181–190 of 360 posts
Actually, no, the jury verdict on punitive damages is $45.2 million, but that is certain to be reduced before Jones is ordered to pay (there seems to be some dispute over whether a portion of the compensatory damages award is economic or not, and depending on the answer on that, the cap under Texas statutory punitive damages caps would seem to be somewhere between $750k and $1m; even if the plaintiffs succeed in thei…
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If Jones had stuck with "Sandy Hook was a false flag operation to take your guns," he would have been in the clear. The issue was his claim that the families whose children were murdered were "crisis actors".
It’s also interesting because he could still be 100% correct and they actually be crisis actors and the whole nine yards but that doesn’t actually matter in the outcome of the case as far as I can tell.
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How would Jones be found liable for defamation if his claims were “100% correct”?
By not showing up to court, and by not complying with discovery. Which is what he did, and why there are two default judgements against him. It doesn't matter how right you are, or how stupid a lawsuit against you is - if you don't show up, you aren't likely to win.
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Let me guess: you don’t have kids
Actually, no, the jury verdict on punitive damages is $45.2 million, but that is certain to be reduced before Jones is ordered to pay (there seems to be some dispute over whether a portion of the compensatory damages award is economic or not, and depending on the answer on that, the cap under Texas statutory punitive damages caps would seem to be somewhere between $750k and $1m; even if the plaintiffs succeed in thei…
Caps on punitive damages have always annoyed me, especially for things like the Exon Valdeze or similar oil spills, where the companies nickel and dime out the compensatory damages over years and then with capped punitive damages it barely impacts their bottom lines.
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He said that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, it was fake, it didn't happen. They play portions of it in an interview with him here: https://youtu.be/-HzOqZeX3Yk?t=524 He also claimed the parents were actors, and it was all done in front of a blue screen: https://www.mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2016%3A11%3A29%3A51...
He did this for years, after it was blindingly obvious to literally everyone but his followers that it wasn't some kind of 'deep state globalist false flag hoax with crisis actors'. Those followers would track down the parents no matter the circumstances, if they moved, they would be found and harassed, if they changed their names, they would be found and harassed. Jones kept platforming a lunatic named 'Wolfgang Hal…
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-tex...
> In our exchanges, Kelley Watt had spoken proudly of Madison, a gifted artist and linguist, who to Watt’s frustration “doesn’t question things the way her mother does.”
> In a fraught, seven-hour conversation, Madison relived the breakdown of her family while her mother pursued self-actualization through conspiracy-mongering. A reserved, cerebral young woman, she left Tulsa for good when she won a scholarship to a prestigious university in New York. Today she lives with her family in Europe, where she works as a consultant. She pushes back against her mother’s beliefs, but has never been able to dissuade her.
> When cornered by the truth, Kelley Watt “moves the goalposts,” Madison said, and she didn’t see much hope for changing her mother’s mind. “The only thing that could make her question it would be if that inner circle of hers started to doubt or chip away, but even then, it would be hard,” she told me.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/the-sandy-hook-hoax....
> Alex Jones invited Halbig on his show to share his run-in with the police and to detail the 16 questions Halbig believed needed to be answered about Sandy Hook. (“12. Why did the parents of the two children who died at the Danbury hospital not allow their children to donate their organs to other children waiting for the gift of life?”) Halbig told Jones the stress of the investigation was threatening his marriage, but said in another interview that nothing could stop him. “You’re willing to die for this?” the host asked.
> “Yes, I will,” Halbig said.
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> Does this set a precedent that anyone who spouts conspiracy theories about an event is targetable by those who suffered from that event? Not in any legal sense. 1) Defamation is already well established in US law; no novel legal questions came up regarding the borders of protected speach in this case. 2) Precedents are never set at trials. In order for anything from this case to become precedent, it would need to b…
There may be due process concerns over refusing to follow the due process?
The point I was making by bringing up a due process claim was that there is no path for this case to become precedent regarding free speech.
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I can’t tell if he’s a psychopath or mentally ill. Maybe whoever put the guy on air seems responsible on some level as well. We love to point the finger at this guy but a lot of people were responsible for many, many insane productions by him, and no one questioned if it should be aired long enough to realize this would be harmful to the victims’ families.
I used to listen to Jones a lot back around 2010 and I feel very confident that Jones fully believed it was a staged event, more surprising to me is that he corrected his mistake many times on air, on video and in person many years before he was sued. I said this in another comment as I hope his platform disappears, but I don't think justice is being served here.
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>> He tried to convince the world that the crime didn't actually happen and even worse tried to convince the world that the dead were actors and other nonsense. I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American. I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have. I appreciate the thought behind those laws. But I appreciate freedom of speech more.…
> And I do have faith that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that truth will prevail over lies. I wish I had that faith but I think the Holocaust stands as a pretty big counter-argument. I'm genuinely curious about your faith, do you think that something could have been done in Germany in the 30s which would have preserved free speech and prevented the Holocaust?
It's extremely obvious that Trump (his government, his admin) not being able to control the media, control speech, was a really good thing. And that's true whether it's a terrible Republican or terrible Democrat, or any other terrible politician, that is in power. If you give them one big lever of speech control to start from, they'll expand that control, you can count on that.
He got off easy considering he was profiting by ruining these people's lives