thank you for being here. my name is dan solomon. albee's speaking with elizabeth williamson who wrote the book sandy hook and if you would like

to get copy of the book after this, they're available at the at the ten if you buy it here, a portion of the sale goes to support the book festival as well. book people, the local bookstore here in austin and we're going to talk about sandy hook. and i want to start by talking about the book called sandy hook, but you're reading it expecting that you're going to get a blow by blow of happened at the shooting. you're not going to find that. can you talk a little bit about what the book really explores? yeah, absolutely. so can can you all hear me more like yell? right. okay. okay. so sandy hook, it's called sandy hook in american tragedy in the battle for truth. and it really is about is that battle for truth that happened in the aftermath of the december 14, 2012 shooting that we all know well. and, you know, broke hearts as a

nation after the shooting, you know, it became apparent that there was a group of individuals, particularly, you know, since here we are in august, you know, home of alex jones and infowars, hours after, the shooting began to question whether it even occurred and we're saying that it was a so-called false flag operation and a faked event by the government as a pretext for gun control. so what happened in the, you know, the intervening years that people who believed that the victims families were complicit in this so-called government plot torment outed them online. they followed them on the street they confronted them. they threatened lives. they looked in their windows, dug through their trash. and you know what? what was, you know, the

overarching outrage here was obviously that they them of planning and executing in some cases their own loved ones deaths. of course, this is totally and, completely false. but it became a foundational story in how disinformation and false narratives have a foothold in our society. over the decades since sandy hook, you know, here we are at this in time. we are barely a month away from the ten year anniversary of the shooting and seeing, you know, in the run up to a midterm election, seen pretty pivotal by most people, you are seeing these sort of lies and false narratives proliferate online. you know, most recently after, you know, when you talk about shootings, after you've all day

a lot of times this was a individuals today and this has been borne out by studies after study today nearly 20% of americans believe that every high profile mass shooting was staged by the government. this was true after sandy hook. and what i do in the book is follow this line where. you talk about first, this happened with sandy hook, then most high profile mass shootings, then pizzagate, then charlottesville, the great replacement theory that ignited the violence in charlottesville, then coronavirus myths. finally, the 2020 presidential election conspiracies that brought a mob to the capitol on january sixth. i follow this through line and austin'sy own alex jones played a role every single one of these occurrences fueling

this sort of flames of conspiracy and and igniting a kind of movement of conspiracy and in which have shown themselves more and more willing to defend these false beliefs with confrontation and with violence. and that is kind of where we find ourselves here, you know, a week from less than a week from midterm election and two years from another election and all these things come together, the person who first convinced me of this, you know, and helped me to understand much of a foundational story. sandy hook was in the development of our conspiracy culture was pozner whose son noah was the youngest sandy hook victim. he had a tech background he knew how social media the spread of these myths he understood algorithms that drive more and of this content to people who are conspiracy minded.

and he also knew conspiracy because he was interested these theories himself at one time and had listened to jones's infowars show, you know, and then he kind made it his not kind of he made his life's work in the aftermath the shooting to reclaim his son's legacy from people who were lying about it and to battle against these conspiracy theorists, not around sandy hook and mass shootings, but really around many of these events and many different victims. help me to convince, you know, help me, you know, in researching this, that this wasn't targeting vulnerable people like the sandy hook families, but really it was beginning to erode democracy. and so that is the point that the book makes so over the summer something happened a couple of blocks here where alex jones was held accountable in a courtroom for what he had said

specifically about the sandy hook families, specifically about about one family in particular in austin. then again last month in connecticut, several families also sued, won a large verdict against him. you were at both of those trials. what do you remember most, what happened in the courtroom during those trials? so, you know, trace, you know, through the stories of three families, as you know, lenny pozner, who i mentioned, robbie and alissa parker, who live out in the northwest and scarlett lewis and neil heslin, who sued alex jones and had trial here in austin this summer against him. i trace their battle to fight back against him, but also fight back against this phenomenon in general. and to warn the rest of us that, you know, this is happening in communities across the united

states and to individuals of all walks of life and actually to us as nation in general, in the political sphere. so the first trial was against jones, so there were four defamation suits filed by the families of ten sandy hook victims against alex jones and infowars. they sued him for defamation mid 2018 and these cases made their way slowly forward with him sort of stonewalling. and dan knows this, he's covered this as well, you know. jones stonewalling every step of the way, refusing to submit or, you know, refusing to give up court ordered documents, financial records testimony, again ordered by judges in these cases. so three of the cases were filed here in austin and one big one in connecticut, which just had resolution a couple of weeks. and that was a that was

gigantic. that was the families of eight sandy hook victims plus fbi agent who is implicated. these false theories. they won a $965 million judgment against alex jones, connecticut, where the shooting occurred. but the proof to that was the trial that know both dan and i covered dan texas monthly and myself for the new york times and because i had written this book, the this was scarlet lewis and, neil heslin, whose son, jesse died at sandy hook and there's there are two cases where combined into one and what was really special that was not only that they were suing him in the place where infowars. is based, but that through an accident of timing, scarlet lewis and again, we were both there and we were just talking about how extraordinary cory this was she was giving her testimony. so she on the stand and she was

supposed to end before lunch and then in the afternoon, jones was going to come in and testify in his own defense. he avoided mostly coming to court and families, you have to understand that this had been going on since 2018. he late last year lost all of these cases by default. he stonewalled and refused to surrender these documents. so that meant that these jurors were instructed only to decide how much he must pay the sandy hook in damages. so this was a damages trial that happened here in austin in the summer. scarlett in she testified she hadn't finished by lunch so. jones comes rolling up in his motorcade with his bodyguards fleeing in set the journalists on his way into courthouse just over here on guadalupe and comes in sits down at the defense table. he's going to have the floor to himself off. and scarlett hadn't finished yet

and so for 90 minutes this grieving mom and i'm i get a little emotional when i about this because to witness was really one of we talked about this one of our great privileges journalists to see this mom address jones directly he sat there literally sweaty threw his shirt at the defense table saying you are responsible for this pain that we have experienced for the last years. for people confronting, us on the street, my jesse was real. i a real mother. you are a how can you do this? how can you come up with these theories and contribute to so much torment and that these families had been in for the last ten years and he didn't have an answer for and and she

pointed out the broad truth here that truth is so important as a bedrock of our society and she said and we are more than we have ever been and you are responsible for some of this and it was so power fault and it went on for 90 minutes. so this was an opportunity that the sandy hook families had been waiting for. lo these four years since they filed the cases but really for the decade since began to happen to them and they and it was just a cinematic in how powerful it was and and you know and in the message that had for them so scarlet was the only one who got to confront him. i'm curious to what extent do you think that one person being able to get this moment, get accountability for him, whether it's through direct

confrontation or if the verdict gone differently in some of these cases? to what extent among the families is one person's justice? everyone's to to a great extent. so i just you know, we just concluded the case in connecticut that lasted a month family after family came forward and testified as to what they endured at the hands of conspiracy theorists, you know people sending them photos, murdered children saying your kids didn't die. so maybe you'd like to what a real dead child looks like. people demanding that they exhume the children's bodies and prove to the world. and i'm quoting an email here prove to the world you lost your son. this kind of torment but jones was gone for a lot of that. and the reason he wasn't there, i am firmly convinced, is because of that confrontation here in austin with scarlett,

where she explained this and as this was happening, i was telling dan before the program, as this was happening, other family members were texting me and saying, go, scarlett, you know, it was just so powerful for them to have one of their, you know, unhappy fraternity confronting him directly and telling him to his face what he had cause. and let's not forget, this is in service of profit. alex jones makes more than $50 million a year selling diet, doomsday prepper merchandise. this, you know, quack to people who share conspiracy sort of mindset. he makes a lot of money doing this and what the families were able to show is that when he spoke about sandy hook his audience and his sales were surging so he knew this he was tracking it.

he spoke about it more so that people would tune in. they would get enraged about this and that they would buy his products. he hawks constantly on infowars. those of you who have listened to him or seen him online so, it was yeah it it was a real moral victory and while it will probably be years before these families see this money by the way, the judgment here in in austin was for $50 million for jesse lewis. his parents, scarlett and neil heslin. jesse's the moral victory was really what they were seeking. and moreover, the warning, you know, sandy hook and these conspiracy were a portent of we have all endured in years since, you know, the conspiracy theories that are undermining you know individual sense of safety and also you know are our, our democracy. so in order to report this book

you had to build relationships trust based relationships with these people who are grieving, who have been had their names besmirched many times by many people. how do you build those relationships and what are those relationships like now with the people who trusted you? tell their stories? so i had a pretty good idea because, you know, again, i said lenny pozner was really at the center of this story. he has a nonprofit called the honor network, which is composed volunteers who nothing but try to convince social media platforms who are not cooperative. by the way, by and large, to take this material down. you know, there were thousands, thousands of youtube videos and websites and facebook groups devoted to spreading this conspiracy see beyond alex jones's show. and there were a lot of, you know, lower conspiracy theorists who had an online presence who became his sort of content providers on infowars.

so i knew that i wanted to, you know, he, he really schooled me and, you know how this came about, how he'd been fighting it up to the point where they filed the lawsuit so you know, i just listened to his story what he had to share and you know how he could educate me and that was, you know, that was sort of first family. he and veronique de la rosa, who is noah's mom. so they're one family. and then robbie, i got to know him. you know, when those lawsuits filed, he was very reluctant to confront the hoaxers. he worried about his surviving children's safety, his family's safety. and he sort of represented that group that, you know, was really reluctant take this on, because they were afraid and worried. and they sort of adhered to that philosophy that, you know, if

you feed the trolls, maybe they'll go away. and then scarlett and neal were sort of the third couple in the book, you know, that the third central characters and, they were they were kind of in league with lenny in sort of how to sue alex jones. so they were kind of a natural for that. so how do people in sandy hook feel when a reporter comes into town now really protective in the aftermath south of the shooting, there was unbelievable amount of media attention and a real onslaught in this town of 25,000 people and. and because this was such a horrific crime and because it involved, you know, 21st graders and six educators in one small school, the pressure talk and to participate in interviews was really intense. and what happened was, you know,

part of what happened was sort of unintended consequence was, you know, officials in the town wanted to shield the families from too much information, something that might harm them or hurt them. and that ended up fueling some of these conspiracy theories because they were saying, well, why aren't they releasing all of the crime scene photos or why aren't they releasing autopsy reports? and it was to protect families. but that, too, the conspiracy theories this sort of symptomatic of kind of cover up how do you avoid poking the bear that is the conspiracy community and making sure that people aren't putting themselves back in the crosshairs is when you tell a story like this that was really a worry by some of the family members and it's actually an ongoing debate that we have inside the new york times. how do you cover, you know, the trial of, you know, someone like alex jones who this point is an

adjudicated without giving the megaphone down to him anew. you know and having people, you know, say, oh, you know, wake up people who may have even known about this and you have him draw new followers. and, you know, it's important to note that the aftermath of these judge against him, he's raising even more money and selling even more products because people feel like they believe his claim, you know, his right to free speech is under attack and. actually, he had the opportunity to use free speech as his defense, but he squandered that he lost that right. because he refused to cooperate in the discovery process. so he had to judgments entered against him. but he tries to say that is a free speech case when in fact he didn't want to defend himself on those grounds. so lost. but then it became, you know, as

the texas lawyers put it here in austin, you know, speech is free, but you pay for. and so is so you had to write a book about this, which involves telling a story, crafting a narrative, given how much disinformation has been, how do you approach telling story about this, that that that provides some baseline truth around what actually happened and what means. yeah. so this is an thing, you know, i'm sure in this audience are a lot of folks who are saying, well, you know, here i am listening. i don't know that i can read this book. you know, i'm not sure i can cover you know, i'm not sure i can read about this horrific tragedy, which really, you know, heart wrenching, hard to to digest it because we all, you know, lived through it to one degree or another. but i felt like it was important to establish baseline truth of what happened and to do that

through official. because this book is about asserting the truth of, you know, not only that shooting, but all the false narratives that followed in the decades since. so i told it through the police reports that were filed, bill carillo, who is a connecticut state police sergeant, who is one of the first into the school, and i put whole account in the prolog so the thought was that if there are people who really don't want to read about the shooting itself, that material is there. but it's beginning with chapter one we go through that the family experience of that day, but also the aftermath and then just follow the chronology when these theories began to sort enter their consciousness that, there were people out there denying that this happened and who were, you know, beginning to to stalk and contact them and to face their social media pages.

so, yeah, i started just sort of establishing what happened, but then this really is book is really about the secondary trauma that occurred too. you know, these families when people denying their loss and them in it. so you kind of describe sandy hook and the and the movement to spread disinformation around it kind of patient zero of our current environment what do you think it means when we have these huge courtroom verdicts and judgments saying that this is the consequence of of spreading that disinformation. so i think it will dissuade maybe the next would be alex jones because he will pay eventually it's going to be a while with appeals and he's filed bankruptcy you know his parent company he's declared that they're bankrupt the families think otherwise they've

engaged asset tracers they're going to find out where he's putting money they think he's hiding it so this will all go on for very time but i think it does have a salutary effect. people who want to build business around these kinds lies, which is what he's done. and, you know, we want to hear from people here in, austin, because many of you know, alex jones, in a way that few other do because he's from here, he's been a phenomenon here since. the nineties he was not always as dark as he is now. but, you know, are people that i think will be dissuade aided by the size of these judgments. but i think what's important to remember and i do this in sandy hook is that people don't adhere to these theories. they don't embrace them for of fact or even because necessarily believe them there is a sense of social belonging and a new

identity that comes from this. you know, people find each other online conspiracy. we all have one in the family, right. you know, it's that person that you at the family reunion or the or you know, at thanksgiving. and they want to tell you their views about know the jfk shooting or coronavirus or what have you. they were often isolated. but social media allows to find each other. and this travels so swiftly and reaches so many like minded that the people who embrace theories find an entire sort of social gathering around. and so that is one of the reasons that they're really reluctant to give them up. once someone really embraces one of these, it's very hard to talk them out of it because they're getting something else out of it. and in book i trace the experiences. a couple of conspiracy theorists who are really among the most

pernicious hoaxers and you know, they often have trauma in their own background, so they're sort of lonely their lives haven't turned out. maybe the way they had hoped and reinventing themselves by becoming online researcher or citizen journalists. you know i there's a woman tulsa oklahoma at a house cleaning she contributed a chapter to a book called nobody died at sandy hook nice subtle title there she you know all of a sudden then was an author and you know she was a researcher you know people were you know the country were repeating the theories that she up with and her particular theory that no one cleaned up the school after shooting because she had come from this cleaning business that she had founded. that, of course, wasn't true. you know, that was actually part of the record you could see who did the cleanup of sandy hook after the shooting. you know who performed that

horrific but she didn't care about the facts it made her an authority and you know those of you who might be battling this in your own families you're probably you know encountering that you know it's someone who just doesn't want to give this up because they have built an identity and and and a group of friends around this, you know, they've sort of made it their life's work in a strange. so we've got about 20 minutes left and wanted to open up the floor to questions now. so if anyone has any questions let's hear them. yes yes yes ma'am. confused about it's just alex jones. of course it's the hundreds people who are conspiracy theories are harassing and targeting these families. most of them seem to operate with impunity. is it that we don't have the to prosecute them?

do the laws themselves need to be changed so that these people are prosecuted, that they stop harassing these families? it's a tricky question because, you know, a journalist, i'm very you know, keen on our free speech laws. right it's not illegal to express these views. you know, you can, as alex jones does right, take a bullhorn and stand on the street and broadcast this where it does become illegal. that's the whole thing about lies. you pay for speech is free but lies you pay is when you are defaming you're naming names saying people either murdered their own children or faked their loved ones. deaths in order to profit, which was what was at the core of this. so that is prosecutable in the alex jones case shows us that but but the rest of it no and you social media companies are you can't go after social company for this either because

they are you protected by something called section 30 which treats them as the platform over which this material travels. so they're not liable for the false, you know, for public showing like the new york times would be false information. someone sue us for that, putting it in the paper, but they're treated differently by the law and that's why there is so much of this material online and so little, you know, actual consequences for people who spread it and for the platforms themselves facebook google with its youtube or twitter. yes sir i'm so so if i if i if you feel the need to make a make me have a clear the one that's needs to come more uncensored is can you speak a little more loudly please. sorry. how can you.

determine for donald and alex jones when there's many american that ask that that want them to be arrested. that want how can you determine the this the the the the outcome of coming together are these american people that want these two guys arrested. how can you determine the outcome or how can you like come to determine that outcome? how can we accomplish when we really battle for the truth, when we you know, get the truth out there. but it's not. coming together and i'm not talking about people. i'm just talking about the truth, justice, stuff that to put a handcuff on a person. i think you know, the goal of

the book was really to sort of connect some dots. and i hate to use that because. that's a term that a lot of conspiracy theorists use. but to sort of follow throughline of, you know, all of these have common roots and there there has been and you know, i didn't cover this but alex jones famously put donald trump on his show in late 2015. and that was because roger stone, who is a trump adviser and had been on infowars and knew jones and they were associate it's identified the constituent see the tens of millions of people who listen to alex jones's show on infowars and believe these theories as a very important constituency donald trump who was running at the time in a very crowded republican primary field most republican candidates this has

been out there but they would not countenance these individual or try to appeal to them. and donald trump broke that mold. he's conspiracy minded himself. he understood them and he was willing to cater to them and and make part of his constituency. and that arguably is what put him over the top. so i try to just illuminate how those pieces all fit together. yes, ma'am. so it seems to me what what i'm hearing is the only that we could stop any of this insanity is lawsuits. because or do we change the laws on how social platforms are treated? what's going to stop? because it clearly now with the purchase of twitter, it's really going to spin even more. what do we do? it's a great question. so yes, and court's an imperfect solution, as we've seen, but definitely one, you know,

recourse source that people have particular i mean, now we've see the dominion voting, you know, people suing dominion voting, suing fox news and some of these far right outlets for spreading lies that, you know, darwinian voting machines were part of the, you know, stealing the 20, 20 election. and those cases are serious and they've passed some major hurdles and they are moving forward. so that is a really tool in the toolbox. but part of it is understanding how these things work, why people embrace them, why they don't give them. and there's a lot of interesting work being done on trying to identify people online who conspiracy minded and, sort of inoculate them against this kind of material. but when they encounter it online, you know, try and show how the sausage is made so that people it a little better when

they encounter conspiracies and aren't so willing embrace them right off the bat. so just talking about this and understanding it, you can see how much conversation there is around this. you know, i saw quite different reaction to the of the paul pelosi theories online. you know people jumped on i'm not saying that's a solution but identifying it and understanding that this is going to crop up now that this is now a feature of our politics in our national discourse is just an important first step. i think wrote that it's great. i just wanted to ask what would you say is the best way to protect yourself in the digital age right now against disinformation? like, what can we do better protect ourselves from disinformation? and so there has been this now just, you know, this a little further. there's a cambridge researcher

that's had a lot of success in developing a sort of online game in which people who are conspiracy minded actually create own conspiracy theory. it'll be like, figure out who you're going target. what's your theory? how you spread that. and because in the personality of someone who tends to embrace these theories, is sort of desire for superior knowledge. and it kind of plays on that like, oh, now i know how this works. like now i know how these are created how they're spread, how you demonize one group with these theories. and then when they see it and, his research has borne this out is name is sandra van der linden and he's at cambridge that when people encounter these theories online they're more likely to report them and they're less likely to spread them. so that is one sort of small bright spot in all of this. i think it's really important. you know, people understand that

this is out there and that, you know, you see more flagging anachronisms now, people kind of stepping in to fact check and debunk. i mean, i think this is all part of the growing that needs to happen before we take decisive action against this. do you think that if jones had told his listeners to leave these poor families alone, when the lawsuit started occurring, that they would have actually backed from the most tenuous of the things they were doing and to him, i think he do it. and i think that he wasn't willing because he would he would lose his listeners. so that would mean he would lose his audience. he would lose his sales. and, you know he is a conspiracy theorist. he likes to have superior knowledge. i think that it had gotten to a point where he just willing to

do it and he also is a kind of double down sort of guy, you know, once this happened and you saw this after the big judgment in connecticut, he sort of went back to where he was ten years prior, saying, you now i'm going to question every mass shooting and you know, this is all about me. this is they're coming after me. and this trying to shut me down. and these are my know my democratic elite enemies. and this is the deep state. and, you know so he's he would never get it and one thing that we learned about having alex jones testify in court both in these matters and in others here in austin know his sort of custody battle that he had several years ago. he is sort of own worst enemy. you know, he totally doubles down. he he he treats, everybody who would criticize him as a personal, you know, every criticism is a personal attack.

and every person who would level it is an attacker during this trial he was maligning the judge on his show. he was insulting the families. he even insulted and i don't know why you would do this, but he insulted the jury was calling them, you know, from another and saying they were extreme blue collar folks who were easily duped by these slick lawyers for the families. so why he thought would help him, i don't know. so, yeah and he did it again in connecticut. so he just he's unable to help himself. so that's a really long answer to to, you know, really good question question. yes, i was wondering, do you have any kind of idea of what person lineage of people fall for this? because i've heard that like 30% of the electorate still believes that 2020 was stolen. you know, i thought well, maybe it's 5% of people fall for this

really off the wall stuff, but it seems to be a really significant portion of the population. maybe you covered this earlier. but do you have any kind of idea of how many people go for this? yeah, i mean, i think important to remember that people aren't nazis falling for this because they every, you know, sort of thread in this imagined plot is it really is that group identification the sort of tribalism that we have in our politics right where, you know nothing triggers libs more than to say that the sandy hook families staged this you know this mass tragedy in service gun control. you know, it's a sort unifying theme. it's an us them and that's at the of any conspiracy theory. it's the demonizing of the other and whether that's, you know, liberals or gun control advocates or, people that you

you know, you disagree with politically or socially, that's really at the root of it. so i think it's important to kind of remember that because debunking doesn't work, because it's really about the facts. it is about that group identification and what people get out of it. so do think alex jones believes, the theories he promotes. i get asked that almost every time i speak about that and you know i. think here's the best answer to that question came from josh owens, who is a former infowars employee who left, has now, you know, been a very outspoken critic of jones. and the impact that he's had on, you know, not only these families, but on our politics and others like him. of course not, just him. and that's that it doesn't matter if he believes it. and no, i don't think he believes sandy hook was staged. no, he does. but it what really matters that

a significant number of his listeners do believe it and in that tens of millions of people in the audience are listening to this. there are people who are willing to take action and the dangerous thing, you know, there are people who listen to him was a case where lenny posner had his life threatened by a woman down in florida as a condition of her parole. she was ordered not to listen to infowars because that was what was driving her. so that's the important thing. it's not so much whether he believes it, not it's what he gets out of it by spreading it, which is money. and then you know there are a lot of listeners, including many people who do believe that i you agree with you on alex jones totally. i want to ask you a question to me the most private you serve, you could lean into the mic a little bit so he can hear thank

you now. yeah, yeah, that's better to me. alex jones or kournikova ism which really anti semitic adam west base why that is the dangerous person out there as far as i'm concerned is a man with a mostly battered and we're not here to comment on that because deep and these people have no idea kerry like in arizona i don't know. i agree that he should not be repeated. there's really no debate with him because he's out there. but the most important person is the my feeling is steve bannon, because steve bannon is a trained leninist. he is a trained he's a trained wryness, and he's using lenin's ideas, including the assassination of leon trotsky in mexico city, to accomplish what is doing. he is pushing awareness on propaganda. the thing that happened in russia and happened in germany, steve bannon doing it in this country.

so alex jones to, me, he's out hustling food. let's face what he is. he's a hustling, big, fat. but as far as the most man out there is, steve, as far as i'm concerned, drop your opinion on that. so i'm really glad that you brought up steve because he stands for something really significant here. and that's that what we see and what steve bannon spelled out you know again former trump campaign manager now has show war room top trump in the administration his theory is and he has expressed explicitly it matter if you are convincing people when you put these lies out there these obvious falsehoods through sheer repetition will convince some people. but what he was really saying and he said and sorry for my friend here but what we're trying to do is flood the zone with --. so you put that much guano out

there on social media and repeat it over and over. you're going to get some people are going to be arguing about this, say, trying to debunk and being distracted and then other people are just going to throw up their hands and say, i don't know what to believe. there's so much -- in the atmosphere. what am i supposed to believe? and i saw this very strikingly after of all day where you had members of congress putting out things like let's let's, you know, have schools have only one door for example, or let's put, you know, in every one of our 110,000 schools. and this was the nra's stance after sandy hook. let's put an armed guard in one of our, you know, 110,000 public schools. that's never going to work. and so you'll have people who are arguing that over here and in the nothing is really getting done we're not getting to any kind of policy debate or any

solutions. and so this is what happens in the political realm after. every one of these events, you throw a lot of -- out there, like the paul pelosi attack, for example who was the was the window broken from the inside or the or the more of who are spending our time on twitter or on facebook arguing about this --. the last time we are spending understanding that what's really at stake here is you know what this issue here is political violence since and a growing number of americans who are willing to defend their beliefs with violence that's the issue it's not who did what to who the facts are not in doubt but if you can flood the zone with this then you will distract and you will get your by hook or by crook that think is the goal with someone like bannon. and he has stated that explicit

length. and i just want to mention you want to add one particular he said that he was trained by the federal, he was trained by the military and naval intelligence. he knows exactly what he is doing. this man is trained at a revolution. this man is trained at doing. i'm not a conspiracy theorist, but this man is trained to be iranian. and if he got to take out somebody like trump, he will. they don't have to do. thank you thank you. thank you all for the book again is, sandy hook. and it's at the time. my name is dan oppenheimer. i'm a writer here in austin, the director of public affairs for the college of liberal arts at ut austin. i've been doing this book festival. think for going on 14 or 15 years with the