had grown. He was no longer just a fringe commentator in Austin—he had gotten the attention of the mainstream media.
THE RISE OF INFOWARS
BY THE TIME HE appeared on Morgan’s show and ten years after Richard’s Bohemian Grove raid, The Alex Jones Show had reached 120 AM and FM radio stations around the country, drawing in around six million listeners, or maybe more, depending on the source. Jones’ radio numbers are always in flux because he’ll often get dumped by stations after he receives negative attention for his controversial views.
Where InfoWars programming began to beat out rival talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, though, was online. In 2011, InfoWars had a more prominent online following than Limbaugh and Beck combined, and a 2017 report said that InfoWars got around 10 million monthly visits, making it more popular online than mainstream news sources like Newsweek.
Jones’ following grew from his “in your face” approach, as Richard had described Jones’ style. People were attracted to his ambush-style journalism, badgering politicians he ran into in the streets and public buildings of Washington, D.C. or waiting in airports. He immersed himself in protest rallies, screaming at “communists,” and provoked confrontations.
Jones also was successful as portraying himself as a truth-slinging David pitted against a six-headed mass media conglomerate Goliath. Jones was not owned by Disney, Comcast, News Corp, AT&T, Viacom, or CBS, as almost 90% of American media is.
InfoWars found revenue for its programming by taking on sponsors and selling an InfoWars line of dietary supplements, which accounts for two-thirds of Jones’ revenue, according to a study. The officially endorsed InfoWars line of products (with the logo stamped right on the packaging) includes protein bars, bone broth, Survival Shield X-2, and a male vitality pill called Alpha Power.
“While the rest of the liberal world cries and gets weaker, the Infowarriors and Patriots of the world know that it takes real vitality to push back in the fight against the globalist agenda,” the ad copy for Alpha Power reads. Saying it’ll boost energy and testosterone levels, “you’ll discover what it feels like to be an alpha male all over again!”
BuzzFeed News sent several of the InfoWars products to a lab to be tested, and in the lab’s report products were described as “safe, but ineffective,” a “waste of money,” and as having “no real basis in science.” The Survival Shield X-2 turned out to be regular iodine marked up three times the market value.
Other frequent InfoWars advertisers include makers of things like fluoride-free toothpaste, bulletproof vests, and apocalypse survival supplies. Accumulating Patriot Points leads to getting a discount on your InfoWars shopping.
Although Jones was still the leading presence of InfoWars, the media outlet expanded to include other radio shows, correspondents, video producers, and staff.
Paul Joseph Watson is Alex Jones’ second-in-command and editor-at-large of InfoWars as well as a writer and sometimes guest host of The Alex Jones Show. He also has his own InfoWars-related show on YouTube called PrisonPlanetLive, where he has over 1.6 million subscribers. Rob Dew is InfoWars’ Nightly News Director, and other shows on the platform include The David Knight Show and The War Room with Owen Shroyer.
There’s also a motley gang of on-the-street reporters who have mimicked Jones’ ambush journalism style, sticking mics in people’s confused faces to confront, harass, and shout them down in public. They began to hit the streets all over the country, like a demented news agency.
“Why were people in the audience telling people to be calm moments before the bomb went off? Was this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote Homeland Security by sticking their hands down our pants in the streets?” queried an InfoWars correspondent named “Bionic” Dan Bidondi, at a 2013 press conference with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick about updates to the Boston Marathon bombing, which had killed three people and injured hundreds. Bidondi, a former semi-pro wrestler from Rhode Island, did man-on-the-street reporting for InfoWars when not hosting his own YouTube show Truth Radio Show Dot Com.
“No,” Governor Patrick responded to Bidondi. “Next question.”
“You know what will protect women from getting raped, so they don’t have to get an abortion? A gun!” Kaitlin Bennett threw down at the University of Akron students she was confronting in 2019 in an InfoWars video segment titled “Triggered Feminist Gets Destroyed by Kaitlin Bennett.” Bennett, a.k.a. “the Kent State Gun Girl,” is famous for posing with an AR-10 and a graduation cap that read “come and take it” in her graduation photo. She hosted an open carry rally on campus, and her videos usually consist of her shoving a mic at college students to confront them with disdain on gun rights, censorship, abortion, and other topics.
Although he got out on street level himself sometimes, Jones was mostly found yelling in his Austin studio where he talks for three to four hours a day Monday through Friday and a couple more hours on Sunday.
When Jones needed a break, he’d call in guest hosts like author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist promoter and men’s rights activist, known for inflammatory comments on rape, like the tweet he sent commenting on an article that read “A whore will let her friend ruin your life with a false rape case. So why should I care when women get raped?” and blog posts like “When in Doubt, Whip it Out.”
During the 2008 election cycle, Jones’ passionate hatred for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats in general, gained him further fame and audience from people with a like mind. Jones is responsible for circulating the popular protest image of Obama wearing makeup similar to Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight.
Jones also produced a popular anti-Obama documentary titled The Obama Deception in 2009 which propagated that Obama was conspiring to help orchestrate a one-world government. The film was cited as one of the inspirations for Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, who pulled up to the White House on November 11, 2011, and fired several rounds at the White House with an assault rifle before speeding away from the scene. He was caught at a Pennsylvania hotel five days later and said he thought Obama was the Antichrist. His friend, who had sold him the AK-47 used in the shooting, said the two had watched The Obama Deception together. InfoWars, true to form, said the mentally ill Ortega was a “plant” or possibly even a “Mossad agent.”
Hillary Clinton was just as bad, if not worse, Jones told his listeners. His rants often included an angle that Obama and Hillary were literally practicing black magick or possessed by demons.
“I mean this woman is dangerous, ladies and gentlemen, I’m telling you. She’s a demon! This is biblical. She’s going to launch a nuclear war!… Hillary’s into like creepy, weird, sick stuff, man. Imagine how bad she smells. I’m told her and Obama just stink, stink stink stink. You can’t wash that evil off, man. There’s a rotten smell around Hillary. I’m not kidding, people say, they say—folks, I’ve been told by hired folks, they say ‘listen, Obama and Hillary both smell like sulfur’ …I’ve talked to people that are in protective details, that they’ve scared them, they say ‘listen, she’s a frickin’ demon, and she stinks, and so does Obama.’ And I go ‘like what?’ ‘Sulfur.’”
And, like many conspiracy theorists, Jones often targets Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist and hedge fund billionaire George Soros as the ultimate liberal boogeyman. He’s accused of being a Democratic puppetmaster, as well as secretly bankrolling everything from the Occupy Wall Street movement, to Black Lives Matter, gun control activists, and the Colin Kaepernick kneeling protests. If something is deemed liberal and insidious, the phantom of Soros is sure to be lurking somewhere nearby.
Jones has called Soros “fundamentally evil,” with a 2016 InfoWars video titled “George Soros is About to Overthrow the US.”
Soros was also a primary target of Glenn Beck, the conspiracy author and former FOX News personality, who now runs his own media site, TheBlaze, a lite version of InfoWars. Beck dedicated two entire 2010 episodes of his FOX News show to Soros conspiracies, which he laid out with the help of three chalkboards and literal marionette puppets to explain the intricate conspiracy web to viewers. Beck continues to accuse Soros of funding everything from communist organizations to migrant caravans.
When he wasn’t talking about his list of Democrat enemies, Jones would scream for attention any way he could get it. One of Jones’ most famous over-the-top moments occurred when he flew off the handle while talking about a potential “gay bomb” of chemicals being added to the water supply, perhaps referencing a study by UC Berkeley that showed atrazine from pesticides in water supplies caused frogs to gender-switch.
“I don’t like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin’ frogs gay!” he yelled, red-faced, then pounded his desk with a stack of papers. “Do you understand that?! I’m sick of this crap! I’m sick of social engineering! It’s not funny!”
But what was going to get Jones more mainstream news attention than anything was his promotion of the “crisis actors” theory.
Up until this point, I had viewed conspiracy as amusing, like the moon landing hoax, or sometimes interesting, like the JFK assassination theories. I enjoyed learning about these ideas, even if there was usually no way I would believe it. The spreading of the sickening “crisis actors” theory changed all that for me.
LIKE MANY CONSPIRACIES, THERE’S some grain of truth to be found in the crisis actors theory insomuch as “crisis actors” do exist. They’re hired by companies like CrisisCast who set up scenarios for law enforcement to work through as a training program. These actors might set up a scene of a terrorist hostage situation in a closed-off section of an airport so law enforcement can get firsthand experience learning how to deal with a panicked group of people, mass casualties, and active shooters. Somehow this spun into a wild theory that crisis actors are used to stage horrifying hoaxes of mass shootings.
As these shootings became an all too regular occurrence, the theory began to circulate that the government staged the shooting events to cause a catalyst that will lead to the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. The victims are fabrications, and the grieving loved ones seen in media are just actors playing a role. The supposed evidence is that in several cases the same “actor” appears to play different grieving people in various tragedies because they have a similar appearance.
Susan Orfanos, for example, lost her son, U.S. Navy vet Telemachus Orfanos in a mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, one of 12 people killed at the Borderline Bar & Grill on November 7, 2018. He had escaped the Las Vegas shooting at the Harvest Music Fest a little over a year earlier, on October 1, 2017.
“I don’t want thoughts. I don’t want prayers. I want gun control,” Orfanos told reporters about losing her son. But soon a meme was circulating among conspiracy theorists that showed a picture from the interview paired up with two other photos. “Just so you know, not only was she a mom of the California and Orlando shootings, she was a victim of the Las Vegas shooting, too!!” the meme post shared, adding three laughing emoticons with tears in their eyes.
The other two photos were not of Orfanos, but of Christine Leinonen, who lost her son in the 2016 Pulse Club shooting in Orlando, and Jan Lambourne, who survived the Las Vegas shooting with a gunshot to the abdomen. All three women resemble each other insomuch as they are all Caucasian women with glasses and somewhat in the same age range, and theorists said it was the same person wearing different wigs and glasses. Soon the juxtaposed photos were rapidly being shared via Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Similar examples were picked up from the vast database of people responding to different shootings. A somewhat similar grieving brunette younger woman was found in footage from the Sandy Hook and Aurora shootings as well as the Boston bombings.
In other variations of the mass shooting hoax theories, conspiracists say that the shootings did happen but were a type of “false flag” event set up by the Deep State, who got a shooter to do their bidding through a “Manchurian Candidate” style of brainwashing program.
That’s what Richard McCaslin believes happened at the Aurora, Colorado shooting on July 20, 2012, when James Eagan Holmes, heavily armed and wearing ballistic gear, walked into a movie theater and killed 12 people. For a period of a few years, I knew I could count on a message from Richard whenever a large-scale shooting or event happened. He usually didn’t take time to say hi but jumped straight into the conspiracy. Sure enough, later the same day Aurora happened, I got a message from Richard with his thoughts.
Tea, This shooting has CIA / MK Ultra / Project Monarch written all over it! I haven’t heard all the details, but this guy was waayy too equipped and prepared just to be some psychotic fanboy. I don’t buy the “lone wolf” scenario either. Somebody in that theater had to open the emergency exit for him because you can’t open them from the outside. HLN reported that a few people saw someone (Holmes’ handler?) answer a cellphone call during the movie, get up and leave through the emergency exit. Keep in mind that Columbine isn’t that far away and that region of the country is a major center for the military-industrial complex. Bottom line… this psy-op was another attempt by the Establishment to scare the American people into giving up their 2nd Amendment rights!
Richard ended up driving to Colorado to protest the “false flag” outside the theater where the shooting had happened. From Aurora and the other 15 mass shootings of 2012 to the 2017 Texas Sutherland Spring First Baptist Church shooting where 26 people died, most mass shootings have a conspiracy attached to them. But the favorite targets for the crisis actor theory have been Sandy Hook and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, another school shooting where 17 people died. The teenage Parkland survivors went on to make appearances at rallies and in the media, pleading for gun control legislation. One of the most frequent Parkland spokespersons, David Hogg, became a favorite target for the theory as he was the son of a retired FBI agent. Hogg was soon as reviled a liberal name as Clinton, Obama, and Soros (and later Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad”). His family began to receive death threats from conspiracy theorists.
After his appearance on Piers Morgan’s show, Jones propagated the crisis actors theory several times on his show, specifically related to Sandy Hook and Parkland.
“Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured,” Jones told a caller on his show in January 2015. “I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”
IN OCTOBER 2016 ROBBIE PARKER was walking in Seattle to a hotel to meet members of his family. Parker and his wife had lost their six-year-old daughter, Emilie, at Sandy Hook. A middle-aged man in khakis and a sport coat approached him and asked if his child had died in the shooting. When Parker answered that he had lost his daughter, the man unleashed a string of obscenities at him, then followed him for blocks “jabbering in my ear,” Parker said in an interview.
Parker had been a favorite target because, still grieving the death of his daughter, he let out a nervous laugh before he broke down in a news interview shortly after the shooting. A lot of crisis actor theories are built about perceived behavior from grieving people. The loved ones of the victims are not sad enough or too sad or seem like they’re reading a script, conspiracy theorists say.
“He’s laughing, and then he basically goes over and starts breaking down and crying,” Alex Jones said on his show, imitating fake crying. “This needs to be investigated. They’re clearly using this to go after our guns!”
Parker was not the only parent to receive harassment. Sandy Hookers6 are among the most unhinged and frightening conspiracy theorists out there, and they’ve stalked and harassed the Sandy Hook parents through phone calls, e-mails, and in-person confrontations.
Shortly after the shooting, Sandy Hookers began creating media on the event, including self-published books and YouTube video “documentaries,” and discussed their theories on sites like 4chan.
InfoWars gave the arguments a consistent microphone. InfoWars correspondent Dan Bidondi traveled to confront lawyers of the family and family members in Newtown, in front of a courthouse.
“Yer a buncha frauds, a buncha criminals! Scumbags! Sandy Hook was an inside job!” Bidondi screamed at them.
Other popular Hooker media produced included a book edited by Jim Fetzer and Mike Palecek titled Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, published by Moon Rock Books. The company went on to publish a series of similarly titled books like And Nobody Died in Boston, either, as well as The Parkland Puzzle: How the pieces fit together, and Political Theater in Charlottesville. Fetzer was an InfoWars guest.
Another InfoWars guest, Peter Klein, produced documentaries that worked on the theory that Sandy Hook was staged, We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook in 2014 and a 2015 follow-up titled The Life of Adam, which studied Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza.
But the most dogged Sandy Hooker was Wolfgang Halbig, who made his pursuit of Sandy Hook conspiracies a full-time hobby.
“What’s your bottom line, what do you think really happened at Sandy Hook?” Jones asked Halbig in an InfoWars video.
“I can tell you children did not die, teachers did not die on December 14, 2012. It just could not have happened,” Halbig responded with a smirk.
Halbig, who was briefly a Florida State Trooper, a part-time employee at U.S. Customs, and a retired school security director (he also tried to sell his school system on a phony bomb detection device called the Quatro Tracker), harassed families and lobbied the Connecticut government with repeated information requests. In one video confrontation, he approaches the Newtown Volunteer Fire Department and antagonizes them about their response to Sandy Hook until a firefighter pushes him, at which point Halbig calls 911 to report an assault.
Halbig, via InfoWars, promoted many of the Sandy Hook conspiracies—that the school had allegedly been abandoned for years and was used as a movie set; that Porta-Potties, sent for because of the mass of grieving people and media who had assembled at the closed-off school, had arrived too quickly, proving it had been premeditated. A theory that Jones helped spread, swirling his hand around in a circle, suggested that the Sandy Hook crisis actors were being led around in circles through the building with their hands up, over and over. What the video really shows is adults being evacuated at a different structure and being led outside from the back door to the front of the building.
One of the strangest conspiracies alleged that CNN host Anderson Cooper was not broadcasting live from one of the Sandy Hook funerals, but was recording in front of a green screen because at one point the tip of his nose seems to disappear, evidence that theorists said was part of a green-screen glitch. Why Anderson needed to fake the news report in a studio produces more questions than answers.
Fundraising efforts by Halbig to file more Freedom of Information Act costs and trips to Newtown to investigate were publicized on InfoWars shows.
In a 2015 e-mail, Halbig asked InfoWars Nightly News Director Rob Dew to thank InfoWars host David Knight for an interview, saying the publicity “has raised $1,545.00 since last night.”
All of this Sandy Hooker media inspired InfoWars fans to engage with the Sandy Hook families themselves.
In November 2015, a Sandy Hooker named Matthew Mills was arrested for harassing the family of Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old Sandy Hook teacher that had died trying to protect the children in her classroom. Mills entered the Vicki Soto 5K run in Stratford, Connecticut, a charity event organized by Soto’s family. After the run, he confronted Soto’s younger sister Jillian about a photo that had circulated online of the Soto sisters he believed was “photoshopped.” Mills said he considered himself a “journalist.” Soto asked Mills to leave her alone, but he kept pushing the photo toward her, telling her that her sister didn’t exist until the police arrived.
In the photo, Mills explained after his arrest, “people say the rocks don’t match up, the shadows don’t match up.” The prior year Mills had been arrested for grabbing the microphone away from Seattle Seahawks linebacker Malcolm Smith during a Super Bowl press conference and saying “Investigate 9/11. 9/11 was perpetuated by people in our own government.”
Mills pled guilty via Alford plea procedure and was sentenced to a one-year sentence followed by a two-year probation, and ordered not to have further contact with the Soto family.
In December 2016, a 57-year-old Tampa, Florida woman named Lucy Richards threatened Lenny Pozner, whose six-year-old son, Noah, had died at Sandy Hook. Richards harassed Pozner with multiple voicemail messages and e-mails, including a text that read “you gonna die, death is coming to you real soon” and “LOOK BEHIND YOU IT IS DEATH.”
Richards, a devoted follower of InfoWars, had gotten Pozner’s e-mail from Alex Jones after he shared it on his show, also showing a map where Pozner’s post office box was located.
Pozner had attracted more attention than most Sandy Hook families because he was vocally challenging those who were spreading the lies about the tragedy. Pozner has said that he had been interested in conspiracy theory himself, and had even listened to The Alex Jones Show after dropping his kids off at school, but for him entertaining the ideas were the same as “watching a good science-fiction movie,” as New York magazine reports.
Perhaps because of this, “he decided the best way to quell the controversy and shut down the conspiracy theorists was to make himself personally available on social media, to answer people’s questions, and provide proof of Noah’s existence,” a statement reads on the website for HONR, a nonprofit Pozner founded to “end the continued harassment and intentional torment of the victims’ families” of Sandy Hook and other mass-casualty events.
Pozner posted copies of Noah’s birth announcement, report cards, autopsy reports, and death certificate, but if anything, this added fuel to the fire. Hookers created social media groups dedicated to stalking the Pozners, posting Social Security and credit information, and creepy videos of their house and Noah’s grave. Eventually conspiracy rhetoric and threats grew so great that Pozner ended up moving over and over—seven times in five years—as Sandy Hookers found out where he and his family lived and continued to harass them.
Richards went to trial in June 2017 and pled guilty. As part of a plea deal, some of the charges against Richards were dropped, and she was sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of house arrest, followed by three years of supervised release. During this period she was told that she would need to record her computer activity, and part of her sentence was that she was to “cease consuming InfoWars programming.”
Another of the Sandy Hook parents, Jeremy Richman, who had lost his daughter Avielle at Sandy Hook, found himself harassed after Wolfgang Halbig had promoted a particularly disgusting conspiracy that Avielle was still alive and wasn’t even Richman’s daughter.
Like Pozner and other Sandy Hook parents, Richman, a neuroscientist, had created an organization. He had hoped that the Avielle Foundation could do some good in the world, honor the memory of his daughter, and help him cope with her loss. The Avielle Foundation’s mission is “to prevent violence and build compassion through neuroscience research, community engagement, and education.”
Halbig’s website, SandyHookJustice.com, accused Richman and Avielle’s mother, Jennifer Hensel, of trying to “deceive and defraud the American public and collect donations for The Avielle Foundation, claiming she is dead, when in reality, she is alive and was never their daughter.” Halbig’s evidence was photos that allegedly showed Avielle (or someone that looked like her) alive and well.
But despite his efforts with the foundation, Jeremy’s heart was broken, and the grief was too much. In March 2019, he committed suicide.
For the time being, the remaining Sandy Hook parents were stuck in Hell—they had not only lost their young children in a massacre, but they were also being bombarded by conspiracy theorists accusing them of faking the tragedy as the conspiracy continued to spread on the Internet.
Some small retribution for the families would be arriving soon.
6 They prefer to call themselves “Sandy Hook Investigators” or “Sandy Hook Truthers,” but this is the term I’m using.