Alex Jones Ripped by Parkland Parent After Raising Florida, Texas Shootings

Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, said that he was “not going to stop” questioning other mass shootings after being ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in a defamation lawsuit for calling the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 a hoax.

A Connecticut jury ordered Jones on Wednesday to pay the families of eight Sandy Hook victims, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the shooting, a total of $965 million after spending years falsely claiming that the shooting, which killed 20 first-graders and six school administrators, was staged by “fake actors.”

While the final damages were being read out loud in Connecticut, Jones, who has boycotted attending the trial in person since last week, livestreamed the verdict on Infowars and urged viewers to purchase products from his site to help “stand up against this travesty,” according to a clip shared to Twitter by The Recount.

Infowars founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court during his defamation trial on September 21, 2022, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jones on Wednesday was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims for repeatedly saying that the 2012 shooting was a hoax. Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images

“Literally, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years, I can appeal this stuff, we can stand up against… the billions of dollars they want,” Jones said, adding that the defamation suit is a “joke.”

Jones also said that he would not stop questioning “what really happened” at other school shootings, listing the May 24 shooting at an elementary in Uvalde, Texas, and the February 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, as examples.

“They want to scare everybody away from freedom,” Jones said. “We’re not going away, we’re not going to stop.”

Fred Guttenberg, a gun law reform advocate who lost his daughter in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, tweeted that Jones could “bring it” if he wants to question the Florida shooting that left 17 dead and others injured.

“I am sitting in the criminal phase of the murderer of my daughter in the Parkland shooting,” Guttenberg wrote. “Alex is a scum sucking low life dirt bag who deserves his place in hell.”

Jones’ comment about the shooting comes as a Florida jury decides the fate of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 14 students and three school staff members. The jury will either recommend that Cruz faces life in prison or the death penalty.

Jones has also previously speculated about the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 18-year-old shooter Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two teachers. During a May broadcast on Infowars, Jones said that the shooting was “very opportunistic” as the midterm elections were approaching.

“I don’t want to say this was staged,” Jones said during the broadcast. “But we have specifically said, with two years of our leading mass shootings, that with all the pre-programming, that mass shootings are coming, terrorists are going to attack and we have got to take the guns. Then I’m like, well I would predict a lot of mass shootings right before elections and like clockwork, it is happening. To me, it is just very opportunistic what is happening.”

It is unclear if Jones has the ability to pay the damages that were awarded to families of Sandy Hook victims, however, MSNBC senior reporter Ben Collins said that the damages were “an amount of money that [Jones] cannot make up, and he knows that.”

Newsweek reached out to Jones’ legal team for further comment.