Alex Jones is trying to have it both ways.
The Infowars founder claims that TV host Megyn Kelly and NBC News misrepresented him as a Newtown conspiracy theorist in an interview that aired Sunday night. Yet he is still promoting the claim that the massacre of 26 children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 was a hoax.
"You have a total right to question Sandy Hook," Jones told viewers on a Sunday night webcast meant to counter Kelly's show on NBC. "I've been saying since it happened I don't know if the official story was true or not. And now, if you can't prove it one way or the other, there are some anomalies."
Then he added this: "But the parents look pretty legitimate to me, and I feel sorry for 'em as a parent myself."
That last line is Jones' cover. He is no longer saying explicitly--as he has in the past--that the Newtown shooting was staged with child actors. But he continues to pump oxygen into the idea.
Jones was joined on the webcast by Steve Pieczenik, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration who, in his post-government life, became a fiction writer and, more recently, a conspiracy theorist of Jones-ian proportion. Pieczenik claims, for example, that "Seal Team 6 had nothing to do with the death of Osama bin Laden" and has said for years that there was no shooting in Newtown.
Jones wants you to believe that Kelly distorted his position on Sandy Hook. Don't be fooled. The guy who says "the parents look pretty legitimate" is still pushing the notion that they helped fabricate the mass killing of their children.
Editorial on 06/20/2017