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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Alex Jones got himself into this position via a trifecta of pure stupid.
First of all, he made claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This turned public opinion against him severely, because Sandy Hook was a lines-crossed kind of event. Although school shootings are common in America, these tended to happen in colleges and high schools. Sandy Hook was an elementary school, meaning the victims were much younger
Secondly, he called the victims of the aforementioned shooting 'crisis actors', people who are paid to portray victims during emergency drills. These lies by Jones directly led to harassment campaigns against families that were already grieving the loss and extremely violent deaths of their very young children. This also got national attention, and many people pitched into the responding lawsuits raised by the grieving families against Jones's media company.
Thirdly, and perhaps a big reason why the punishment is so severe, Jones treated court hearings and depositions as optional, and skipped a huge amount of them. He didn't even seriously attempt to defend himself in a court of law, and when he did try, his lawyers were either idiots or actively working against him, leaking text messages (EDIT: and emails) that contradicted his own testimony. This led to a lot of default and highly punitive judgements against him.
To the third point, if they had done the minimum, they were more or less fine. The burden lied with the plaintiffs. He handed them a default judgement dream.
He also platformed several “journalists” who were actively harassing the Sandy Hook families, repeatedly claimed one of the parents was autistic, and during the trial shared a photoshop of the judge as a demon or something. He was bragging the entire time that he was “bankrupt” and they wouldn’t see a dime, while his series of weird shell corporations (lots of money hidden with his parents) was unfolded before the court.
He was in Hawaii like two months ago on vacation/looking for Zuckerberg’s secret hideout lol.