Alex Jones Judgement

We've covered Alex Jones many times in the past. Alex Jones is a fairly well-known far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist. Most skeptics will be aware of his InfoWars website, which promotes conspiracy theories and certified-real fake news.

Jones has been in court over claims he made about the Sandy Hook shooting. Sandy Hook is a small village in Newtown, Connecticut, and its elementary school was the site of a school shooting where 26 people died, most of which were young children.

Jones made claims on his radio show and website that the shootings were faked, and that the people involved were “crisis actors” (despite no such job ever existing). As such, some of his audience then went on to harass the families of the victims, including desecrating the graves of the victims. Some of the families of the victims have been the target of death threats, and have been forced to move several times. One father of one of the victims unfortunately took his own life, but Jones then went on to suggest that he was murdered instead.

The families took Jones to court, suing him and his companies for defamation. The court cases have not gone well for Jones, with him seemingly refusing to follow the rules of the legal system in providing evidence as part of discovery. This resulted in default judgements against him, which required he pay all damages in the lawsuits.

Back in July jury trials began to decide the amount that Jones and his companies must pay the victims. The cases were quite a spectacle, with Jones treating them as a joke or as one of his performances, and failing to show up, or even put on a defence, in some instances.

Last week, in a trial that consolidated the three cases, the jury decided on an amount of $965 million dollars to be shared by the 15 plaintiffs. Jones was broadcasting, and reacted live to the verdict by mocking it, and claiming that the victims won't actually see any money.

And while Jones isn't a billionaire, he certainly has substantial wealth. He has claimed he's bankrupt, but forensic analysis of his activity has estimated his net worth to be somewhere between $150M and $270M USD. He certainly has wealth spread around - owning five houses in Texas alone.

It appears that Jones and those like him live in two separate worlds. There's the make believe world where they spout their unbelievable claims to their viewers and subscribers, and then there's the real world where they're required to adhere (sometimes) to actual laws and be held to account.

Jones undoubtedly knows that he's lying about everything, but he does it simply to make money. Famously, when his marriage to his former wife ended in divorce in 2015, he claimed, during a custody trial for his children, that he was a performance artist essentially playing a role.

How does he make money? Alongside his conspiracy theory work, he has his InfoWars store, where you can buy all manner of unskeptical products. The main thrust of his sites seems to be to generate outrage and promote misinformation, which he handily has solutions for in the form of products and services.

Perusing the site gives you access to a variety of InfoWars-branded health supplements all of which are completely lacking in proofs of efficacy and full of pseudoscientific language.

As an example, you can buy their Survival Shield X-3 Nascent Tri-Iodine (pictured above), a bottle which will set you back $45.95 USD ($82 NZD) for a 1 ounce bottle. The webpage for the product contains this doozy of a phrase: “Thermodynamic Pressure Sensitive High Energy Sound Pulse Nano-Emulsion Technology”. Honestly, the people who make this stuff up must be having a quiet giggle to themselves.

Of course, all of the claims on the page are subject to the usual asterisk, which leads to the standard disclaimer “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” You know the drill!

In addition to health supplement products, there's a preparedness category, where you can buy freeze dryers, survival gear and accessories, water and air filtration products, and survival foods, all of which are over-priced, but probably likely to appeal to his target audience.

Another part of the operation is to simply appeal to his audience for donations, to play the victim, to help keep the show alive. I note that he asking for donations via cryptocurrency.

People like Jones are following a simple formula and latching onto people's gullibility and hunger for certainty in a complex world. There are people like him exploiting others all over the world, though arguably Jones is the worst of his kind. But, we have our own here - those attempting to emulate his success - such as CounterSpin Media, and Chantelle Baker (currently in Odessa, Ukraine interviewing pro-Putin people funded by the donations of gullible people over here) and many others.

Coming back to the court cases, some of his businesses have filed for bankruptcy protection, but Jones himself has not. It does seem that Jones will inevitably have to cough up money, though likely well short of the $965 million dollar judgement, which will be reduced on appeal anyway. But, he is a big spender, with estimates he spends around $300K USD per month. Naturally, he's now claiming to be poor, and has attempted to move assets into others' names. These efforts will likely fail though, which is great.

Over on the InfoWars site, they've published an opinion piece claiming that the court cases and resulting judgement are absurd. The piece is written by somebody from the Mises Institute, which is an extreme liberterian think tank.

They make the claim that Alex Jones didn't do anything wrong - he didn't explicitly order anybody to harass families or desecrate victims' graves. From the piece:

“Essentially, Jones was found guilty of saying things that supposedly inspired other people to say cruel and disrespectful things to the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. The harassment allegedly also includes the desecration of the graves of victims.

Jones is being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because some other people—who were not acting under any orders from Jones—allegedly committed some crimes on their own. It's difficult to see, then, how Jones actually inflicted any actual damages on his supposed “victims” in this case. If people have harassed the parents, of course, that's a crime for which the actual harassers are responsible. The real guilty parties here are the people who have committed acts of harassment. But it appears that Jones has been convicted here of simply saying things that the jury and the plaintiffs found objectionable.”

The piece fails to recognise the power of people such as Jones to incite hatred and actions through the powerful platforms they command. I guess that this is the essential libertarian position that speech should be totally free from consequences.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but it appears, on many fronts, that chickens are coming home to roost. For that, I'm glad. It would be great if this buries Alex Jones, and gives others in the same game pause for thought. It's certainly great that the judgement amount is so large, that it's more than simply the cost of doing business.

The judgement, being so large, is likely to hang over Jones for the rest of his miserable career and affect dealings with others well into the future. The only regret is that it's just a monetary punishment - people like Jones ought to be in jail.