Alex Jones Is No Free Speech Martyr

Right-wing conspiracist and human pus-bubble Alex Jones wants a new trial.

A month after a Connecticut jury slapped him with $965 million worth of compensatory damages for defaming the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, he apparently believes he’s entitled to one.

And as the court now moves to consider punitive damages, which could put him on the hook for much more, he’s desperate for a do-over.

He won’t get it.

Nor should he.

With its near billion-dollar judgment against him, the jury delivered a blow for human decency and against the forces of vulgar deceit Jones so perfectly embodies.

Here’s hoping the courts enforce it by attaching his properties — all of them — and blocking his attempts to shield his assets through fraudulent bankruptcy maneuvers.

He deserves nothing less.

Nothing less than complete and utter financial ruin.

Every dollar beyond that required to keep him fed and off the street — only because no one should go hungry or without shelter — should be taken from him.

Everything else he manages to earn, either from his rancid ventilations or his supplement sales, should be confiscated. They should be given — every penny of them — to the families of the children killed at Sandy Hook, whose memories Jones so viciously besmirched to his demented base of fans by claiming that the grieving parents were crisis actors.

Fuck him and anyone else who believes that.

Seriously, if that thought even entered your mind in the aftermath of Sandy Hook or any other slaughter of schoolchildren, anywhere, you are a horrible and likely irredeemable human being.

And no, were the courts to grind Alex Jones’s finances to dust, leaving him bereft of even two nickels to rub together, it would not be indicative of cancel culture run amok. If the courts, which is to say the government, take everything he owns, it will not be an act of censorship.

Alex Jones’s free speech rights have not been violated by the jury verdict.

That verdict’s enforcement would not violate them either.

What Alex Jones did was not protected by the First Amendment.

And those who think it was — people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Charlie Kirk — wouldn’t know the Constitution from a colostomy.

First, Alex Jones wasn’t punished for his political beliefs. He has spent years spouting his bullshit views without consequence.

Second, it was his unwillingness to comply with the court’s request for documents that led to the default judgment against him in the Sandy Hook case.

If Jones had cooperated with the discovery process in a timely and comprehensive manner instead of trying to play hide-and-seek with his financial and web analytics data, he would have had a chance to win during the liability phase of the trial.

But by failing to do that — by choosing not to — Jones invited the judge to enter the verdict against him. For her to do so was entirely appropriate as a matter of civil court procedure.

If he had followed the rules, he might have avoided that fate, but having trampled them, he deserves no sympathy.

Third, and here’s the clincher: free speech does not allow you to defame people. Nor does it allow you to speak in a way that incites others to commit or threaten violence. Jones’s Sandy Hook claims violated both of these truisms.

You can say stupid and false things, but if those stupid and false things defame the character of other people — in this case, by suggesting they were lying about their dead kids for some pernicious political ends — you have crossed the first line.

And when such claims are almost certain to result in threats of violence against those you accuse of such perfidy, you have crossed the other one.

It is time to shut down the right-wing lie machine, not because they lie, but because so many of their lies amount to personal smears and incitements to violence.

If you have some burning desire to shout stupid shit like “Trump won,” okay loser, have at it.

But when you identify specific people or voting machine companies as having stolen it from him, and yet, have no evidence (because they didn’t), you deserve to be sued to the point that packaged Ramen becomes a luxury.

If you want to say that “mass shootings are used as political fodder to push for gun control,” again, have at it.

But when you accuse people of fabricating those shootings, you are accusing grieving parents and families of being fraudsters.

And when you do that, those you smeared deserve to see you ruined.

We all do.

Let’s hope it happens. And that it hurts.

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This post was previously published on AfroSapiophile.

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