A Connecticut jury on Wednesday ordered Alex Jones, the radio host and media leader of America’s paranoid far right, to pay $965 million in damages for harm done to the families of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. At this elementary school, a former student shot dead 20 children aged six and seven and six teachers in December 2012. Jones, then a radio preacher on the fringes of the Internet, began promoting the theory that the massacre did not happen, that the parents and children were actors, and that it was a Deep State facility to justify restrictions on gun ownership. He kept this nonsense going for a decade and got rich doing it. Along the way, he viciously pounded family members trying to survive unimaginable pain from his pulpit. The parents have received death threats and verbal abuse from Jones supporters, and have been systematically humiliated in the internet’s far-right universe.
The compensation to be paid will be divided among 14 plaintiff families and one FBI agent who are victims of the false reports. It’s on top of another previous one of $45 million and another of $4.1 million. It affects both Jones and the editor of his InfoWars show. The verdict, which is being appealed, has the potential to ruin Jones, who filed for bankruptcy for his company last summer to avoid the embargo. Jones has fueled all the toxic conspiracies in the US (he’s also under investigation for the attack on Capitol Hill), creating an audience for himself that has garnered him sponsorships and a distribution channel from which he’s amassed a fortune estimated at 135 million and $270 million.
Jones explains that the lawsuits against him are an operation by dark forces to set a precedent restricting free speech in the US. But in this case, all the aggravating factors come together. Jones was aware of the lie, repeatedly spread it, profited from it and caused tangible harm to the victims of his lowliness. Jones’ cruelty to these families, for example, is not very different from that suffered in Spain by the victims of 11-M, who rejected the interested inventions with which some media outlets feed their audiences. In the age of social networks, this is an important precedent to stop the irresponsible spread of hoaxes disguised as opinions that deny reality and confront society for the benefit of those who create them. There are no alternative facts. They are called lies. And when they really do harm, they deserve real punishment.