Sandy Hook

Ten years ago today, Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people in Sandy Hook, Connecticut: his mother, six educators, twenty first-graders. Then he shot himself. Speculating about what might have motivated Lanza to commit an atrocity of this scale was difficult in 2012. What information was available about Lanza was sparse; what we did have was difficult to make sense of. A bug-eyed photo of him. A single mother who loved guns. A crazy, isolated kid — maybe it was the medication? There was very little to weave a story out of. It was haunting; it was horrifying; but it made no sense. There was no ready-made narrative for a twenty-year-old who could step into a first-grade classroom and open fire. There was nothing we could compare it to. Mental health, probably. Guns, probably.

Alex Jones looks unwell. He lost his bodybuilding figure decades ago but for years he was a veritable tank of a man. Now he looks swollen and exhausted — one piece of bad news away from his heart giving up. I say that with no relish. Jones is an extraordinary American character. America is like an enormous carnival and, for better or for worse, it is rich in charismatic mountebanks. You don’t have to like them but they are as American as pecan pie. Jones is an undeniably astonishing performer. His thunderous speech is often imitated, never equaled — a perversely captivating force of nature. His ability to switch tones in an instant — from cussing out the globalists to apologizing like an old Southern gentleman — is used with pinpoint comic timing.