Nigel Farage appeared to compare parents bereaved by the Sandy Hook school shooting, who took legal action against a far-right US conspiracy theorist, to leftwingers trying to curb free speech, it has emerged. The Reform UK leader was interviewed by Alex Jones on his Infowars platform in 2018, just after the parents began legal action against the radio show host for claiming that the massacre was faked. Farage did not dispute Jones’s assertion that he was being targeted by “frauds”. Instead, Farage said Jones’s experiences seemed to tie into a wider attempt to quash free speech, saying “the left and the state are fighting back with all their might” after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. A spokesperson for Farage said the politician was “not even sure he was even aware of Sandy Hook at the time” of the interview, in April 2018. In December 2012, 26 people were killed by 20-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut – one of the worst school shootings in US history. In more recent interviews, Farage praised the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the “emasculated”. It has also emerged that last year Farage said he would enjoy interviewing the conspiracist David Icke to find out more about how he came up with his views. And this weekend Farage doubled down on his claim that the west had provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine, insisting he was not an “apologist or supporter of Putin”. The office of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was among those to condemn the Reform leader, saying he had been “infected with the virus of Putinism”. Farage has previously been criticised for appearing on Jones’s shows at least six times, and Jewish groups have expressed concern after Farage used these appearances to discuss conspiracy theories, some of which have been linked to antisemitism. In the most recent of the interviews, Jones complained that free speech was under threat because the “left is trying to bully it out of existence”. He went on: “They have filed 15 frivolous lawsuits on me now. More came in today. The lawyers see it, they’re total frauds, they’re overturned as fast as they come in. But they are so authoritarian – the left is so authoritarian.”
It was at this time that two of the bereaved Sandy Hook families sued Jones and Infowars for defamation, having become the target of internet conspiracy theorists after Jones argued that the shooting was a staged “false flag” event. Jones has since been ordered to pay the parents $1.5bn in damages, and faces the liquidation of his personal assets and bankruptcy for Infowars. In the interview, Farage replied to Jones: “Yes, the liberals actually are very illiberal. In fact the liberals have become the very fascists that they try and criticise with their rhetoric.” He said this was a reaction to Brexit and Trump, and added: “If we can resist this politically correct charge, this attempt to stop us thinking and speaking freely, if we can resist that, then our victory actually will be complete.” Elsewhere in the same interview, Farage argued that leftwingers “hate Christianity” and wanted to abolish the nation state, saying: “They want to replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the new world order.” While Farage has denied any antisemitic intent, the terms “globalists” and “new world order” regularly feature in antisemitic conspiracy theories. Speaking about Icke, the former footballer and BBC sports presenter who has spent recent decades promoting conspiracy theories, including that the British royal family are lizards, Farage told a podcast last August that it would be interesting to interview him. “I’d like to get to the bottom of how some of these ideas came into being … you know, the lizards and all that,” Farage told the Disruptors podcast. “He does have a following. Some of the things he says, I think, ‘Oh that’s interesting.’ And then he says stuff and I think, ‘Oh no, no I can’t live with it.’ In terms of a life journey, how do you go from being a trusted face by millions on the BBC to being considered one of the most eccentric people in the country?” Farage’s spokesperson said he had never supported Icke, and was only discussing the “general point of interest” about how he had amassed a following. The spokesperson added: “The Guardian are scraping the barrel with this one. Perhaps its journalists have nothing better to do than sit through countless hours of interview footage to find very little.”