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It seems like the push finally came to shove for Alex Jones, as he will have to liquidate pretty much almost everything he has to pay the $1.5 billion dollar settlement after the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit went the plaintiffs way. Via AssociatedPress:
Considering $9 million is more than 100 times less than what he owes, I don't see any other way for this to end in his completely left in the dust, with no business media, no career in journalism (at least as a self-owned publication, though I doubt anyone wants to hire him, and I don't think him having a Rumble channel with no structure to back him is going to bring him that much money). His only hope involves a Hail Mary crowfunding moneybomb from his supporters and people annoyed by the veredict a la Trump, but even if he raises as much as Trump, he's still owing hundreds of millions left, and I doubt he could even reach that point; not only we're talking about somebody not as popular, but the specifics of the case do touch sensitive spots (nobody likes someone stating falsehoods about dead children)
Comment from ZeroHedge:
Two things that come to my mind:
First, from what I understand, the final payment number came from Alex Jones not being willing to disclose his net worth, which allowed to the plaintiffs to imagine an infinite net worth if they wanted to. But once the books are finally displayed, does that make sense? And even if he hadn't, why isn't the level of damage caused to the plaintiffs part of equation to lower the number? Isn't this institutionalized debt slavery as punishment for what is at the end of the day an civil case? Don't get me wrong, as a libertarian I certainly don't oppose debt slavery for a sort of tort system where crimes are punished with payments; but it has to be equivalent to the crime and the criminal's means; $1.5 billion would be too much of a punishment for Adam Lanza, the actual sicko who murdered the children in Sandy Hook, let alone for the guy who espoused things that weren't true about the shooting. Is he even going to able to ever pay for it entirely?
Secondly, isn't this simply a completely disproportionate answer to Jones sins? Yes, he went on for too long with this charade and should had never started it in the first place, not to mention that his claims didn't went against the NWO or the globalist elites that he despises, but against parents of dead children, claiming that the most emotionally painful thing that had ever befallen them was something they were lying about on TV. However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people? Are CNN or MSNBC liable for defamation since they broadcasted Jones making those same claims? Do we know that if the people that harassed the victims parents actually got their information directly from Jones himself?
It seems to me that defamation law is a two edged sword...a society that doesn't have it allows misinformation to be used to harm people, but a society that doesn't have it on a tight leash allows to weaponize claims of misinformation with far worse repercussions.
Can’t believe there was ever a conspiracy about Sandy Hook. No opinion about if the legal process was correct here but ridiculous that this was even put forward as a possible conspiracy.
Why? While I think that it probably did happen as the official narrative depicts (mostly because I also think that if the conspiracy theory about using mass shootings to destroy the 2A were true, there would have at some point been a more consistent flood of them with shared characteristics exclusively targeting children to attempt to brute force the issue, instead of the more natural sporadic pattern they've actually happened in), because of emotional desires like "protecting the privacy of the families", etc., there's very little of an epistemologically complete case proving it, same as with most mass shootings (except for Columbine, which had an unnaturally high degree of transparency due to the (itself uproven) "Giving them publicity just encourages them!" meme not yet filtering much into the public consciousness).
For this reason, I was also somewhat skeptical of Sandy Hook for a while myself until, as mentioned, the follow-up that would have made it a likely conspiratorial act didn't materialize. Though that just means that in isolation it's a pretty questionable event, which it is.
With that said, I've never given much credence to Jones's formulation of a possible conspiracy with the parents as mere crisis actors and the kids as alive and well. That particular narrative makes no sense, as for one thing it postulates a conspiratorial entity trying to suppress the rights of all of society that would also bother picking some plan that avoids child casualties when it's far easier and more credible to just actually shoot them.
But if you consider a more realistic plot, like some shadowy interest-aligned ghoul shooting up an elementary school, forcibly dragging along some randomly-chosen isolated autist (who maybe looks a decent enough amount like the ghoul too, not that it matters tons as most mass shooters are relatively covered up) who could credibly be the culprit and executing him in a way that looks like a suicide, then leaving the body and having his fellows ensure that any evidence that places him at the scene is suppressed, while I don't think that is what happened, other than the aftermath I don't see any reason why it couldn't have been what happened. As far as I know, we don't even have publicly available footage of so much as Lanza shooting through the glass door to enter the school, even though it would be hard to argue that distributing such video naturally offends anyone's privacy rights or emotional concerns. (Nevertheless, given again that I am not actually a SH conspiracist, I just chalk this up to irrational normie emotionalism instead of anything conspiratorial.)
I suppose I just can’t picture a scenario where a “shadowy interest aligned ghoul” shoots up a US elementary school. Why would they ever have incentive to do that? The risk is also eye watering levels high. Makes zero sense to me and I can’t believe a single person buys it.
If I may put on my (even more) schizo conspiracy hat on really quickly, it would be very easy to come up with an incentive. By the way, I don't actually believe in the following, but writing schizo fan fiction is fun for me: In order to better control the populace, "They" (the ominous "they" or "The Kabal", if you prefer some other name) need to disarm the populace. To do this from a top down perspective would be very difficult because there would be a lot of resistance. Therefore, "They" have to convince the populace to disarm itself. A way to do this would be to cause or make-believe an event such as SH. Have you been getting those Youtube pre-roll ads from SH Promise? There's a reason that they are being promoted now.
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...Because they're aligned with shadowy interests? Also given how little hard proof of exactly what happened the public was able to force to be released, it doesn't seem to me like the risk was that high. Plus I would imagine that for the guy going into the building, his understanding would be that if he screws up and fails to extract himself properly, he will be burned and his fellows will be forced to turn on him (with compensation to match that risk).
What is a “shadowy interest” that would benefit from the murder of a bunch of US 6 year olds? Also the risk seems pretty high to me, doesn’t seem like many people who are involved in 26 murders in broad daylight walk away clean.
I truly cannot believe there is a market for this nonsense. Also let’s not forget the main conspiracy being pushed was that the whole thing was fake to “get your guns”.
Banning guns.
Like I said, I don't think it's what happened, because the follow-up wasn't there, but it's hardly infeasible in isolation. Some of these people have billions at their disposal, and it almost certainly wouldn't take even a single billion, or even half, to pull such an attack off scot-free.
Your substance-free proclamation that you "truly cannot believe there is a market for this nonsense" like some hysterically offended NYT commenter doesn't affect the facts here.
But it wasn't in broad daylight. It was in a closed building that was then further closed off to the public while whoever did whatever they wanted to any evidence of what happened in it.
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We've already had proof of cases where the FBI groomed Islamic mass shooters and literally had agents observing their attack without intervening (the Texas Draw Mohammed attack).
There's been some others where the attacker was literally a paid informant, but there's no evidence (found) that he was ordered to do the attack.
So imo it's not an unreasonable jump to assume the state is directly involved in planning and carrying out mass shootings for political reasons. At best it's one of those things that exists in a quantum superposition of "duh, everyone knows that, it doesn't prove anything" and "that's a right wing conspiracy for which there's no evidence"
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