Good afternoon. Im the chief Communications Officer for the library of congress. On behalf of my wonderful colleagues, welcome to the 2022 National Book festival. Its great to see this huge crowd. If you missed any of the authors today, please go to the website and you can catch up with our marvelous authors who have been part of the festival so far. Almost as old as this nation is, there have been conspiracies wrapped around. Today, we are here to discuss the struggles that have been dealt to our nation. Joining us today is the professor of history at Boston University and the author of the book the brethren a story of faith and conspiracy in revolutionary america. [applause] joining him is New York Times writer and the author of the new book sandy hook an american tragedy elizabeth williamson. [applause] welcome to both of you. A couple of weeks ago, the verdict for alex jones came down. Have you spoken to the families and how are they reacting . I did almost immediately and throughout the trial which i was covering for the New York Times, they were weighing in. They were particularly gratified by the confrontation in the courtroom that Scarlett Lewis whose son jesse lewis died at sandy hook had with alex jones. For 90 minutes, she was on the stand and she addressed her responses to every question to him personally and she held him to account. That was something that cheered them. How are they coping . How are they feeling moving forward . I hesitate to characterize or ascribe any feeling to any of the group or even to speak for them, but they are absolutely determined to hold alex jones and the other conspiracy theorist who supplied his content and harassed their families to account. [applause] when i started, i said conspiracies have been part of the country for more than 200 years. You write conspiracy rumors can be a collective response to psychological threats which is defined as an attack by outsider on a groups identity, values, or politics. Those items seem to be the common denominator room 200 years ago to today. What started it then . Conspiracy theory runs back to the reign of elizabeth the first and even before that. You have a kind of belief that somehow that people believe that their rights or liberties are being infringed on, their group is being threatened. There are different context in which that occurred it is something that is deeply ingrained in that somehow liberty or personal autonomy or Group Identity is always in threat by someone in power. Does it seem like the common denominator of fear and Everything Else is whats being weaponized to move these theories forward . Whether it is fear or religion or misinformation . Brandon has a lot to say about this in his book. It is often in cases where people feel that something is threatened. I am unsurprised in the sense of what elizabeth has written about that that second amount Second Amendment issue that fear runs again. His fear of an overreaching government, they are going to infringe your rights or personal autonomy and that has run back deeply in the society and it was a major issue in the revolutionary generation and it also leads to the Second Amendment. One of the bigs you talked about elizabeth is the Second Amendment and freedom of speech which tends to be the defense. Where is the line . When is it freedom of speech and when is it that you are inciting a rumor or a bad Conspiracy Theory . During the trial, the lawyers for the sandy hook families had a great phrase that i think should be put on a tshirt. It said speech is free but lies pay for. When you are spreading lies that harm Vulnerable People or any people and are patently false and have been debunked countless times, there is a penalty for that in our law. Speech does not protect that although conspiracy theorists generally tend to claim that it does. Attacks on people knowing that they are false is prohibited. The First Amendment does not protect that. How did they deal with at 200 years ago . In a sense, the revolution mobilized on the belief that a conspiracy had corrupted the british monarchy and government and the revolution was mobilized on that. Once the revolutionary regime began to take shape, there were people who believed that had been corrupted. It works in a sense both ways. The regime and the regimes that people come to oppose the regime both argue what we would consider conspiratorial language because they believed the dispensation of power was controlled by groups of individuals i wanted to gather as much of that power to themselves. There is that fear that the Second Amendment will be abridged that you are going to lose that part. So much has changed obviously since the revolutionary war. One of the things is the factor of media when it comes to reporting what is happening. You wrote about this very well, elizabeth. How does bad reporting contribute to bad theories . What happens in the chaos after a major event or mass tragedy is of course in the rush to report to americans what happened, mistakes are made. I saw after a recent mass shooting, this idea of there is rarely a second shooter but that is something that often crops up. There is this balance to be struck between getting the information to people quickly and making sure that it is accurate. What conspiracy theorists after these events tend to do is point to anomalies in the reporting and say that these are proof of the fact that it didnt happen that way, the official narrative is false or wrong or willfully being misrepresented. That is where you have to pitch a perfect game when you are reporting on these tragedies although that is not really possible in many cases because you are getting information from authorities who themselves are trying to piece it together. As a reporter, during breaking like this in a competitive media market, people tend to report whatever is told to them. Have things changed in newsrooms to make sure misinformation doesnt go out the can be weaponized later . Ic hopeful developments after these mass tragedies. I want to give a shout out to my colleague from the Texas Tribune who is here in the audience. His staff reported after the shooting and you could see his dedication to make sure the details are correct, questioning and that was important because the Police Narrative was false and self protective. That is still being unpacked by the media. You also have to be respectful to the families doing things like not repetitively naming the gunman, not focusing on the gunmen to the exclusion of the victims and their families. Putting them first and foremost in your reporting and being respectful in doing so. Aside from the Mainstream Media, one medium that is being used is social media. How did these entities make things worse for the families of sandy hook . In reporting on the event or the conspiracy theories . Both. Again, you have people who sees on the initial reporting to say this detail was wrong so therefore this part of the narrative or the entire narrative is incorrect or is being manufactured or concocted by the federal government in particular social media in general is what gives a megaphone to people who question these events and these official reports. Conspiracy theorists were often isolated or in earlier times, they had to rely on wordofmouth or print. Social media allows ally a lie to gain adherents not just by the handful but in the millions and that happens within minutes. Obviously, there was no twitter during the revolutionary war. Thank goodness. [laughter] how do people get together to form a group . Its interesting. The revolutionary generation was living through the expansion of communication. Newspapers, pamphlets, broad bills, speeches, sermons. Information got out particularly as the revolution mobilized, the opportunities to spread information increased geometrically. Thats how you get an uncontrolled situation in some respects about the way information is passing. What amounts to a struggle about what is and is not accurate. One of the things i have thought about is we are engaged in a radical experiment in the democratization of information and it is hard for people to sort that information and come to an understanding of basic things. You have the legacy media and social media, there is a tremendous amplification of whats available and not a decline in the ability to make sense of whats real and whats not. That went on with the revolutionary generation as well. One of the big fears was the fear that protestantism is somehow being undermined by hidden catholics in the upper end of the British Government including the king himself. It takes hold even though it is completely false. The belief that there was no catholic conspiracy, but they believed there was that the catholics were trying to seize control of the british empire. Nowadays, social media amplifies things. Back then, maybe the lack of information allow things to percolate . In many respects happens is a lack of control of information. What happened in the revolutionary generation was that two new bodies appear. Committees of safety and correspondence. They have an agenda in their behavior and they communicate in certain ways and a lot of people were left out of that or they have an incomplete sense of whats going on. They are left to sort things out themselves. Thats not that different from people trying to sort through which website is valid and which is being produced by someone who doesnt know anything about the situation. One thing i didnt know, some of the families of sandy hook they triggered a domino effect of how social media work regulating the information being put out there. When we speak about the dramatic uptake in social media, in the book i talked to woman named lori whose daughter was injured in the Virginia Tech shooting. I asked her, in the aftermath of that lori became active in the guncontrol movement. She was out there a lot. She was demonstrating, speaking before legislatures, pushing for new Gun Legislation. She is very alleged visible. I asked her did anyone contact you on social media and call you a liar or a crisis actor or someone who was part of a government plot . She went through her Facebook Page and she said no, i dont see anything. That was 2007. Sandy hook occurred in 2012. In those five years in 2007, there were maybe 5 million tweets sent out her day. In 2012, there were 5 million every second. On facebook when lori was not finding anything into thousand seven, there were 20 million facebook users around the world. Five years later when sandy hook happened, there were one billion. You can see the speed and the morale of the that happens virality of what happens when that is put out. The possibility of vetting which of these Facebook Accounts is accurate, which is based on facts, which is just malicious. One of the parents, the father who really took action to making sure that these internet trolls were held accountable, what method did he use to make sure that twitter, facebook, and youtube did the right thing . Lenny who is the father of noah the youngest sandy hook victim had a technology background. He could see that sandy hook was not just one off theory or even something built on guncontrol and out of the realistic expectation that Gun Legislation would result from this tragedy. What he knew was that this was a foundational story for how misinformation and false narratives have spread in our society. He began by trying to appeal as you would to the social Media Companies. There are thousands of these videos out here calling us liars and Crisis Actors and saying is false. Facebook, can you take some of this down . Twitter, less so because it was a smaller platform. He ascribes it to shouting at a locked door. He never got anything relating to a response. He got auto messages. He started to use his power as a grieving father to call attention to what was going on. He did oped in the newspaper. He got powerful interviews on the radio through abc abc and he called out these companies and shamed them. He also called out the individual names of conspiracy theorists who were generating so much mistruths that his family was being threatened and harassed and being forced to move because people kept publishing their home address online. He started to talk about the secondary trauma that was being inflicted on them and the danger they were in because of these lies and if there is anything the social Media Companies respond to its public shaming and thats what he was doing. He began doing that and he continues to do that. He is the true hero of the story. The final thing that he has done, now they do Pay Attention to him. They go to him first and he reports this material on behalf of not just sandy hook families but an array of people who are being tormented online. The numbers you were sharing earlier about how social media has progressed since Virginia Tech has been staggering. From the revolutionary war to even just Virginia Tech or september 11, conspiracy theorists always felt like they were on the french. On the fringe now they have become more mainstream. Why do you think it was better controlled 200 years ago . It wasnt always better controlled. When the society is in crisis, when there is a sense of disorder, these things can move to the center of discussion when the society has more stability, there is less chance for that movement to occur. You have a vast change in the velocity and scale of information. This happened in the revolutionary generation as well. The American Revolution doesnt fully stabilize until the Second Party System emerges in the 1820s which is when you have an explosion in print culture. It is a test to see how we can have a Stable Society with this much information moving this quickly and people struggling to make sense of that information. Whats scary is it bills like history repeats itself. The parallels with what happened in your book to the governor of michigan. Its a strong parallel and that you have a group of people who feel like their governor is a threat and involved against their traditional religion and practices. Ultimately, they move into a position where they think youre going to kill the governor and the governing elite. Same thing with the governor of michigan in the sense that you have a group. The parallel is that the people who were hostile or wanted to kidnap governor of michigan and the people who had the assassination plot in 1777, they were extreme manifestations of broader Belief Systems that have been carried out to their extreme and irrational the fears they had in North Carolina was that their governor did not share their religious leafs which was true. Nonetheless, they carried it out to the degree that we are going to kill the governing elite of North Carolina and start a slave uprising to get it done. The idea that somehow kidnapping the governor of michigan, where does that go . It is a strange solution to the problem of i dont like the governor, maybe i will vote for the other candidate instead. Its a strange response. I can vote for someone else, i dont have to kidnap the governor. [laughter] we will be taking questions shortly. If you have questions, but for we go there we will keep talking. Reading your book, both your research and your reporting are outstanding. It leaves you feeling a little hopeless. I want to read one passage. I mean that with a complement, by the way. You write you not only do false flag claims around sandy hook persist but they have metastasized to every mass shooting ever since. It feels like since sandy hook which was 10 years ago and how more Mass Shootings have progressed in the next 10 years after that. The rumor bill and aries got worse. Yes. How do you think we could get a hold of all this . It is true that now 1 5 of americans after every highprofile mass shooting espouse the belief that the shooting was faked or staged. That is a shocking statistic. It doesnt point to i really think its important to say this, it doesnt want to politics or ideology as much as psychology. People find a sense of social belonging in adhering to these conspiracy theories. They find a community online. They are often lonely. The ones i interviewed for the book often have trauma and their backgrounds. They are looking for something and they are looking in the wrong places. It is the reason that once you try to get someone to disavow these conspiracy theories, they are extremely resistant. They have often reinvented themselves. One tells me dont say they have developed an entirely new identity. Someone i interviewed a woman in the book who had a business in oklahoma. Being one of the most pernicious conspiracy theorists around sandy hook allowed her to reinvent herself as an author, researcher, investigative journalist. This is important for people. Theres been a lot of research and trying to get people to be suspicious of these theories, use that National Natural suspiciousness and apply it to when they see this material online. There has been a lot of hopeful success and breakthroughs in that area. The other hopeful thing i think is that i am so gratified at the number of people here. Its as people recognizing the message that sandy hook families have sent by talking with me and through these lawsuits that this is a problem. We are being steeped in a world of lies. It is affecting us as individuals but our democracy as well. That is huge. [applause] that is hopeful. People are paying attention. People who are in a position to do something about this other it is the social Media Companies tightening up on their policies, Congress Looking at new forms of legislation and this is a bipartisan effort and if its the big thinkers out there looking at the psychology behind this trying to figure it out, those are all hopeful signs. What can we learn from history to move forward . Going back to what elizabeth said, it is the ability as we become people come to an understanding of how do i sort information that seems rational to me from does not . Thats where we are, but it takes time. These social media things are new. From 2012, 10 years seems like a long time but its not that long given the nature and the way that they have insinuated themselves. How many in our audience have sat in bed looking at social media, tweets, facebook . They hit insinuated themselves into every corner of our existence. It will take a long time but if you look at, earlier societies who went through a similar less dramatic less rapid things, they do go forward and they find a path forward in the sense of creating more stable order in their society. That is the hopeful thing. Its also an issue of acacia. If you understand that people are not going to fake shooting a second a sevenyearold child. Its hard for me to think that anyone could believe that but it is a question of education and looking at society. We have a lot of people lined up for questions. I have a question about sandy hook in general and alex jones. To what extent do you think he has main and obscene amount of money on his website selling meal prep kits and supplements and what have you. To what extent you think he sincerely believes what he talks about versus how much do you think he is weaponizing the act of riling people up so he can make any . Make money. As one of the individuals who i interviewed for the book who used to work for info wars, it doesnt matter if he believes it. By the way, he knows it happened. Its that people in his audience of tens of millions many of them believe the lie that he is spreading about it. His Business Model is ingenious. He sells products to people who distrust traditional medicine, established science, the federal government, and many of our institutions. Doomsday propers purchasing dried food and things for their shelters. They are buying diet supplements which is an enormous business for him. He has definitely built an empire around these lies. You could see and i trace this in the book that traffic to his website surges when he spoke about sandy hook. It resonates with people and that leads to sales. It is cynical and ingenious Business Model that he has pursued and it is not based on any genuine suspicion around the event itself. Misinformation and conspiracy can affect everyone. We often feel they can be a distance problem that does not impact us particularly when we see the confined realm of social media. When this misinformation takes root, we can often be caught off guard. How would you recommend we navigate a conversation that addresses the dangers of misinformation without damaging our interpersonal relationships with others . I dont know if i have a recommendation for that. Ultimately, one of the challenges we are facing is that it is ultimately up to each individual to weigh what they are doing, to weigh their exposure to social media and technology. The consumption of information. I think its important that when youre thinking of something as tragic and important as Something Like sandy hook, you come to a view that i need to have the understanding of the history and background to what happened before you go off and say the person who tweeted that must be right. They have the inside information. Clearly anyone can mount almost anything on the internet. There is very little check right now and you have to have the ability. That calls on the citizen to develop their own sense of citizenship, knowledge of their society, knowledge of the things around them. It means reading the newspapers, broadening your understanding to see what you are finding on the internet, how it can be measured and understood. I dont think that solves the problem. I had a general question. In a world where there is more awareness and mediate reporting on these events around conspiracy theories and tragedies, do you have any thoughts on how a journalist in taking in all of this information can handle these concepts in the aftermath of the reporting without bringing further harm or attention to the conspiracy . This is something that i have struggled with with a book and every day in the media, how do you debunk these theories without drawing more adherence to them . I try to focus on and i do this in the book religiously on the victims of those theories rather than the substance of them. I sometimes see coverage that you can tell the conspiracy theorists like it because a claim arises what theyre doing and saying. I try to focus on the impact. We didnt really talk about that here, but it is like people who have had to move a dozen times in the 10 years since the shooting because their address was being put online and people were coming to their homes. People looking in the family members windows, digging through their trash, threatening their lives, calling their phone, defacing memorials to the dead. I try to focus on these things because that stirs up good people who will do things to try to push for solution. Do you know of any other families of Mass Shootings if they have been treated the same way the families sandy hook . Have other families moved 10 times so they will be treated the same way . A number of moves that this family has had to go through is a special case and away because the sheer number because they took a forward roll so they were instantly identifiable. They were targeted specifically for that. Yes, unfortunately the survivors of a Mass Shootings, after the Las Vegas Shooting still in their hospital beds were logging onto facebook to post themselves as safe and seeing people call them liars and crisis act while they were still being hospitalized. It still does happen. The sandy hook families were kind of the first. Earlier you talked about conspiracy theories as having a long tradition. Having spent quite a bit of time in the middle east, i know that the arab world can spin a conspiracy yarn as big as anybody and it is a human condition in a place with a sense secrets are being kept from them just like it exists in other governments and other places. The real origin of these conspiracies is when someone perceives either rightly or wrongly that some kind effect is being hidden from them. That is the sewer that conmen like Alex Jones Live in because he preys on their erroneous beliefs. I hear this a lot, that we shouldnt talk about the shooters name or anything like that. Doesnt that feed into the idea that somebody somewhere out there is hiding affect from me so i need to go somewhere else to an alternate sphere to find the real truth then these hucksters come sweep up that information . My understanding is from people who have lived in the arab world, that Conspiracy Theory is very common there. At the heart of all of that is in my view its the belief that whatevers happening, somebody is benefiting from that and it is a discernible movement of a hidden group of people who are going to benefit from this. They want to abolish the Second Amendment, to do whatever it is. Whenever you have that, what you have is the belief that everything you are seeing is a result of the conscious actions of certain actors who think theyre going to benefit from this or get something they want from it. When you have that belief, you can read into everything. It becomes common and hard to dissuade people that sandy hook happened or holocaust deniers, that that happened. If you want to believe that, its hard to dissuade people but its the belief that somehow somebody is benefiting and they are in control of events in a way that you are not in control and its being hidden from you. I had a quick question about the ethics of journalism. As a journalist, you are an employee of a company and you have the responsibility toward your shareholders and the beneficiaries of the company which might include publishing something that would generate a lot of internet traffic like conspiracy or something that could contribute to a Conspiracy Theory. How do you reconcile that as being an employee with also being a journalist and having that responsibility toward resenting the truth to society . The earlier question spoke to a similar issue. How do you draw attention to this climate of disinformation without glamorizing it or laura find the bad actors . Glorifying the bad actors. We try not to do that. When you talk about generating traffic when i write about for the New York Times, i find that describing this battle for truth is really the way i do it. That gains 20 of readers on its own. Will recognizepeople realize ths extant and continuing and the right way to cover it is to talk about its impact on people. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the excellent talk. It seems clear that changes in communications technology, especially with the internet and social media are driving a similar revolution in conspiratorial thought similar to the rise in print media. Looking back at the past, eventually people figure out how to deal with the rise of new forms of media. Sometimes it can be a very rough roads with things like world of religion or world war ii. Where we are today, can we see how rocky of a road is ahead of us as we figure out how to deal with new forms of media . Or, are these changes so greater in scope and magnitude than what has happened in the past that we have no idea where this will go . Historical context. How rocky road . Boulders. Boulders are ahead. It will not be easy. Because, we want free and open society. In that society one of the risks is we will have some issues that people carla in this case, freedom of information that is unprecedented and we will have to learn how to come to terms with that. I see a road ahead where we struggle to come to terms with this and i dont think we are anywhere near the end of that road now. One saying that its important to note, and brandons book puts this well, in reading his book i was reassured that we have these spasms in our history and this is not wholly unprecedented. The parallel of the plot to assassinate and kidnap the leadership of North Carolina versus Gretchen Whitmer in michigan, that tells you something. That in itself is a little hopeful. You can see this is a feature of our society, our country, our development and these spasms can be gotten over. Thank you for coming today. Do you feel that harmful conspiracy series will lessen or continue to grow after the alex jones trials . I think the absolute victory that the families have a cheesed that have achieved in the families have achieved in bringing the lawsuits and confronting him in court and there are two more trials for damages against alex jones ahead including a big one in a couple weeks in connecticut brought by the families of eight sandy hook victims is highlighting these phenomenons showing the human impact of it, the devastating effects it can have on people already traumatized. I think it makes other would be conspiracy purveyors think twice about what they will do. Not everybody has the resources alex jones has to absorb these judgments and verdicts. Thats my hope. Now i feel like alex jones has been put aside. Is there another alex jones type on the horizon that could reformulate the formula heated . The formula he did. Yes, there are many. This is partly because it is in our National Character to question official narratives. To question official narratives, to be suspicious of authority. We are at the end of this long and terrible epidemic. There is a lot of a political division. We are now in the shadow of two long, contentious, and unsuccessful wars. So, this depends on what the course of events is going forward. If there is a longer period of relative stability, i think the opportunity for this hardcore alex jones type conspiracy theorist to spread something will diminish. It will not go away. Its never going away, but it will diminish if the society remains at the level of dislocation, turmoil, and atomization we are at now because of these various challenges. This oil remains very fertile. I think thats a fair way to think about it historically. It looks like we have time for one more quick question. Thank you all for coming. I was wondering if you had any recommendations for the audience of how we can more critically evaluate is the information we see on social media. What tips can we verify that information . And really check its veracity. Thats a good way to end today. Yeah, thats a really great question. I mean, its with a longer answer than we have time for. But, trustworthy sources of information have not changed. Im not saying one should not question my employer or other Mainstream Media accounts. But i think one of the keys is for people to get out of the mode in which we have so much media out there, so many choices, that people tend to choose the one that closely corresponds with their political beliefs and that may not thats not necessarily feeding them falsehoods, but its definitely coloring the world in a way that makes them comfortable. I think if we consume an array of media, there is information out there. We know that the info wars of the world are not trustworthy sources of news. But if we graze a little more widely, i think thats one step. Its important to know what people outside of your media bubble are thinking. In questioning. In order to more efficiently argue with them. The groupthink of the algorithm. Yeah. I think one thing thats important is to look at the sources of your information. Books, old media, newmedia, visual, television, other things. Going across platforms. Going across the type of information you get helps you get a better grip of how to weigh what you are hearing and come to a rational conclusion about it. Its important that its not just one source. That you are going across platforms to look for different kinds of information about different problems, different people im a given issues, given events. Thats important. Thank you to the two of you. We appreciate both brendan and elizabeth. Both of them