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Thinking about it again, this question belies a misunderstanding of just how seething mad we'd expect Jones's victims to be. He's basically engaged in an old school feud with these people, who did absolutely nothing to provoke him besides have their lives ruined.
We live in a society where we resolve things with court cases and laws and such. For most of human history, this group of victims would probably have just murdered Jones for being a pest. We live in a unique period where we don't allow you do that just because you're justifiably angry.
A judgment like this tries to protect society from that chaos. It acknowledges that what Jones had done is beyond the pale, but mollifies the homicidal rage of the wronged.
Free speech is meant to protect citizens from a tyrannical government, isn't it? If he'd stuck to defaming the government like a normal person, I suspect he wouldn't be in nearly so much trouble.
There seems to be a misunderstanding on the actual situation.
My understanding was that Alex Jones covered the conspiracy theory but did not actually originate it.
Schizos would have harassed the parents of these supposedly dead kids whether Alex Jones existed or not.
Maybe that one guy shouldn't have made that very odd laugh on camera right before talking about his kid(s?) getting shot.
Maybe AJ did insist too much on it, but even then, this is just suppression of political opponents.
Kind of what happened with Kanye West 'You can't say George Floyd died from fentanyl' while what they meant was 'You can't say that jews control the media and banks, or else we will disparage you and unbank you!'
None of these people care about the dead kids' parents, but they do care about the other stuff he was talking about, probably Epstein and co.
He didn't 'cover' it, he aired it. While a few Schizos might have harassed them anyway, his audience of Schizos surely follow him more than originating ideas individually; otherwise why watch him?
So one non-professional-broadcaster's bad emote on camera makes them more culpable than years of lies from a professional broadcaster? No.
I have no idea what you're on about here, but as far as I know Kanye West isn't being charged with any crimes, so I don't understand the comparison.
Who are 'these people'? The parents are the plantiffs.
MSM covered Epstein though.
Barely his accomplices (Ghislaine Maxwell and others) and hardly ever the clients of his blackmailing business.
People like Kanye West or Alex Jones will get everything taken away from them for speaking about one thing or another while human traffickers and their friends will hardly get anything happen to them.
When is Les Wexner getting unbanked for his friendship with Epstein?
Absolutely covered Maxwell, her trial was regularly front page news.
Nobody is taking Kanye's wealth except maybe whoever is bilking him into buying a social media site.
Right after Clinton, Trump, Gates, and Musk I imagine.
How many of the articles covering Maxwell bring up her dad's Mossad ties?
You must have missed the breaking of his contract by Adidas and other companies breaking business ties with him?
It's not his money until he earns it. An endorsement deal is not a suicide pact. Adidas isn't required to keep a pariah as it's brand ambassador.
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We live in a society that I believed had long left behind the settling of feuds and paying of weregilt. Insulting the honor of your neighboring clan might have been an issue for the courts a thousand years ago, but today?
Why not? By the ancient standards you appeal to, lese majeste is if anything a far greater crime than to defame an individual subject of common birth. Certainly, it seems far more likely to create 'chaos'.
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Sounds like extortion. Give us obscene amounts of money or we may go on a homicidal rage.
within reason. Is a billion or more dollars reasonable, especially we're talking an individual who doesn't even have anywhere close to that much money? Probably not.
Isn't that the point of laws and police. Rule of law can be upheld without acceding to unreasonable demands.
Wait till you find out about taxes.
'We want Jones's head on a spike' is an unreasonable demand. 'We want Jones to pay us a large sum of money' is reasonable.
Now if it's a matter of degrees, I once more refer you to 'don't piss off the court.' Had jones conducted himself like a law abiding citizen is expected to, he probably wouldn't be dealing with such a large judgment.
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In a world in which government didn't exist, Jones wouldn't have anyone to rant about. But assuming he still finds a reason to offend the families, he wouldn't probably wait like a sitting duck. He could recruit his followers to defend him.
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In short: Ingroup>outgroup?
The problem here is the 'direction' of the society you are talking about when justifying things that happen within it. To illustrate: There are thousands of things that happen every day that, in the past or under difference circumstances, would have instigated a potentially fatal altercation between those involved. So lets ask the question in the OP again, why is Alex Jones specifically getting sued for an amount seemingly plucked out of an Austin Powers movie, yet the other thousand instances that happen every day get ignored or even celebrated? I can certainly think of worse instances of abuse and harm than what Alex Jones did. Can't you?
To put things in a different context, if public figures start talking about the inherent evil of a people, and then others start attacking those people in the street at random, do we punish the public figures or the people who committed the crime? It seems bizarre to blame Jones as if he was the one phoning these peoples homes, right?
No it's not. Free speech as a concept is meant to sanctify and elevate the individuals right to expression within a society above that of the right of others to silence.
Alex Jones could have been Alex Jones and made up a different lie that didn't implicate random strangers as adversaries in some grand conspiracy. For example, he could have said that Adam Lanza was CIA.
Many many cases go to court every day, so I'm not sure what you're saying here. Jones clowned in court, and if you do that, all bets are off.
I have difficulty imagining a more ghoulish use of a radio show than to slander the mourning parents of slain children.
Consider the way 9/11 truthers operated. Very few denied that people actually died. I suspect that someone saying 'Cops are liars, none of them died in 9/11, they're just trying to take away our right to brandish box cutters on airlines' they'd be in shit just as deep.
In my ideal world we'd discourage that type of thing, yes. I think that there's a difference between slandering, say 'all white people', 'all black people', 'cops' or 'politicians' and, say, a very specific small group of people ('sandy hook families') and a necessary increase in liability to go with it. If someone says 'Officer Jones is a killer' and someone shoots Officer Jones, it's probably different than if Activist Bob says 'All cops are killers' and someone shoots officer jones. Now, if Activist Bob is the most recognizable cop hater in the whole country, which brings me to:
We live in the age of untouchable useful idiots who can be used for plausible deniability. In days past, people were more direct, and law enforcement got good at nailing organized crime. So now we have this: distributed crime with no explicit orders and all relationships are parasocial.
Which would still be irrelevant to the question as to why he got slapped with a trillion and not others.
Really? There are that many trillion dollar bills flying around the justice system?
I didn't specify radio shows. I said any instance of abuse or harm. Can you not think of any worse ones, more deserving of a trillion dollars in damages, than what Alex Jones did?
Why would you suspect that? Has that ever happened? I mean, when was the last time anyone got into shit a trillion dollar deep?
But we would not discourage group slandering, even though it leads to the exact same result? I don't understand the distinction you are trying to make. What if someone started killing members of the CIA because Alex Jones said Adam Lanza was a member of the CIA? Would that not, by your standard, be the fault of Alex Jones?
I don't understand the relevance of this. Nor do I understand the conflation of Alex Jones and InfoWars with organized crime.
Same reason Amber Heard got slapped with the judgment she did, despite the entire media apparatus and even many lawyers (for purely legal reasons, unlike the media) stating she would win: he behaved badly enough to be sued, put up a poor defense, was found guilty of egregious behavior and punished.
Are we going to argue that Amber Heard was an enemy of...there's really no name for it that doesn't sound conspiratorial... The cancellation machine wielded by the Left tribe?
Kevin Spacey, one of the original villains of MeToo, just won his court case against the accuser that torched his entire career. Are we going to argue that he's a favorite of the Left-tribe cancellation machine?
People will sue you for anything, to try to destroy you, but that doesn't mean that some people actually haven't put themselves into a position to face destruction as decided by a reasonable or at least median juror or judge.
EDIT: To use an example: Gawker was rightly destroyed due to their (hypocritical) behavior when they got Hulk Hogan's sex tape. Like many unwary internet people, they fucked around with real world consequences and found out. However in that case, unlike these ones, we know for sure that Hogan had a benefactor who had his own beef with Gawker. But I don't think anyone here thinks that that means that Gawker was destined to lose because Thiel skewed the trial. No. They made an enemy so he pursued them into the legal system. He won because Gawker was seen (rightly) as behaving egregiously.
Those would all be relevant arguments if we were talking about purely win/lose consequence. But we're not. We are talking about trillions vs slaps on the wrist.
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