As a father—hell, as a human being—there are fewer things that I find more frightening than a school shooting.

            Every day, I kiss my kids goodbye and send them off to school… and there is this moment, this dark thought, where a voice deep within the darkest corners of my subconscious asks: Is this the day? Will something bad happen to my kids at school?

            That we now live in a country where these kinds of questions are common… 

            Terrifying.

            The idea for Just A Hoax came about shortly after Alex Jones’ protracted trial around his false claims that the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting were not real. He is the grim inspiration for this tale, for better or worse. I’ve personally been fascinated with the shock-jock-as-antihero for a while now, ever since watching Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio. I was just a kid during the Morton Downey Jr. heyday, but his bark was still there. 

Then came Howard Stern. Then Rush Limbaugh. Then Jones. 

Then all hell breaks loose.   

I had a chance to explore a bit of this character personality for a scripted podcast series titled Quiet Part Loud, for Monkeypaw and Spotify, cowritten alongside Mac Rogers. That was a riff on the Tucker Carlsons and Bill O’Riellys of the time, but the personality persists. There have been so many voices that draw on an audience’s malleable belief system. To pull them in. To lose oneself. All you need is a magnetic personality behind the microphone to feel the undertow of radio waves.

I wrote the first draft of Just A Hoax in 2022. Here it is, finally seeing the light of day—or hearing it, I guess—in 2026. The scary thing about a story like this is, no matter how much time passes, there is always an articulate cult-like leader ready to exploit the belief systems of an audience. The succumbing of listeners is always prevalent, losing themselves to the words of a megalomaniac. The devotion, the destruction, it’s all there.The more things change, the more they stay the same.

—Clay McLeod Chapman

Poster art process snap by Brian Level