Williamson also interviews Kelley Watt, a Tulsa woman so deeply involved with the hoaxers that, in 2019, she turned up at the Wisconsin trial of James H. Fetzer, a retired professor and author of a Sandy Hook hoax book who was being sued by Pozner for defamation. (The jury awarded Pozner $450,000, but the trial put him through the excruciating task of proving that Noah actually lived and died.) Watt is a high-functioning hoaxer, oriented in time and space, but moronically convinced of her own shrewdness and the merits of her gut feeling that “too many of those parents just rub me the wrong way.” She’s bizarrely obsessed with a certain kind of photogenic kid; Williamson notes that Watt maintains a supremely creepy Pinterest board called “Beautiful Children,” full of pictures of angelic tots, many with gigantic limpid eyes photoshopped onto their faces, Margaret Keane style. How could the Sandy Hook parents be legit, an indignant Watt asked Williamson, when none of them sported “messy buns,” “cute torn jeans,” or “Tory Burch jewelry”? Later, Williamson interviews Watt’s daughter, who has little hope that her mom will snap out of it because, she says, “her whole identity has been built on this for so many years.” The daughter suspects that Watt “feels bad that she in some way hasn’t accomplished something. It’s really important for her to be seen as someone really intelligent and good at research.”

That’s key, Williamson argues, to Jones’ success, and from the seeds of the Sandy Hook hoaxer subculture have sprouted many current conspiracy theories, from QAnon to COVID denial. Fringe media opportunists like Jones know that “debunking” a news story or crisis will drive phenomenal amounts of eyes and ears to their websites and products. Some small percentage of those people—the isolated, the insecure, aimless—will become fanatical, like Watt or the dozens of delusional people who stalked and harassed the Sandy Hook parents. Jones’ calls to his audience to “look it up” are more than just savvy bids to game Google searches. They make his screeds interactive, assuring people who feel otherwise insignificant that, with their “research,” they’re participating in and contributing to a vitally important cause.