Movie review: The Truth vs Alex Jones

Alex Jones made a fortune from supplements sales, but Free Speech Systems has filed for bankruptcy, after several courts awarded billion sin damages to plaintiffs. Photo / HBO

The Truth vs Alex Jones, documentary, mature audiences, 121 mins, streaming on Neon.

Directed by Dan Reed

How unthinkable it would be to send your 6-year-old child off to school one apparently ordinary day, unaware it would be for the last time, discovering later in the day that your child had been shot to death, while jammed for protection by teachers into one of two classrooms’ tiny bathrooms.

Twenty children aged 6 and 7 and six staff members died at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. The gunman committed suicide at the scene.

If one of the recently bereaved parents, Robbie Parker, had not decided to be interviewed on TV, a nervous smile and a nice suit persuading influential shock jock Alex Jones that Sandy Hook was a hoax and Robbie Parker merely a method actor who’d never had a child, the next 10 years of harassment by Alex Jones himself and members of the public might not have happened. There were demands for the children’s bodies to be exhumed, verbal attacks and threats in the street, desecration of the children’s graves and more.

Lucy Mangan, writing for the Guardian in June, asked what could be worse than the massacre of children and those trying to protect them. “And yet,” she adds, “it did get worse, thanks to a right-wing bloviator with merch to sell” who had been warning about the “false-flag operation” — a fake shooting orchestrated by gun control advocates to give the left the leverage it needed to come for patriots’ weapons.

Director Dan Reed also made Leaving Neverland (2019), about Michael Jackson. In both documentaries he’s unflinching, here selecting footage of Alex Jones spitting his invective about the deep state on Texas-based media platform Infowars, owned by his company Free Speech Systems. Infowars’ website homepage asks visitors to: “Support Infowars, defeat the new world”; and to pre-order T-shirts with the slogan “Bullet Proof”, beside an image of Donald Trump with a defiant raised arm in front of a billowing American flag.

In Infowars stores, sidebars and banners advertise nutritional supplements with names like DNA Force and Mitric Boost, presumably helpful in fighting the deep state. And Alex Jones has a message there: “World War 3 can happen any second, and I want all the dumba**es in the FBI and the Secret Service and all you guys that are compartmentalised and are following orders that have been going along with this … Do you understand you’re the danger, your bosses are the danger?”

Alex Jones made a fortune from supplements sales, but Free Speech Systems has filed for bankruptcy, after several courts in various states awarded more than US$1.5 billion in damages to be paid to the bereaved families of the Sandy Hook murder victims. Alex Jones has apologised to the parents, admitting he made a mistake, but has not paid up.

Almost unbelievably, Alex Jones is still active on Infowars and still influential. According to a shocking statistic halfway through this excellent documentary, 24% of Americans, 75 million people, deny the existence of the 20 murdered children, dismiss their parents’ grief as being fake, and regard Sandy Hook as a hoax.

★★★★★