As he tries to avoid having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was fake, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was forced to admit under oath Wednesday morning that the horror which left 26 people dead, including 20 children aged six and seven, was indeed real.
Testifying in a trial that will decide how much in damages Jones has to pay for his lies about Sandy Hook, the host was asked if he understood “how crazy” it was to claim no one died at the school. He claimed he was “under a lot of pressure at the time” and added:
Of course, if Jones hadn’t said such disgusting things in the first place, he wouldn’t need to take them back.
On Tuesday, parents of one of the victims testified, Mediaite reports:
Jones has already been found guilty of defamation, and the family is seeking $150 million in damages due to the threats and harassment they’ve received since Jones began telling his falsehoods about what happened at Sandy Hook.
While we already knew that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is one of the most bigoted and disgusting people currently serving in Congress, something he tweeted shortly after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, killed 21 people was so tone-deaf (and completely incorrect) that he felt a need to delete the tweet a couple of hours later.
Extremist Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) deleted a disturbing and offensive tweet Tuesday that falsely claimed the gunman who killed more than 20 people at a Texas school was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
The lawmaker wrote the message in response to a Twitter user who wondered if the shooter was a member of the far-right, “the kind of trash that” Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Gosar “travel to speak to?” before deleting their tweet.
Gosar’s conspiracy theory about the shooter was also widely disseminated on right-wing media, despite its factual inaccuracy:
Gosar, an anti-immigration hardliner who routinely cozies up to white nationalists, was apparently promoting a false claim circulating on right-wing networks. Users shared images of a trans person unrelated to the attack claiming they were the shooter.
Who needs facts when you’re trying to spread a lie? Right, Paul.
Gosar is such a sorry excuse of a human being that his own family members have urged voters in his district not to support him. They have also suggested he should be held responsible for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Now that the problem of mass shootings and gun violence are back on the front page as a result of what transpired in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, the debate has begun once again on the issue of sensible gun control.
During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, there was a great deal of talk about possibly banning assault weapons such as the one used by the Boulder shooter, strengthening background checks for gun buyers, and other reforms that have sadly been discussed thousands of times before whenever innocent people are slain by a weapon of mass murder.
But something Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said during the hearing was especially chilling, not only because it suggested just how deeply in debt Cruz is to the gun lobby, but also because it called for putting people with mental illness into prison if they are caught with a gun.
Specifically, Cruz remarked:
So now mental illness will be a crime instead of a disease? On antidepressants? You can buy a gun, but you’ll be sent to prison if you do under Cruz’s deeply flawed logic.
Also, Cruz’s comments completely ignore the real problem that exists in this country: There’s too many damn guns! Does anyone actually believe that more guns is the answer to the problem of gun violence? That’s absurd! It makes no damn sense whatsoever. But it does allow Cruz and his GOP colleagues to continually suck on the teat of big gunmakers who are only too happy to buy U.S. senators if that’s what it takes for them to remain in business. Apparently, money trumps human life when it comes to Cruz and his ilk.
If Republicans cannot rationally discuss the gun problem in this country, maybe it’s time we make them the permanent minority party.