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And if someone assassinates Trump, can Trump Jr bankrupt Maddow?
It is a very slippery slope to apply an “egging on” standard.
All laws are slippery slopes. I never understand this argument: "If you took this principle to an unreasonable extreme, terrible things will happen." Well, yes.
Trump Jr. suing Maddow on the premise that her bashing of Trump directly and intentionally or recklessly instigated an assassination would have to prove a lot of things beyond "Maddow said Trump bad."
Maybe things like calling him a threat to democracy or a Russian plant etc etc. not that dissimilar to what Jones did to be honest.
Law is supposed to have procedures that protect the defendant as much as it provides vindication to the plaintiff. For example, there is a limitation on unreasonable fines. This seems like a paradigmatic unreasonable fine.
If hordes of Maddow's followers started physically harassing Trump and she seemed to be egging it on (or at least conspicuously silent about it), he might have a case. But as others have pointed out, Jones's legal troubles were not just because of what he said, but because when sued he tried to play shell games with his finances.
This narrative some of you are swallowing where Alex Jones got sued to oblivion for the crime of wrongthink and offending liberals just doesn't hold up. The judgment may be absurd, but not for the reasons you are claiming.
Hmmmmm, what about a situation where a literal designated terrorist organization posted lists of people to harass, and the followers of that designated terrorist organization repeatedly committed criminal violence against those people?
But somehow I'm not seeing them being fined eleventy billion dollars, because they're just terrorists rather than political opponents of the regime.
Are you talking about Hamas? How do you imagine this equivalence works, since we can't sue Hamas?
I don't know, maybe they could actually investigate them for admitting to firebombing a federal building?
But hey, the libs who run the security state have more important targets, like kids leaving scooter tire marks on rainbow crosswalks and parents at school board meetings complaining about their kids being forced to read gay porn
Okay, I agree that firebombings should be investigated and prosecuting kids for driving scooters over rainbows is dumb. This has nothing to do with the actual topic, but sure, glad we're on the same page about firebombings and skid marks.
Oh, you're just going to do that thing where you pretend that Justice Was Done when someone you don't like is targeted for prosecution, acknowledging but then completely ignoring that the entire system is rigged to target only enemies of the regime.
When leftists vandalize people's homes and scrawl Hamas logos on their doors, this is of course bad but it means nothing that the state doesn't prosecute them. But of course someone carrying a lit tiki torch 8 years ago being re-prosecuted over and over is just the justice system working as intended, got it.
Ok, sure, my fault for forgetting the rule about interacting with users who pull manipulative debating strategies like that.
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Isn't Trump the victim of a nearly decade long harassment campaign that was initially started (in part) by very spurious claims and outright lies, which has now cost him millions of dollars and resulted in outright harassment from his political enemies via the legal system?
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Not to mention that the default judgment happened not once, but twice, in both Connecticut and Austin, after some of the most hilariously incompetent lawyering by his defense counsel. They accidentally emailed Jones’s unculled phone data to plaintiffs’ counsel, which included texts showing that Jones was refusing to produce relevant information, all after years of dilatory tactics and abuse. They data dumped on the plaintiffs in the Connecticut case, including child porn that should have been culled. If you are an unsympathetic defendant, maybe don’t fuck around with testing the limits of the rules of civil procedure.
Jones is definitely an enemy of the cathedral, but he’s also a scumbag and an idiot who deserved to lose his cases. He will get out of this relatively intact after discharging the judgment debt in bankruptcy and go back to being a convenient weakman for the left to meme on.
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What’s the standard here? If people tried to break into his home whilst burning historic churches next to where he then lived would that count?
Can you show that that was done by Rachel Maddow followers as a result of things she said? Can you show that it was happening for months or years? Can you show that she knew (or should have known) that it was happening, and did nothing about it?
No but we also can’t prove it was done as a result of Jones’ followers. Causation is really hard (people hear a lot of stuff and do random things all of the time).
That's what trials are for. If you believe the court was in error in finding Alex Jones responsible, I'd like to know why you think that, and if it is based on actually examining the arguments heard and their reasoning, or if your objection is based purely on the principals (not principles) involved.
The Alex Jones verdict did not establish that anyone with a media following who says mean things about someone is responsible for any harassment that person receives, and I don't think you actually believe that's what happened here.
There was no trial. Nobody decided either
Whether Jones's followers were in fact responsible OR
Whether, even if they were, that their actions (which would not have been legal even if Jones's claims were true) were a novus actus intervienien breaking the chain of liability.
Jones was found liable on a default judgement.
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