In 2012, Lenny Ponzer lost his 6-year-old son, Noah, in the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That may seem like enough suffering for a dozen lifetimes, but it wasn’t the last burden heaped on Ponzer. Soon he was getting calls from a man in Florida, an actual university professor, accusing him of being part of a “hoax” in which Ponzer was a hired actor and his son never existed. When Ponzer complained about the professor, events took an even darker turn. He began to receive death threats.
“You’re gonna die you [expletives and slurs deleted],” he heard. “… And what are you going to do about it?
“You can do absolutely nothing. … this is coming to you real soon [expletive deleted]. You going to die,” and “You [expletive deleted] look behind you, justice is coming to you real soon.”
A 57-year-old Florida woman was charged on Wednesday with making the death threats, but the conspiracy theory that fueled her hatred is still out there—most notably at sites controlled by Donald Trump’s friend and admirer, Alex Jones.
Why are fake news sites pumping up these elaborate conspiracy theories even though they put actual people at actual risk? Just ask the woman behind 'Pizzagate.'
“I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience,” she said.
Pizzagate—the insanely unbelievable story in which emails ordering pizza actually disguise a network of satanic child traffickers hidden in a series of tunnels bored beneath a D.C. strip mall—resulted in a man showing up to “investigate” with a semi-automatic rifle.
Last Sunday, less than three weeks after MacWilliams’ article was published, Edgar Welch was arrested after a rifle was discharged in the restaurant. He later said he wanted only to investigate the claims.
Pizzagate author Stefanie MacWilliams’ only concern is that her story was saddled with the term ‘fake news.’ She finds that irritating.
Of course, by the time Welch entered the picture, MacWilliams was far from the only one pushing pizzagate.
Alex Jones has a following. His radio show is carried on more than 160 stations, and he has more than 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
And he claims to have the ear of the next president of the United States. ...
He has been a chief propagator of untrue and wild claims about a satanic sex trafficking ring run by one of Hillary Clinton's top advisers out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
With people like Alex Jones on the air across the nation and interviewing the president-elect, the shadings from the Wall Street Journal’s liberal conspiracies, to Fox New’s liberals are traitors, to Alex Jones’ liberals are satanic child rapists is a simple road from bias to distortion to fiction.
After all, Ann Coulter’s 2006 book on the horrors of liberalism was titled Godless. Her 2011 book? Demons. How hard is it to make the jump from there to what Alex Jones’ 1.8 million YouTube subscribers were seeing right before the election?
“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
The “fake news” industry on the right isn’t a separate, distinct beast. Fox and Breitbart deal in everything from simply slanted coverage to outright lies, with the occasional pause at opinion masquerading as fact. That these stories threaten the lives of people in the real world seems to be of less than no concern. After all, building elaborate conspiracy theories has “really grown their audience.”