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Despite that, he lost. He lost multiple times in multiple cases across multiple jurisdictions spanning a decade. He has appealed, and lost, multiple times. Multiple judges and multiple juries have found him liable for a litany of incidents of defamation. Hell, at one point he even lied under oath! Which, depending on the circumstances and the judgement of the prosecutor, could have turned into criminal charges!
And CNN and other news outlets DO get sued for defamation. The most famous such case would probably be Richard Jewell, a security guard who was falsely accused by news outlets of planting a pipe bomb at the 1996 Summer Olympics. A more recent example would be Nicholas Sandmann, falsely accused of racist and aggressive actions at a demonstration.
Nothing is new about Alex Jones. You say "All that's needed is more sunlight, not more politically motivate lawfare". By your own words, you aren't calling for some return to the status quo, you are calling for a change. You think that existing defamation laws should be reformed, because without that you get totalitarianism. But then the burden is on you: if defamation laws are the road to totalitarianism, why haven't we slid into totalitarianism in the last few centuries?
Regarding totalitarianism: Democrats have been fighting against Free Speech in countless ways, but thus far keep getting defeated in their efforts, by conservatives with more wise minds. Take Britain as an example. People over there are now being JAILED over non-violent political speech, and even speech that is merely "impolite" to protected groups. So to think totalitarianism can't happen to Western Countries is wrong. It can. It is. Currently in the USA however, the good guys have just won an election, and a clean sweep and a mandate to restore Freedom and Common Sense.
If anything, the takeaway from this story is that the United States Court System is still a system of law and when they demand your attention, you ignore that demand at your peril.
> Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence?
Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. And to corroborate your point: perhaps whether or not they lie, the public opinion already holds them accountable so no legal action is needed. But to properly answer the hypothetical: they retain a legal department in preparation for such lawsuits. Perhaps Jones should have done that, since he had quite a bit of spare money to spend on engaging with the law of the land he lives in. Instead, he chose to flout the authority of that legal system, to his loss.
But the legal defense of both Trump and Jones had every opportunity to take every rule that favors the defendant to their advantage and... They didn't. That set of 12 jurors with "pre-existing highly-biased hatred" was filtered by Jones's own representation. The evidence that Jones had evidence the rules of the Court require him to disclose that he did not disclose was revealed by his own lawyers. There are rules to this process and he either chose to ignore them or he retained incompetent representation.
Powerful men believe they don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of their fellow citizens. The system disagrees.
The sum total of your last post can be summarized as: "They both lost Lawfare Fair and Square, because the system works how it works, and their lawyers failed, and thus they probably deserved to lose, especially because of their wealth and fame, making them probably bad people."
I disagree.
The biggest weakness in our Legal system is that people who think exactly like you do get themselves onto Juries, by saying all the right words, and appearing unbiased when you're absolutely not.
(https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088639577/alex-jones-skipped...)
The biggest stumbling block to Alex Jones prevailing in the civil case against him was Alex Jones, by treating a legal proceeding as a minor inconvenience.
Anyway, I wouldn't put much worry in my opinion of powerful rich men. Neither of us will ever be enough of one for it to matter.
(FWIW... Jones losing a civil suit doesn't make him a bad person. Accusing the families of eight dead kids of making up that their kids were massacred, then profiting off of that lie, would have made him a bad person whether or not he ever saw justice over it.)
My position is that being bad isn't a crime. Telling lies isn't a crime. Insulting people isn't a crime. etc. Trump and Jones were treated badly because people like you are willing to wage lawfare against the powerful and the wealthy simply because they hate people for being powerful and wealthy.
Since you bring up my own wealth, I indeed am in the top 1% of population, so speak for yourself.
What is your position on repeatedly using lies to engage in slander and libel towards a specific group of people over a long period time?
The fact that reasonable people often disagree about what's true and what's not is exactly why we must have Free Speech codified in law. The opposite of Free Speech is when one group of people get to lay down the law and assert that their biased point of view is the one true correct world view, and forcibly shutdown the speech of those who disagree.
I suppose I'm just curious about a hypothetical, like... I'm wondering where you might draw a line, so maybe entertain me with this for a sec?
Let's say you and I work together, and for whatever reason, I don't like you. Maybe you and I are competing for a promotion, or maybe an interaction rubbed me the wrong way, doesn't matter - I want you gone. So, I decide to spread some nasty rumors about you throughout the office - you leer at co-worker's children, you're aggressively sexual with the women in the office, shit like that. Whatever I've come up with to disparage you is bullshit, but for the sake of this conversation, let's say I put a lot of effort into this and that you end up getting let go because of it. Maybe the rumors even happen to jump from your co-workers over to your friends/family. Some of them stop talking to you. Perhaps other businesses in the industry hear about it and opt not to hire you, either.
What's your stance on that sort of speech?
"That government is best which governs least." --Henry David Thoreau, 1849
Meanwhile, the old saw about those who trade freedom for safety deserving neither Liberty nor safety actually referred to the colonial government considering allowing the Penn family to forgo taxes in perpetuity in exchange for deploying some mercenaries to fight on the colonial frontier. Benjamin Franklin was talking to the legislature, and reminding them that they have the liberty of setting the law as they see fit - by giving up that Liberty via a guarantee of perpetual freedom from taxation for temporary safety, they (The legislature) would deserve neither.
In practice, government is forever a balancing act between liberties and safety. One can start at social contract theory and work one's way out from there if one wants a formal grounding, or one can go the common sense route and understand that if you go around cheating people, eventually people are going to gang up on you because we are social creatures.
The First Amendment is there to protect objective truth from government stifling, but the judicial process recognizes truth exists (if it didn't, we'd have no use for trials) and that wanton disregard for truth can cause harm to a person.
If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him. I say there was a lot of personal hatred for him PRIOR to the lawsuit which is the true reason for the huge settlement. People hated him, and they used lawfare to get at him.
Yes, that's a hole in your understanding of the fact-pattern. He wasn't fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy. The error of his lawyer revealed evidence that he knew the conspiracy was false but he spread it because it made the people who listen to him keep listening and buying his products, which crosses the line into "malicious" and opens him up (in most states, including Texas) to significantly larger penalties.
Jones was hit with a level of consequence few defendants in civil suits over slander are hit with because of how egregious, continuous, and malicious the offense was and because he took actions to mislead the jury.
If you're more familiar with crimlaw, civil court is a significantly different animal and worth learning more about. It serves a slightly different function in American society but is part of the fabric of systems that let people sleep at night.
> If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him.
We are currently a pretty tribal society, so I suspect you are correct that nobody on the Left would sue. But you can bet that someone on the Right would have (for bathroom reading, look for summaries of the suits Donald Trump has brought against people in his 78 years and ask yourself if you would consider that "lawfare"). The civil courts are intended to make people who have been harmed whole; someone on the left lying about someone on the right would have to be sued by the aggrieved party for the case to exist.
And you are right that emotion enters into it. But regardless of the jury's opinion of the man before the trial (and, again, both parties, which includes Alex Jones's legal representation, tuned the jury to be maximally charitable to their side)... He lied to them on the stand. I don't know that a jury exists that is magnanimous enough to overlook that. One of the points of a jury trial is to judge not just the facts but the overall character of the defendant (because so many facts tend to originate from the defendant themselves, so if the defendant flips the bozo bit in the minds of the jurors, that matters). If you're looking for someone to blame for Jones's fate, start with Jones.
Because the evidence shows he's not crazy; he's a con artist.
On point #2. Your main point is that both sides act in bad faith equally, and I disagree. Dems have been eating up CNN/MSM left-wing propaganda and brainwashing for over a decade and so now there's just no common ground between the two sides any longer.
There was a law passed in 1995 by a Democratic majority to cap damages at $750k in Texas; the judge on appeal to Jones's Texas ruling found that the law was unconstitutional.
On point 2, we will probably agree to disagree. If anything, I believe the GOP has taken the most steps to disrupt and destroy norms of legal practice and has opened the door to using the law as a tool for shaping society. The Trump administration, for example, tried to rig the census in 2020 (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-trumps-census-s...), an initiative that fell apart primarily because the daughter of a GOP political operative attained a hard drive of her father's that revealed that a citizenship question would bias the results, under-counting the population of areas with more (legal and non-legal) immigrants.
It's actually quite hard to get the Executive's authority on the topic of census questions put under scrutiny, and the evidence in the email correspondence on the drive was so damning that it caused the census change to fail to pass a judicial challenge (essentially the only way for the Executive to fail to pass that bar is if they were lying about the justification, and... They were).
What you may be observing is that both sides practice lawfare but one side seems consistently bad at it...
Back on Jones: I don't know if $1.5 billion is fair. I do note that the Information Age gives people much larger megaphones to spread information much further than ever before. I don't think we fully comprehend the effect that has on society. In the short run, I don't consider the fact that if you say something so egregiously wrong that you hurt people in multiple jurisdictions, you could be on the hook for damages in multiple jurisdictions and that could result in a sum-total civil penalty larger than any individual jurisdiction would levy to be obviously wrong? Criminal law doesn't generally work that way (federal authority would subsume), but civil law is a different beast.
On the plus side, this fate is eminently avoidable: don't maliciously push lies that hurt people in multiple states. I'm not sure you've recognized how egregious the lying was, how unapologetic he was about it, and how much that impacts a final court decision on one's fate (in general, not just if someone has an [R] after their name in a political census).
(Wikipedia suggests the term itself originates from black communities, which is not synonymous with Democrats. I think it's fair to assert the practice without the name is much older).
The Dixie Chicks had their career derailed with only a nascent Internet in existence. It was never necessary for people to organize and decide collectively something needed to be shunned.
"Cancel culture refers to the mass withdrawal of support from public figures or celebrities who have done things that aren't socially accepted today."
That's a pretty concise description of what happened to the Dixie Chicks after they criticized George W. Bush.
And yes shaming started in the Garden of Eden, and that has nothing to do with Cancel Culture.
And to be clear: you're right. None of the things Jones did were crimes. If they were, he'd have been in criminal court. Civil court is for restitution of wrongs between individual parties and resolution of disputes. When the strictures of law are broken, criminal court is involved; when someone is wronged, civil court is involved. And make no mistake: you can wrong someone with words. It is not a violation of one's freedom of speech that if a party goes around telling everyone you cheated someone out of a million dollars and you didn't, you can sue that person to (a) compel them to cease to lie and (b) make restitution for the damage those lies did to your reputation and opportunities. This is an old feature of the American judiciary, at least a thousand years old and inherited from England... And it's there because the alternative is more crime (because if you can't be made whole when someone's wronged you, you must logically take steps to prevent further harm by doing ill to the threat).
The legal system handles more than crime. Nobody's "been bad" in every divorce or an estate settlement. And when someone is harmed by another individual in a way that doesn't have a specific stricture against it, we have civil courts to make the harmed person whole.
(I'm a lot more interested in talking about Jones than Trump. Trump is a separate case entirely... For example, he was in criminal court, he was charged with falsifying business records, a crime because it strikes at the process of truth that the law depends on to regulate business, and he was convicted of doing so. Trump's circumstances are different enough to Jones's that there isn't any productive discourse to have in lumping them together. If you disagree with the criminal process of the courts of the State of New York, you are welcome to your opinion but you can discuss it with someone else. I hope the first question they ask you is what makes his case special as opposed to the other people in New York who were found guilty of NY Penal Law § 170.10).
Wow, I didn't expect you to openly admit you're in favor of lawfare, especially based on wealth discrimination; but after reading that stark confession in the first sentence it saved me some time, because I didn't keep reading past that.
This is a weird post-legal era we live in, where it appears people hold the law itself in contempt. I'm not super excited to see what happens next, because we've tried alternatives to rule of law and they haven't generally worked great...
> because I didn't keep reading past that.
As, of course, is your right. I don't generally make these posts for individuals; I share these thoughts for the larger discourse on Hacker News. If, as an individual, you don't wish to use your time to consider this alternate viewpoint, it is your time.
You knew precisely what the word meant when you used it.
The Sandy Hook families were private individuals; the only thing they had in common is a man killed their kids and then another man told his hundreds of thousands of listeners, over and over again, that those kids didn't exist. They had no platform to shout down his lies. They had no corporation to fund an antidote to his lying. They had no resources to stop the harassing phone calls and death threats from the people Jones convinced they were monsters.
What they had was a right, under common law in the United States, to not have their names dragged through the mud. And they took the man who did that to court and they won. In a country where, we should note, truth is an affirmative defense (and not one that Jones proffered, because truth was not on his side).
This is the story of victory of the marginalized and powerless over a media mogul who hurt strangers for a buck. It is good that they live in a country where such people can hold the powerful to account.
And hey. If injustice was done he can counter-sue to rectify it. Perhaps we should take note that he won't because the law is not on his side... They didn't wrong him.
Lol, you know that isn't what's happening.
The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about.
An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison.
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-10-28/segment...
> HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said.
> Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election?
> RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with.
Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
There was a time before the Nazi party was orchestrating a genocide. The party didn't start obviously evil. It found its way there through a series of circumstances and a need to maintain control in the face of global opposition and no policy within the party itself to actually address successfully the problems Germany was facing, leading to blind trust of a leader and his his inner circle over sense, reason, and morality.
There is a real and tangible risk that the modern American GOP is following the same path.
And hey, the German people who supported the Nazis didn't want to hear what they were turning into either. Their descendants got to live with that on their consciences.
... but back on topic: none of this explains why, if the accusation isn't true, nobody is suing CNN for defamation over these accusations.
This is a very disingenuous take. There's a litany of footage of Alex Jones saying everything he said about Sandy Hook being fake and speaking ill of those impacted family members - do you have a litany of footage of CNN anchors/staff calling all conservatives Nazis?
They really ramped it up during the election, but most Americans saw thru it and knew it was lies.
You just moved the goal post. That's why I never send people like you links. No matter what links you get you'll tap dance right out of it, and pretend it's proven nothing, dispute everything, adjusting goal posts as necessary along the way. lol.
All you have provided is conjecture - "They're doing it!".
MY PROOF: There's countless, easy to find, Youtube montages of CNN/MSM news anchors spouting the Nazi/Fascism accusation at the MAGA movement.
If you try to expand my words to mean something else, just so you can disprove that something else, that's called straw-manning.
How easy? "cnn calls conservatives nazis" doesn't really return the results you're suggesting should be there[1].
>If you try to expand my words to mean something else, just so you can disprove that something else, that's called straw-manning.
Relax, nobody is doing that. I asked for proof, you gave me conjecture instead. Simple as that lol.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cnn+calls+conse...
I certainly see a couple of videos with CNN reporting on someone calling GOP fascists, but... that's it. I don't see any CNN reporters or anchors explicitly, and repeatedly, calling them fascists. No montages, either. Oh well.
>... even despite that youtube rigs their search results against conservatives.
So, I'm supposed to go to YouTube to find "countless, easy to find" (your words!) proof that I'm looking for, but once I've started searching and finding little of any of that, your response is, "YouTube rigs their search results against conservatives". What was that you'd said about shifting goalposts? :)
Yes, that’s a Copilot answer because you should already know this, especially if you live in America.
Unless you can show me where, this year, CNN repeatedly said Trump shouldn't be elected because he explicitly colluded with Russia in 2016, you're trying to compare apples and oranges.
The fact they gave up on the Russiagate conspiracy after a while doesn't obviate them pursuing it because they "thought it had teeth" (it didn't) or because the conspiracy theory was believed by "everyone" (it wasn't).
My gut instinct is that he'd sworn to the Clintons years before that he'd never publicly talk about that firm.
That's about standard for how most media organizations handle shit, right-wing outlets included.
No human has the omniscience to be able to flag anything as "true" or "false". Best example in recent history: Hunter Laptop. People will flag it as "false" even knowing it's "true". The FBI and 51 officials did exactly that and it was enough to swing 2020 election all by itself. Not to mention the 100s of other political lies, everything from drinking bleach hoax, to "good people on both sides" hoax.
> Instead, the publication portrayed Biden as a blue-collar "average Joe", an affable "goofy uncle", a muscle car driver, an avid fan of 1980s hair metal, a raucous party animal, a shameless womanizer, a recidivist petty criminal, and a drug-dealing outlaw. --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_(The_Onion)
Neither of those things have gone away. Jones is still himself just not under the "InfoWars" banner, and the first amendment is still very much in place. Not sure what you think is actually happening here.
>You can always tell who the liars and propagandists are...
... when they admit to lying about Sandy Hook in court. Like Jones did.
There are people in Britain being jailed for what amounts "impoliteness" right now, and are simply not allowed to even politely speak out against their Gov't immigration policy for example. Once Freedom of Speech is taken away, the rest of the freedoms will also be taken away. Speech is always the first thing to go, because people tend to tolerate loosing it, due to not realizing until it's too late, that it's the most valuable thing of all.
Nobody's freedom of speech has been taken away. What has been stopped is Jones' perceived "freedom of harassment" - he's allowed his opinion, he's not allowed to badger the hell out of the families based on his opinion, which is what he did.
Nobody has lost their freedom of speech because of this. Don't be silly.
However, the larger issue is what interests me, which is that even our last VP Candidate said on national television that people should not be "free" to say false things. Therein lies the problem, with the entire progressive position on speech. Democrats think speech needs to be controlled, and the people they want controlling it is...of course...themselves.