Sandy Hook by Elizabeth Williamson

Author:Elizabeth Williamson [Williamson, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

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Like a shark that must keep swimming to breathe, Jones would go belly-up without attention. At the convention he gorged on it, strutting through the crowds trailed by a half-dozen bodyguards, a cameraman, and fans. Jones had teamed up for the occasion with Roger Stone, erstwhile Trump campaign adviser who had connected Jones with Trump. Stone was exiled by the establishment GOP in the mid-1990s, when, while working as an unpaid adviser to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, it emerged that Stone and his wife were cruising for sex partners with explicit ads. Ever since, Stone had pushed fringe candidates and hatched wild plots, a jackal circling the campfire’s light, sniffing for an opening.

Stone and Jones, committed conspiracists, had met in 2013 at a gathering in Dallas marking the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. They made a strange pair in Cleveland: the manic Texan stuffed like sausage into his shirt, given to spontaneous fury and tears, and the anachronistic dandy in white suit and two-tone wingtips, his murine visage stretched into a rectangular, joyless smile, his white hairline a stark, straight-edge row, like crops planted atop the parched clay of his forehead.

In scenes reminiscent of high school, when Jones preferred being beaten up to being ignored, he looked for trouble at the convention that he could parlay into viral videos. He dove into a group of peaceful communist demonstrators and had to be rescued by police, and almost came to blows with liberal commentator Cenk Uygur when Jones and Stone crashed his show. One of Jones’s sidekicks, Joe Biggs, a hard-drinking, profane Army veteran, got into a fight with a flag-burning demonstrator, drawing a lawsuit. A few years later, Biggs would join the Proud Boys extremist group and help lead the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.

“Every day it seemed like there was some type of stunt,” said Josh Owens, a former Infowars video editor who filmed Jones’s convention antics and uploaded them to YouTube. “Basically he saw the RNC as his playground.”

On the evening of Thursday, July 21, Jones stood on the convention’s main floor, a VIP invitee to Trump’s nomination acceptance speech. Owens stood next to Jones as the nominee strode onto the gilt-bedecked convention stage, “TRUMP” projected in gargantuan letters behind him.

Trump’s acceptance speech sounded at times like an Infowars broadcast. “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump said,[6] later adding: “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”

Owens looked over at Jones. “He was crying, genuine tears streaming down his face,” he told me.

“Trump was what Jones had been working for, for years.”

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