Monday, Oct. 17, 2022 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
A second civil trial against media personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, has resulted in a nearly $1 billion verdict for plaintiffs.
Good.
The modern digital media culture has given rise to figures like Jones, who have become wealthy by saying whatever outrageous thing generates clicks and views that translate to cash. That money is a strong drug, incentivizing media figures to go further and further with little regard for the truth and how the lies they promulgate damage innocent people.
The only antidote to the cocaine of media cash that encourages people to tell destructive lies is the loss of the same.
Whatever it takes to bankrupt Jones and disrupt his ability to destroy the lives of already hurting people is justice in this case. Jones’ insistence that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and that the 26 people slaughtered there — 20 of them children — were “crisis actors” caused their families to be harassed and threatened by the goons who listen to his show.
It’s all more than I can get my head around, really. I can’t imagine the pain of losing my small child to a brutal, senseless shooting. But to then have someone insist it was all fake, convincing others to harass me as if my family had done something wrong? As if we were anything other than victims to be shown compassion and care?
It’s ghoulish.
It’s uncertain how much, if any, of the money awarded will ever be paid to the plaintiffs. We know Jones’ company filed for bankruptcy protection in the middle of a July trial in Texas. What personal assets he may have is unclear after some lucrative years of shock-jock-type media production at InfoWars.
No amount of money can undo the emotional distress Jones’ content inflicted upon the Sandy Hook families. They had to hear the memories of their lost loved ones denigrated. They had to listen to themselves characterized — at the lowest and most vulnerable point in their lives — as evil people who were participants in some bizarre hoax to attack the Second Amendment. And then they had to fear that one of the unstable people listening to Jones would try to kill them, too.
I am offended by the name of Jones’ parent company: Free Speech Systems. It’s a type of blasphemy to associate what Jones does with the intent of the First Amendment. He is not a crusader speaking out against the powers that be in good faith. He is a pirate.
And if you accept that, as he asserted in this trial, Jones believed the hoax narrative when he repeatedly published it and later came to understand that it was false, I’ve got some beachfront property in Houston County to sell you. He’s not that stupid. He is that immoral.
He is a vulgar profiteer who abuses the sacred gift of free speech to line his pockets with no regard for the truth or the damage inflicted by his lies. Sex traffickers use little girls’ bodies to enrich themselves. Jones traded in the emotional torture and endangerment of already-traumatized people to make a dime.
And in a sense, Jones’ listeners are also victims. Our nation is up to its throat in individuals with fragile mental health. They are susceptible to the deceptions of people like Jones. I feel certain some of the people most deceived by his insistence that Sandy Hook was a false flag fall in this category: paranoid, confused and easily led astray. And for profit, he further confused and scared them, convincing them that the victims’ families were threats to our nation.
And perhaps the greatest offense of all is that a horrible actor like Alex Jones and a case like this runs the risk of chilling legitimate free speech. The families hurt by Jones deserve to get every dime the jury awarded them. But every precedent established by civil litigation sends a message and has effects beyond the case at hand.
Civil verdicts do two things: They compensate for actual damages and use punitive damages to send a message to bad actors and those tempted to follow in their footsteps. Sometimes in the marketplace, people without a soul will treat wrongdoing as a simple math problem: risk versus reward. Without the hammer of punitive damages, those with deeper pockets (think massive corporations or large media enterprises) may do the math and choose wrongdoing if the potential profit outweighs the financial liability risk. The threat of punitive damages restrains that impulse.
This mega-verdict could be the thing that causes other legitimate publishers to recalculate the potential damages they could face if pursued for slander or defamation. And that math could chill the resolve of persons who face some risk in telling the actual truth based on the power and resources of those who don’t want to hear it.
The jury in this case knew wrongdoing when they saw it and responded appropriately to it. But we all bear the cost of Alex Jones’ disregard for truth or ethical standards.
Dana Hall McCain is a columnist for al.com.
