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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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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:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seeking court permission to convert his personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation, which would lead to a sell-off of a large portion of his assets to help pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, both filed for bankruptcy reorganization after the Sandy Hook families won lawsuits against him for his repeatedly calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax on his Infowars programs...

...Liquidation could mean that Jones would have to sell most of what he owns, including his company and its assets, but could keep his home and other personal belongings that are exempt from bankruptcy liquidation. Proceeds would go to his creditors, including the Sandy Hook families.

If Free Speech Systems’ case is withdrawn, the company would return to the same position it was in after the $1.5 billion was awarded in the lawsuits and it would send efforts to collect the damages back to the state courts in Texas and Connecticut where the verdicts were reached.

Jones already has moved to sell some of his personal assets to pay creditors, including his Texas ranch worth around $2.8 million.

But a liquidation of Jones’ and his company’s assets would raise only a fraction of what he owes the Sandy Hook families.

According to the most recent financial statements filed in the bankruptcy court, Jones personally has about $9 million in assets, including his $2.6 million Austin-area home in Texas and other real estate. He listed his living expenses at about $69,000 for April alone, including about $16,500 for expenses on his home, including maintenance, housekeeping and insurance.

Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, which employs 44 people, had nearly $4 million in cash on-hand at the end of April. The business made nearly $3.2 million in April, including from selling the dietary supplements, clothing and other items that Jones promotes on his show, while listing $1.9 million in expenses.

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:

The $1.5 billion settlement for claiming an event didn’t happen the way it is popularly believed to have happened was always absurd and had nothing at all do to with justice delivered to the families who lost their kids in Sandy Hook and everything to do with silencing a voice long a thorn in the side of the establishment, which the lawyer essentially concedes in the above quote about the ruling not just being about money — lawfare waged via a weaponized legal system I wrote about in detail when the ruling came down from on high last year.

Please miss me with comments about how Alex Jones is an unhinged pseudo-evangelical lunatic with a drinking problem or whatever. The vast majority of Alex Jones haters, in fact, have never listened to a single hour of his broadcast. Their negative impression of him comes entirely secondhand from ten-second clips and the non-stop, orchestrated bleating of hostile corporate media — a consensus-forming propaganda campaign of, arguably, unprecedented scale targeted at a single individual in the 21st century.

But anyway, I’m not here to do apologia for Alex Jones or to sell him to anyone; I am aware of his flaws, as I am aware of my own. We all live in glass houses...

...The Alex Jones censorship sage is not about Alex Jones.

When Jones was universally banned overnight from all major social media platforms in 2018 in what was clearly an orchestrated move among the Big Tech giants, that was an allusion to things to come.

It was only two years later, if that, that the mass censorship regime came for all dissident media, including me when I got the banhammer from multiple platforms in 2020 for “COVID misinformation” and other alleged crimes of wrongthink.

It’s InfoWars today and the rest of us tomorrow.

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.

I find it interesting to compare the Sandy Hook judgments and settlements to those of Columbine High School. The police department in that case was sued for refusing to allow paramedics to treat a student until hours after the two shooters were dead, ultimately settling for $1.5 million. Thirty-some families of the victims split $2.5 million from the shooters’ families, another family received $366,000, and five other families received an undisclosed amount. In all, almost certainly less than $6 million changed hands as a result of the shooting, all from people who were arguably at least indirectly responsible for the deaths themselves.

In contrast, the Sandy Hook victims’ families received $73 million from Remington for their gun manufacturing and advertising, $450,000 from a college professor for defamation, and now $1 billion from Alex Jones, also for defamation. That’s quite an incredible shift.

Did anyone do a deep dive of the Remington lawsuit? It seemed ludicrous on its face.

Remington settled, so there's really no deep dive to be had. From a litigator's perspective, 73 million divided by nine plaintiffs is about 8 million per, which is about in line with what I'd evaluate a case with a murdered child for, especially considering that the sympathy factor is high here, and especially since there have been a lot of ridiculously high verdicts lately in some jurisdictions (though I don't know about where the suit was filed). When you consider that a jury would have easily awarded at least 20 million per had the plaintiffs won, 8 million seems about in the ballpark for what I'd recommend if I were their attorney.

Did a bit more digging:

  • Remington was already bankrupt so this payout was the max that insurance could cover.
  • Would Remington have actually lost? The ads they put out were stupid, garden variety "man card" shit, and Adam didn't even buy the rifle - his mom did.
  • If the insurance company was already emptying their coffers for a settlement, why not gamble on a trial to reduce the total cost? A bigger jury payout would have been blood from a stone.

As a preliminary matter, trials aren't free, and as stingy as insurance companies can be, they'd much rather pay policy holders than attorneys, so the cost of litigation is always going to be a factor. To get to the central reason, though, we have to look at some more arcane details. Even though Remington was insolvent, they still had a duty to protect their creditors and thus a motivation to settle the suit within the policy limits. So they were obviously pushing for settlement. The Plaintiff's were obviously pushing for settlement, and there's a good chance that the judge was as well. As I said in my above post, their lawyers probably told them it was a reasonable settlement amount.That leaves the insurance companies, who may have had a good argument but not exactly a guaranteed defense verdict, especially given the highly sympathetic Plaintiffs and highly unsympathetic defendant. Remington spent several years trying to get the case thrown out but once those efforts failed and they knew the case would go to a jury, the jig was about up.

So what about the insurance companies? On paper their exposure was limited. In reality, the insurer has a duty to act in good faith. If everyone involved wants to settle and the insurers refuse, it's likely that they're going to be held responsible for the entire verdict, regardless of the policy limits (maybe not the entire verdict but you catch my drift). As soon as the jury delivers an eye watering verdict the insurers are going to be hit with a bad faith suit from Remington that they're going to have to spend even more money defending just so they can get the court to say they're only responsible for 70% of the excess rather than 100%.

There is also a federal law on the books that specifically precludes this exact sort of lawsuit.

When the court is already violating black-letter law to try the case, you aren't gambling on a trial any more.

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