Per his defense, when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called the Sandy Hook parents crisis actors, “he was looking at the world through dirty glasses.” Maybe so. But he has built a career selling “dirty glasses” to people like my mother, a self-described “truther” who spread misinformation before and after the Sandy Hook shooting. In this respect, my mother isn’t unique: Millions of Americans continue to spread Jones’ misinformation even as he is publicly debunked. Jones’ influence over my mother in the last months of 1999 is hard to overstate. During the trial in Texas, Jones’ attorney warned that “if you look at the world through dirty glasses, everything you see is dirty.“ Thirty years ago, Alex Jones sold my mother a pair of glasses, a lens into the world.

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