Editor's Note: There are few Americans of such central importance to the information war as the man who claimed the name for his show: Alex Jones, creator of InfoWars, and Patient Zero of the technology industry’s now-pervasive practice of digital unpersoning. But the power class has not been satisfied with erasing the man from the internet. Today, the historical censorship of Jones migrates to its final home — and the future for all dissident thinkers if trend lines continue — in the court of law.

The case has been enlightening.

Max Meyer reports on the history of the case, detailing the claims and laws in question, with thoughts on the nature of this 21st Century witch burning.

-Solana

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Alex Jones didn’t kill himself. I mean he didn’t bankrupt himself. Er, scratch that. He didn’t disappear himself. Oops — he didn’t perjure himself. Wait, did he? Dammit — he didn’t sue himself. Aha! — he didn’t censor himself. Hold on a minute. What did he do?

A funny thing has happened recently: Alex Jones is allowed back on the Internet. Well, not quite. He’s still banned from every major platform there is. And the minor platforms, too. And the obscure platforms. And it’s still nearly impossible to find even one minute of his tens of thousands of broadcast hours going back to the 90s anywhere online. (A few months ago, I wanted to show some friends a funny clip in which Jones impersonates the all-powerful, blood-consuming “actual demon from hell” more commonly known as Hillary Clinton. I couldn’t find it, and believe me I looked.)

There are a few remaining instances of unedited Alex Jones on YouTube — two interviews with Joe Rogan, for example — as well as a highly-publicized NBC interview with Megyn Kelly, and a fight with Piers Morgan on CNN. But apart from that, he has been disappeared from the Internet. Scrubbed. Unable to communicate on any mainstream platform in any way. He can’t even have a Pinterest board! Jones himself has described this as “identity theft.”

So, I should be more precise. He’s not actually allowed back on the Internet. Like, at all. What I mean is that video of Alex Jones is back on the Internet because his show trials to set defamation damages for Sandy Hook parents in Austin and elsewhere had courtroom cameras. At one point during his testimony in Travis County court in July, the judge overseeing the case admonished Jones and said to him, “this is not your show.” She was right — it was Twitter’s show. And CNN’s. 

Oliver Darcy, CNN’s junior media janitor, wrote the following about the trial:

The dishonesty of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was spotlighted in a Texas court on Wednesday as a lawyer for a pair of Sandy Hook parents cross-examined the Infowars founder and fact-checked his answers in real-time.

He fact-checked Jones in real-time! So: partisan journalists are living vicariously through the attorneys suing Alex Jones, whom they consider the final form of the “fact-checker.” The attorneys, for their part, certainly knew who their audience was. Like a flamboyant high school sophomore ready to impress his mock trial coach at the state tournament, the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Bankston got up and began his cross examination. He began by asking Jones if he took the proceedings seriously. Which was, well, quite a question for him to be asking.

The right wing loved the following exchange between Branston and Jones. It was an attempted “gotcha!” for the ages.

Branston: “Your allegation is that government officials are aiding in pedophilia, child trafficking, and the grooming of children, right?”

Jones: “You mean like what Jeffrey Epstein did, with the Clintons?”

*mic drop*

If you didn’t get to watch yourself, or haven’t followed, what I want to communicate about the Austin trial (and all the others) is that it was absolutely insane. A clown show. And at the center of that clown show, as much as I’d like to keep making fun of the plaintiff’s lawyers, was Jones.

Apart from some of the more colorful testimony on the stand, Jones made the very interesting choice to conduct his regular InfoWars broadcast on the morning of one of his testimony days, just before going to the courthouse. By early afternoon, the plaintiffs’ lawyers had already made clips of the morning broadcast to show to the jury. It was… uh… well, it was something. Here are some highlights:

On the trial:

“This is all just a giant exercise in raping our freedom.”

On the lawyers:

“They are caricatures of what you would imagine in some alternate universe of dwarf goblins. It’s demonic. They all act demonically possessed. The judge, the lawyers. It’s surreal to be around them. And it makes you feel sorry for them because these people are committed to the occult ideology of the new world order. And they’re never gonna stop.”

On the judge:

“Judge Goblin. She literally looks like a goblin, and acts like a goblin. A very goblinish creature, I finally got to see a goblin. I’m a little goblinish, too. Maybe that’s why I’m so sweet on her.”

On the plaintiff, Neil Heslin:

“I gotta be honest, okay. He’s slow, okay? … I think Heslin acts like somebody on the spectrum.”

On the Great Reset and “turd gobbling”:

“So, they’re getting rid of all our basic rights, our right not to be surveilled, bringing in the global social credit scores, bringing in the carbon tax, bringing in the “you’ll own nothing, have nothing” Great Reset, it’s all being announced. But you can paint your hair green or purple and go eat poop in the street. That’s what they do at these rallies, I’m not kidding, it happens at all of them, we’ve got the videos. Pooping and peeing and pooping on each other. This is so liberal, it’s so trendy. And then the monkeypox explodes and it’s all our fault, we’ll have to be locked down now, but don’t worry, the pedo parade and the poop eating will continue. And I’m sorry to have to describe this for you, folks, but we’re talking turd gobbling, okay?”

The plaintiffs’ goblins — I mean lawyers — had a field day playing Jones’ comments for the jury, literally hours after Jones had said them. And from what happened a few days later, it seems that they did not endear him to the jury. They returned a massive judgment for the plaintiffs, with compensatory and punitive damages against Jones of almost $50 million.

The financial situation is murky. It seems like Jones has a lot of money, but between the complexities of Texas bankruptcy law and divisions between his personal finances and money held through different legal entities, it’s unclear how much there is to collect. But I think that we can take the plaintiffs at their word when they say it’s not really about a specific dollar figure for them. The scale of the damages sought ($150 million) indicate, at least to me, that they want InfoWars shut down, and that financially crippling it is the way to do it. Will they succeed? I don’t think so; Jones is motivated, and so long as he’s still breathing, I think he’ll be able to operate at some level. And remember: Alex Jones didn’t kill himself.

Because of how absurd the whole ordeal was — the original claims of a faked school shooting, the trial, all of it — nobody has really asked the most elementary question: does being called a “crisis actor” by Alex Jones actually constitute reputation damage and defamation? Do the parents of the Sandy Hook kids have substantive legal claims against Jones? I’m not so sure. As a lawyer friend put it to me: “Making stuff up that has an effect on people's lives is not defamation.”

What is defamation? Defamation is a false statement that injures another’s reputation. The reputation part matters, and unless reputational damage is proved or presumed — that’s distinct from emotional distress or other types of harm — you can’t prevail on a claim for defamation. I used the word ‘presume’; that’s because there is the idea of defamation per se, i.e. statements that are presumptively damaging to reputation (the classic example is an accusation of a serious crime).

Some of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs, including Heslin, did claim defamation per se, arguing that Jones’ statements about them were self-evidently defamatory. This is a shaky claim, in my view. As crazy as it sounds to be arguing the details here — Jones was obviously wrong — I really think it’s an open legal question whether what he said presumptively or actually damaged anyone’s reputation.

As it happens, no jury ever found Jones liable for defamation, and no judge ever ruled on the merits of the claims or Jones’ counterclaims. He was found liable by default after failing to produce documents. A finding of ultimate liability is technically a permissible sanction for discovery recalcitrance (refusing to cooperate and produce documents) but it is a draconian one rarely imposed by judges. Suffice to say, the court — with an elected judge, mind you — was not a fan of Jones. 

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that Jones refused to participate in the proceedings, and as a result he lost automatically. The only question for the new trials is how much to award the plaintiffs. This is Jones’ fault alone, for the record, and his complaints about not being allowed to argue his innocence at the damages trials are irrelevant; but it’s too bad, because there are some outstanding legal questions that were never really settled.

Let’s play a little game. Suppose for a moment that you were called a Russian stooge and even a Russian asset going back to the 1980s. A racist. Who mocked fallen soldiers. Suppose that you were accused, without evidence, of urinating on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Would this constitute defamation on the part of the people who said it? Almost certainly not.

Defamation, under the prevailing jurisprudence, is a very, very specific civil offense in the US, and it’s almost impossible to prove, especially if the subject of the alleged defamation is a public person (the Sandy Hook parents aren’t public people, by the way). This is why it’s so striking that of all the people to be celebrating the Jones verdict, it’s the New York Times crowd — the paper at the center of the flagship Supreme Court case on the subject, New York Times v. Sullivan, which established the high standards that protect media from suits. 

The Times, of course, smells blood in the water. They want to turn the Jones trials into a precedent for much wider censorship of figures that they find unsavory. They gave away the game in their report:

The Sandy Hook families have a broader goal beyond damages for Mr. Jones: They want the trials to alert Americans to the mounting damage done to vulnerable people and civic life by viral political lies, whether bogus theories denying mass shootings or false claims of a “stolen” 2020 election that brought violence to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Oh, I see: it’s about January 6th, which was Very Bad. Just like Alex Jones, who is Very Bad. And as we know, the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to Very Bad things or Very Bad people. Here’s my question: how far is the Times willing to take this argument? They clearly don’t believe Jones should be able to broadcast. Should he be allowed to have a bank account? A credit card? Board an airplane? 

But let’s get more specific. The Times complains about “mounting damage done to vulnerable people.” I must once again emphasize that even if Jones' statements did “damage” (severe emotional stress, trauma, and fear, I’m sure) to the Sandy Hook parents, that doesn’t mean he’s liable for defamation. And in this country that is a big legal difference, even if it doesn’t seem like a huge moral difference.

That’s what is so concerning about this type of lawsuit: it exploits our moral instincts at the expense of legal traditions that exist for good reason. It’s an end-run around a core principle of the 1st Amendment: that you can sue for false speech that hurts your reputation, but not speech that merely hurts your feelings. This case seemed to comingle the two.

A second problem for the Times is that you cannot simultaneously argue that Jones is a lunatic with only lunatic listeners and that he hurt the reputation of the Sandy Hook parents by making a lunatic allegation. Because he’s a lunatic, remember? Who would listen to a lunatic? In contrast, when the New York Times lies about you, it does really damage your reputation, because they’re the paper of record, the custodians of truth and democracy. Or at least they’re claiming to be… 

Jones himself said this:

“It’s my right to say it. I can question big P.R. events like Sandy Hook, where there are major anomalies. They’re using Sandy Hook, and they’re using the victims and their families as a way to get rid of free speech in America. That’s the plan.”

Trust the plan. This one, at least, seems to be working.

I want to close with the big picture.

Alex Jones is crazy. Maybe the craziest. Bonkers. He literally had to clarify to a jury deciding how much of his money to take in a lawsuit over allegations of a false flag operation that he doesn’t believe they’re engaged in another false flag operation (“I don’t think that you are operatives. I don’t think that you are a part of a false flag. I don’t think that you are bad people, I think you are good people.”) He called the judge a goblin and the plaintiff autistic. This man cannot help himself, and if there’s one person on planet earth who would walk into a totally predictable defamation suit at full speed, double down on the claims, lose by default by refusing to cooperate even though he might have won on the merits, and then put on a spectacle of incredibly erratic behavior throughout the damages trial, it’s him. And they got him. Not quite fair and not quite square, in my opinion, but they got him, and he did not make it difficult.

Yet… in the grand scope of things, Jones is right about one very important thing, at least: it’s an information war. Do you know which side you’re on? Do you even know that you’re fighting in it, or that war has been declared? Do you see that bomber barreling across the sky in your direction? Do you think it’s carrying milk and cookies?

Just asking questions. Go ahead — sue me.

-Max Meyer