Conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones spent 20 minutes defending his conspiracy theories that “the official story” of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School “has more holes in it than swiss cheese.”

Jones, a leading conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed “founding father” of the 9/11 Truth movement (which claims that the U.S. government executed the terrorist attacks or allowed them to happen) was a key Trump media ally during the campaign, and Trump praised Jones as having an “amazing” reputation during an appearance on his show.

On November 18, Jones made what he called his “final statement on Sandy Hook” arguing that his comments are being taken out of context. He then spent more than 20 minutes explaining why he believed the government was covering up facts about Sandy Hook:

ALEX JONES (HOST): I do want to reach out to the victims of criminal crime out there, whether it be a baseball bat, a car, a gun, a knife. I want to reach out to my listeners as well and just clarify where I stand on the reported tragedy at Sandy Hook that took place at that elementary school.

For the last three or four years, it’s been mainstream media’s number-one attack against me to say that I said there was never anyone that actually died there. I’ve hosted debates against both sides, and I’ve been criticized by both sides -- people that say that no one died there and people who say that the official story is exactly as we’ve been told. And I’ve always said that I’m not sure about what really happened, that there’s a lot of anomalies and there has been a cover-up of whatever did happen there.

 

There’s a few clips Hillary used in her campaign of me out of context saying I can see how people that look at all this evidence say no kids died there and this whole thing is a giant hoax, but at the same time there is some evidence that people died there. They take that out of context and misrepresent it. That’s why they’re the deceptive corporate media. But for those who do have an attention span for, say, 10 minutes or so, I will present to you the questions. And I’m going to be quite frank, I don’t know what really happened. I know there are real mass shootings. I know people lose children. I’m a father. It hurts my heart. So I don’t know what the truth is. All I know is the official story of Sandy Hook has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

 

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This is a tragedy. I wish it never would have happened. But quite frankly, I wish that the official story was true because that’s a lot less scary than them staging something like this. But when you think about how they staged [weapons of mass destruction] to kill over a million Iraqis, when you think about all the other hoaxes, all the other lies, all the other rigging, and the way they’re freaking out about it and trying to cover up every level of it, it just makes me ask what really happened there?