Tag: newtown shooting
Megyn Kelly Smacks Down Perspiring, Prevaricating Alex Jones

Megyn Kelly Smacks Down Perspiring, Prevaricating Alex Jones

  As vigorously hyped broadcast events go, Megyn Kelly’s televised confrontation with Internet conspiracy cultist Alex Jones proved something of a dud. Not because Kelly didn’t give it her best. And maybe not even because the former Fox news-blonde’s best falls considerably short of legendary TV inquisitors such as Mike Wallace or even Barbara Walters.

It’s partly a gravitas thing; a matter of stage presence. At this point in her new career as a “mainstream” performer, Kelly hasn’t quite mastered it. She’s intelligent, poised, and almost alarmingly attractive.

But authoritative? Not yet.

So whose idea was it to schedule Kelly opposite CBS’s 60 Minutes anyway? For all of the controversy attending her Father’s Day interview with the Austin-based proprietor of InfoWars, a website that peddles low-IQ political pornography along with male enhancement products and survivalist gear (there’ll be a hot time in the fallout shelter tonight!), the program finished far behind U.S. Open golf and a 60 Minutes re-run during the time period. Dead last.

But the real loser was Jones himself, whom Kelly had little difficulty exposing as a sweaty, blustering fraud. “Some thought we shouldn’t broadcast this interview because his baseless allegations aren’t just offensive, they’re dangerous,” Kelly pointed out. “But here’s the thing: Alex Jones isn’t going away.”

She’s correct on all counts. It’s also true that exposing the sheer fraudulence of a mountebank like Jones could be terribly important. People like him thrive in the semi-shadows of the Internet. Viewers who wouldn’t dream of buying the poison InfoWars peddles need to be more aware of what Jones and similar far-right hucksters like him are all about. Because millions of naïve dimwits are buying, including the President of the United States.

NBC documented several examples of evidence-free allegations going right from Jones’s paranoid rants straight to candidate Trump’s mouth—such as the absurd allegation that Hillary Clinton would show up for a presidential debate high on drugs. Trump thought so too.

Of course, Jones has also alleged that Hillary’s a space alien.

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube posting just before the 2016 election. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”

That was the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory InfoWars also promoted. He has since backed off.

Fear of lawsuits can do that sometimes.

To date, Trump has left the space alien thing alone. But you never know. He now claims that the president phones him for advice. There seems no reason to doubt it.

But enough about Trump.

During their interview, Kelly shrewdly zeroed in on Jones’s bizarre insistence that the 2012 massacre of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax—an Obama-orchestrated theatrical spectacle to promote gun control.

That obscene and deeply offensive lie caused one Connecticut NBC affiliate to refuse to air the program. Kelly’s willingness to put Jones on the air initially caused great anger and sorrow among the surviving parents of the slain five- and six-year olds, several of whom have received hate mail and death threats from InfoWars adepts. Their pain is unimaginable.

Ultimately, however, they needn’t have worried. Whether or not NBC drastically re-edited the episode in response to critics, as some have claimed, the end result was nevertheless revealing of InfoWars’ methods.

So long as it fits the paranoid mindset, basically anything goes.

First, Kelly softened Jones up by highlighting his recent lampooning of teenaged terrorist victims in Manchester, England as “liberal trendies.” One of those trendies, she pointed out, was eight years old. She described his practice as one of “reckless accusation, followed by equivocations and excuses.”

On cue, Jones began stammering, equivocating and babbling alibis. Maybe some children really died at Sandy Hook after all, he allowed. “I tend to believe that children probably did die there,” he said. “But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side.”

“Of course,” Kelly said in a brisk voiceover, “there is no ‘evidence on the other side.’ ”

As, indeed, there is not. Nor ever was. Kelly interviewed Neil Heslin, whose six year-old son Jesse died in the tragedy. The brokenhearted father’s courage at standing up to Jones can only be admired. Broadcast images of Jesse’s shining face shamed the blustering fraud.

And ultimately, shame may be the only known antidote for Jones’ brand of political obscenity. People inclined to accept absurd conspiracy theories can be more vulnerable to ridicule than reason. Men particularly fear the laughter of beautiful women. What’s more, precisely because of her longtime affiliation with Fox News, Megyn Kelly could end up being the perfect person for the job.

Assuming, that is, that she wants it.

Newtown Official: Sandy Hook Shooting Donations Divided Town

Newtown Official: Sandy Hook Shooting Donations Divided Town

By Dave Altimari, The Hartford Courant

HARTFORD, Conn. — The distribution of donations made to Newtown following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was so problematic that it has likely left “a permanent fracture in the community,” First Selectwoman Pat Llodra said Friday.

Llodra and Superintendent Joseph V. Erardi Jr. appeared before the state’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission to discuss issues in town, more than 18 months after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that left 26 dead, including 20 first-graders.

In her statement, Llodra said that recovering from the shooting will be a “decades-long challenge” and that federal officials will be returning to Newtown in October for a meeting on how to coordinate the long-term use of the millions of dollars in grants the government has pledged.

Llodra touched on the difficulties in coordinating all the mental health providers who descended on her community and suggested there is a need for a state agency to oversee such a task. She also told the commission that it should look at the strategy used in Boston following the marathon bombing to create one fund through which donations were collected and distributed.

Llodra said the distribution of funds was “problematic and caused significant conflict that likely has left a permanent fracture in our community.”

Following the shooting donations poured in from all over the world and were initially collected by the United Way of Western Connecticut. More than $12 million was eventually collected but problems erupted when the United Way formed the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation Inc., a private committee made up of community residents.

The foundation decided to give the 26 families who lost loved ones about $281,000 each. It gave $20,000 to the families of the 12 children who survived Adam Lanza’s shooting barrage in two classrooms and $75,000 each to two teachers who were injured.

The foundation kept more than $4 million in the fund, angering some victims’ families and town officials. It has not distributed the remaining money.

Llodra said there also were problems with all of the smaller groups that started collecting money. Llodra said there “was no organized system in place to document who was collecting money” and what they were doing with it.

Llodra said “there needs to be a clear, transparent, and fair” method of distributing money following a tragedy.

The attorney general’s office eventually developed a questionnaire that it sent to every organization that indicated it was collecting donations.
There were 77 organizations that collected more than $28 million with about $13 million yet to be distributed. A large portion of those funds are earmarked for a memorial still in the planning stages.

Llodra was preceded by acting Superintendent Joseph V. Erardi Jr., who told the commission he met privately in July with staff from the Sandy Hook School Elementary School that was working on the day of the shooting to hear their thoughts and concerns.

Erardi said many school personnel still “struggle when they hear school bells ring.”

Photo: Rob Bixby via Flickr

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