During a deposition for a number lawsuits filed by the parents of Sandy Hook victims, InfoWars host Alex Jones said he had a “form of psychosis” while he was pushing conspiracy theories about the school shooting, The Austin American-Statesman reports. Jones reportedly said that at the time, he “almost had like a form of psychosis... where [he] basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.” Jones blamed his mental state on the “trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much,” saying that he couldn’t “trust anything anymore,” and he didn’t really know what reality was.
He also admitted to the lawyer of one of the suing parents that he was susceptible to “mass group think.” “And so now I see that it’s more in the middle. All right? So that’s where I stand,” Jones said. Despite claiming that his mental state altered his worldview at one point, he claimed that he could “question big public events” as part of his First Amendment rights. “I believe children died. “I believe there was a mass shooting,” Jones said, adding that “experts” he’s spoken to—including “retired FBI agents and other people and people high up in the Central Intelligence Agency”—told him there was a “cover-up in Sandy Hook.”