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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>Incitement to credible threats of violence

Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be incitement.

That's why he wasn't convicted of incitement, he was convicted of defamation.

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Because accuracy is important when discussing legal terms - he wasn't convicted. Defamation is a civil offense, and not a crime. He lost a lawsuit, he did not become a convict.

Watch the Behind the Bastards podcast on Alex Jones or read some of the testimony from his various cases. The amount of evidence burying him is incontrovertible. His actions before during and after are incontrovertible.

There’s a reason even the right wing hardliners abandoned this guy.

Alex has not been abandoned. Tucker Carlson is a frequent guest on his show, and they toured together recently.

More to the point he has Roger Stone and Steve Bannon on the show constantly, who in turn have direct access to Trump.

Alex is firmly within the mainstream of the right wing.

> Incitement means means explicitly encouraging.

He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s all “just comedy” right?

Anyone defending Alex Jones in this case is either ignorant, a fool, or an absolute garbage human being.

I am going to pick ignorant in this case.

> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”

> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”

Blanket statements like this are worse than useless. It's a nuanced discussion of damages, not a conversation of whether Alex Jones was right or wrong.

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