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He caused his fans to harass families of murdered children for years, several had to move, some multiple times. All the while Alex Jones was raking in millions in cash off it.
shouldn’t the harassers be tried ?
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HN doesn't like these kinds of questions. You're right - it is OK as long as he's not profiting nor has a bullhorn the size of his. Otherwise, Wolfgang Halbig would be in the same kind of shit. He isn't.
HN isn't one guy with coherent views... But anyway, it's not a very good question because it isn't plausibly serious nor logically related to the previous post.
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Obviously that doesn't mean they have a billion in assets, but it does speak to how large their operation is.
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Jones made money from lying, but remains free of government interference. Nobody’s killing him or even putting him in jail. That’s the very definition of free speech. But free speech doesn’t mean speech without consequences. He’s being sued by the victims of what he said. It’s not the government doing this, it’s the people he hurt, and that’s the definition of “justice”.
Why does making money change the legality of what he was saying?
The fact that he made money from it simply helps the judge - who is not part of the government executive - understand the motivation for what he did. The reason someone did something might be a mitigating factor in some cases, but this time it’s probably aggravating.
But TBH I don't really want to live in a world when Alex Jones exists at all.
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One of the lawyers made in the previous case what I consider an interesting argument: Alex Jones claimed under oath that his show reaches (off the top of my head) about a hundred million people. So the lawyer argued that Alex Jones should pay $1 for every person who heard him lie about Sandy Hook. By this measure, if I intentionally harass someone on Twitter I'd have to pay the victim about $50 (on a good day). Since…
If those were the reasonable standards, every media-company would be broke. I'd argue traditional media reaches many more people and the impact of intentional lies is that much greater.
That doesn't make it any less reasonable of a standard.
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First amendment has limitations. Saying fire in a movie theater, for example. Multiple courts in a number of separate jurisdictions have ruled that the first amendment does not protect Jones in these cases
None of that is relevant here, because defamation is an established exception to the 1st amendment, totally separate from incitement of lawless action.
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FTA:
"Jones ... argued for years that the massacre was a "staged" government plot to take guns from Americans and that "no one died."...He now acknowledges the attack was "100% real", a concession he made in August at a separate defamation trial in Texas."
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Jones stated that the Sandy Hook victims were crisis actors. he knew that to be false. it was an egregious case of defamation. knowingly spreading lies that damage someone's reputation is called slander, and it's not protected by the first amendment. neither is shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, or committing perjury, or falsifying your income taxes.
You're making up a narrative for why suppressing free speech is acceptable in this instance, not discharging the notion that free speech was, in fact, suppressed. The fact that a conspiracy talk radio guy can get hit with a billion dollar fine for some off-hand nutso claim (that he subsequently recanted!) is a very unpromising barometer for the health of free speech in our country.
There were so many points in this saga where Alex could have made decisions that would have made the outcome less severe and he doubled down almost every time instead. Even as the last trial was wrapping up, he was going on air and defaming the judge in the case while calling one of the plaintiffs "slow" and a victim of manipulation[1].
There is such a thing as consequences for your actions.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/alex-jones-railed-against-sandy-19364...