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Can we have a thread about Alex Jones? Apparently the "victims" of his actions are pushing for something like a trillion dollar award.
I get it, he spoke some really shitty things about some people that just lost their children in a horrendous event. I can't imagine what they're going through. But I can't get past this mental block of "Yeah he said some shitty things, but he never directed his followers to do harassment, and the parents essentially just got cyber bullied, like just walk away from the screen, seriously. There were like two incidents of real life harassment, which have been prosecuted, and also were inflicted upon the parents who chose to engage with the public media."
Am I missing something here? Why is he being destroyed so thoroughly?
In defense of wrecking Jones:
First, reports are that he was basically ignoring the court system. I think it is entirely justifiable that "ignoring the court system" gets turned into "the court system reminds you, and society in general, that the court system is not to be ignored".
Second, people are looking at the fine and saying that it seems excessive in absolute numbers. But I think there's a lot of value in fines that are relative to someone's net worth. And I think "promoting a harassment campaign against people who had their children murdered, all for the sake of selling merchandise" is reasonably responded to with "a fine of at least 100% of your net worth". Which is about what this is.
If we fine people absolute numbers, we're giving rich people effective permission to do whatever they want while ruining poor people's lives for small transgressions; if the goal is to make them stop, then relative numbers are what you've gotta do.
Crime has a finite cost and so there is actually a point at which it is worth tolerating crime if we get a high enough monetary benefit. We do limit how much we spend preventing crime. So, maybe the goal shouldn't be to make rich people stop committing crimes but to have them properly compensate us.
What's the economic cost of torturing 100 disabled, net-cost people? If it's second-order effects of normalizing such practices, good luck reasoning about a concrete number...
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Fining people relative to their net worth also means the rich are held to a higher moral (or at least legal) standard. For a marginal case, what lawyer will bother making a decent case against a poor transgressor, if there's no payout. It's like a contemporary incarnation of noblesse oblige.
This argument would suggest that nobody bothers imprisoning poor people, and empirically, that does not seem to be what happens.
Remember that prosecutors don't get to actually keep the money they win in fines.
Also, remember that rich people have much better legal defense.
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I wish somebody qualified could do a deep dive on whether Alex Jones really did willfully ignore the court system in a way that justifies a default judgement. AFAIK, his counter-claim is that the court demanded that he produce footage of some of his shows where he allegedly made the defamatory statements, which were rather old by this time and were deleted by Youtube and various other platforms and he supposedly didn't have backups for, and went right to punitive rulings and default judgements when he tried to claim this.
Alex Jones has a pretty big operation, and you'd think they'd keep backups of everything. But who knows, shit happens, I guess it's plausible that they screwed up at some level and really did lose them. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen if the court demands you to produce something that you really did genuinely lose. I would think there should be some way for it to be handled better than that. But who knows, maybe his lawyers are dopes and screwed something up, or maybe the court is hostile and jumped right to the harshest possible ruling. I wish there was some way to actually find out besides just assuming based on who's closer to my side in the Culture War.
I get the point, but somehow I doubt Jones has over a trillion dollars, or even billions, from hawking snake oil supplements and InfoWars swag.
I think a big component of all of this is that Jones may have just had really shit lawyers on his side. They sent confidential texts to the plaintiff's counsel, for God's sake.
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Let's compare Jones to some other people who could be wrecked.
George W Bush is responsible for the invasion of Iraq on false pretences (I have plenty of quotes from high-ranking US officials to back this up if needed), resulting in thousands of US deaths, many more Iraqi deaths, vast economic costs of pointless war, destabilization of the Middle East, elevated oil prices, indebtedness, greater anti-Western terrorism... You can add ISIS and a general loss of respect for the principle of 'not invading countries' to the tally too - a principle that has become rather topical this year. We're not even at the level of the US gaining from other countries losses, it was a pure negative sum event except for a small group of vested interests.
"You sent me to Iraq in 2003, my friends are dead! You killed people, you lied!": https://youtube.com/watch?v=uhpdwbTWYXM
Whereas for Jones: "You lied about my children's deaths, I'm really unhappy with you."
Where is Bush's billion/trillion dollar fine? That would actually be proportionate to the scale of the harm involved. If there's no punishment for Bush, there should be no fine for Jones.
As someone who wouldn't mind seeing Bush Jr. get wrecked, there sadly isn't a good equvalence between him (a former US President) and Jones (who is ultimately a mere private citizen). If Bush Jr. is ever to see justice, it will probably not be at the hands of the exact same legal system that you or I or Alex Jones would have to face.
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There have been reports that the court system didn’t follow normal standards on a lot of discovery with him which then justifies him ignoring the court system. If the court is going to cheat you anyway then you lose nothing by ignoring them.
What reports? Even so, ignoring the court and getting a default judgment puts him in a pretty precarious position. If he had lost the case on the merits he could make any discovery regularities part of his appeal. Now that's going to be much more difficult because the only avenue of appeal he has is whether judgment in default is inappropriate. While courts have vacated default judgments, the arguments usually revolve around whether the action in question is appropriate for the relief granted or when the default happened because the plaintiff didn't take appropiate due diligence to ensure notice. For example, in Ohio there are a good number of properties where the oil and gas rights have been severed from the surface. Some landowners whose property was subject to such severances attempted to get these rights back by filing quiet title actions against the owners of the orphaned OG interests and getting default judgments in their favor. The appeals court ruled that (if I remember correctly) the quiet title actions were inappropriate because the plaintiffs had no colorable claim to the oil and gas and that furthermore, they didn't make a diligent attempt to locate the current owners and provided notice by advertisement. The whole thing was obviously a "gotcha" to get rights they weren't entitled to, and the appeals court saw it for what it was. The Jones case is a fairly straightforward case of defamation and there's no real argument that Jones only didn't comply because his attorneys were unaware of what they were supposed to do.
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No, actually, it really, really does not. You note the court's ruling and move on, then appeal any adverse result. If the trial court was actually ignoring well-worn discovery standards, the appeal should have a swift and fairly comprehensive conclusion.
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In this circumstance, I'd recommend an appeal rather than a boycott.
The appeals courts just dismissed his case. The fix was in at all levels. I'm sure the judges thought this was for the good reason of sparing the Sandy Hook families the trauma of a trial involving Jones.
What do you mean the appeals court dismissed his case? Even if the court were going for some kind of speed record there's no way they could have rendered judgment already. And lower appeals courts can't "dismiss" appeals; you're entitled to one appeal as of right that must be heard on the merits. That being said, since the trial court ruling was a default judgment his avenues of appeal are limited.
Theoretically you're entitled to have your case heard on the merits in trial court; that was denied Jones. I believe the Connecticut Supreme Court turned down his motion to vacate the default before the final judgement was rendered. He's really got no avenue of appeal; the appeals courts can't consider the merits of the case because he wasn't allowed to make it so there's nothing to examine on appeal.
It wasn't denied Jones; he forfeited that right by refusing to participate in the case against him. That's what happens—you can't get out of a lawsuit by simply ignoring it. He had 2 years to comply with discovery requests and refused to do so despite repeated orders from the court. What was the judge supposed to do here? How many bites at the apple does the guy deserve? You can make the argument that the discovery requests were inappropriate, and though I haven't heard any specifics about that, it's beside the point. Even assuming the requests were inappropriate, it's not up to the parties to decide which orders they are going to comply with. If that were the case, you'd just be giving parties carte blanch to ignore any adverse rulings without consequence.
As for the exact procedural issues you bring up: Asking the court to vacate a judgment is not the same as appeal. For the court to vacate the default judgment, Jones would have to convince them that the entering of such judgment was inappropriate. The court obviously disagreed, and proceeded to a trial on damages. If Jones were to appeal the case, he'd be making the same arguments to the appeals court that he was to the trial court—that default judgment was inappropriate. Asking the trial court to vacate the judgment was a step for preserving the issue for appeal since appellate courts are loathe to consider matters that weren't before the trial court. As a practical matter, though, it's pretty meaningless, since the losing party will ask the trial judge to vacate the judgment in every case, and the trial judge will almost always say no.
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Where are these reports and what, specifically, are they alleging?
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When did Alex Jones become the first trillionaire? I'm pretty sure he's not even a billionaire. Including him in the class of "rich people" even is questionable. Even before this judgment it wouldn't surprise me if he had debt up to his elbows that he continuously avoids through sovereign citizen-esque shenanigans (though I don't know how much public transparency there is about his finances to be fair).
I mean I know you're saying "at least", but isn't that still kind of misleading when it ends up being more like "at least 100% of your net worth, but actually more like 6000000%"?
Even then I don't see how anyone who cares about freedom of discourse at all, like a moderator of this previously de facto deplatformed community (though that's debatable given this place's moderation history), can endorse a fine anywhere close to 100% of someone's net worth for hurting people's feelings. (Everyone on this site will be begging on the streets in a day if that becomes a universal standard.)
"Promoting a harassment campaign against people who had their children murdered, all for the sake of selling merchandise" is a weakman against this site's rules too (or it least it would be if it were neutrally moderated; wishing I could put on a red hat right now to give you a cutesy warning over it). It's not like he just picked the random parents of a selection of wholly obscure child murder victims that week and decided to make them his target. He had a heterodox opinion about a highly-politicized event, child murder or not, that many of the parents most criticized chose to actively and enthusiastically participate in the politicization of, and you have absolutely no proof that he did it "all for the sake of selling merchandise". (I've not seen much evidence he encouraged any direct harassment of anyone either.) That is allowed in free societies without going broke. Obviously a free society is not what we have anymore.
After all, children died on 9/11, have died in Ukraine, have died in Syria, etc. Why not fine those with heterodox opinions about those matters billions too? If we allow the parents of muh murdered children to set the standards of discourse, then say goodbye to discourse beyond "thoughts and prayers! <3" entirely.
Whoops, I thought the fine was for a billion :V
Estimates of Alex Jones's worth are all over the place, but the reputable (pre-fine) estimates seem to hang out somewhere between 100m-250m, which, yes, is a big range.
Because I think that attacking people directly, and importantly, people who never sought to put themselves in the limelight, is a much bigger issue than just "hurting people's feelings".
You make people angry with political claims, fine, whatever; you run a harassment campaign on specific people who just want to be left alone, that's not OK.
You flaunt the judge's requests for years in the process? That's very not OK.
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I've tried to really hammer this home, but most conspiracy theorists absolutely do not create a narrative which paints grieving families as conspirators. Look at 9/11 truthers as your meter stick; they said that it was an inside job or bush did 9/11. That Jet Fuel didn't melt steel beams. Most did not say 'you're fake, your loved ones never existed.' It's not just 'heterodox opinions bad' it's 'slanderous allegations against specific private citizens bad.'
In my experience, crisis actor theories regarding events with small(ish) numbers of victims are common (particularly in regards to mass shootings) and not just with Alex Jones. With stuff like 9/11 there's just so many victims that these theories become so increasingly implausible (not that they aren't already) that they're not used. I don't think it's a moral barrier.
As, for example, the treatment of Kyle Rittenhouse proves, the second only tends to apply nowadays in the context of the first.
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This argument would be a lot stronger if he had actually been ordered to pay that amount. Nothing -- not the verdict, and not the musings of reporters about how much punitive damages might be ordered -- means anything until judgment is actually entered.
My understanding is that while the trillions are only a request at this point, a judgment of nearly a billion has been fully finalized and ordered by a judge already. To me, there's not much of a difference in this case between "essentially impossible, would require him to be like 10x richer than the richest billionaire ever recorded" and "well, maybe if he somehow manages to start the next Amazon or TikTok or something despite being one of the most ostracized men in existence". It's the difference between execution via guillotine and execution via lingchi. Life is still not an option for you in either case.
The point you could make in its favor is that it's not a real punishment, at least not to the degree ordered, because there's no way they're getting that amount of money from him, but that all comes with its own problems.
Your understanding is incorrect. The trial court will not enter judgment until it rules on Jones's motion for new trial and motion to reduce damages. See Ct Code Ch 900, Sec. 52-225.
And Sec. 52-228b.
Fair then. My mistake. Though I still think in this case that a billion dollar judgment having any degree of finality, such as the degree of being ordered by a judge at all, is insane.
Well, again, there is no judgment, and there is no degree of finality. The entire point of the CT statute I quoted is to prevent excessive jury verdicts from going into effect, so isn't the system designed to obtain exactly the outcome for which you are advocating?
That's not what I'm reading from the statute, and in any case I'm not seeing it in action yet. And even if the final result turns out to be more reasonable, there's still the old problem of "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Nothing in this case indicates a system or society that is "designed to obtain exactly the outcome for which [I am] advocating", which is a general tolerance for a wide range of opinions.
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