Alex Jones - Two Stops Past Barking?

[editor]

good luck to 'em

Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist

More than five years after one of the most horrific mass shootings in modern history, the families of Sandy Hook victims are still enduring daily threats and online abuse from people who believe bogus theories spread by Mr. Jones, whom President Trump has praised for his “amazing” reputation.

Now, for the first time, the families are confronting Mr. Jones in court.

I'm rooting for the families all the way. They've suffered enough without this shitbag making money out of their misery.

 

[Nylock]

I hope they sue him into penury -or an aneurysm... I'm not fussy...

 

[Yossarian]

Alex Jones harassed and insulted Bernie Sanders after bumping into him at an airport - people seemed to show a lot of restraint, if I saw Alex Jones giving Bernie Sanders a hard time I'd want to dislocate his shoulder and slap him silly with his own hand.

 

[agricola]

good luck to 'em

Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist

More than five years after one of the most horrific mass shootings in modern history, the families of Sandy Hook victims are still enduring daily threats and online abuse from people who believe bogus theories spread by Mr. Jones, whom President Trump has praised for his “amazing” reputation.

Now, for the first time, the families are confronting Mr. Jones in court.

A slight bump for an update to this - sorry for the very lengthy cut and paste but some people might find this behind a paywall:

AUSTIN, Tex. — In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.

“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms. De La Rosa said in a recent interview. Each time they have moved, online fabulists stalking the family have published their whereabouts.

“With the speed of light,” she said. “They have their own community, and they have the ear of some very powerful people.”

On Wednesday in an Austin courtroom, the struggle of the Sandy Hook families to hold to account Alex Jones, a powerful leader of this online community, will reach a crossroads. Lawyers for Noah Pozner’s parents will seek to convince a Texas judge that they — and by extension the families of eight other victims in the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six adults — have a valid defamation claim against Mr. Jones, whose Austin-based Infowars media operation spread false claims that the shooting was an elaborate hoax.

The Pozner hearing is a bellwether in three cases, including another in Texas and one in Connecticut, filed by relatives of nine Sandy Hook victims. It comes as the social media platforms Mr. Jones relies upon to spread incendiary claims initiate efforts to curb him.

The day after the Pozner case, in the same courthouse, is a hearing in a separate defamation case against Mr. Jones brought by Marcel Fontaine, who was falsely identified on Infowars’ website as the gunman in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February. Mr. Fontaine, who lives in Massachusetts, has never visited Florida. The Pozner family and Mr. Fontaine are being represented by Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball, a law firm based in Houston.

Mr. Jones is trying to have the Pozner and Fontaine cases dismissed under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, which protects citizens’ right to free speech against plaintiffs who aim to silence them through costly litigation. Mr. Jones is seeking more than $100,000 in court costs from the Pozner family. Efforts to reach Mr. Jones on his cellphone and through the Infowars email were unsuccessful. Mark Enoch, his lawyer in the case, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

Mr. Jones has emerged as an avatar for a “post truth” ethos that flourished online during the last presidential campaign. He gained a national spotlight and millions of followers after Donald J. Trump appeared on his show during the campaign, praising his reputation as “amazing.” Since then, many of Mr. Jones’s bogus theories have targeted President Trump’s perceived adversaries and reflect opinions held by his political base.

Last week Mr. Jones broadcast a bizarre accusation that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was involved in a child sex ring. In an online broadcast, Mr. Jones addressed Mr. Mueller while repeatedly imitating firing a handgun, saying: “It’s the real world. Politically. You’re going to get it, or I’m going to die trying.”

The Pozner hearing is a bellwether in three cases, including another in Texas and one in Connecticut, filed by relatives of nine Sandy Hook victims. It comes as the social media platforms Mr. Jones relies upon to spread incendiary claims initiate efforts to curb him.

The day after the Pozner case, in the same courthouse, is a hearing in a separate defamation case against Mr. Jones brought by Marcel Fontaine, who was falsely identified on Infowars’ website as the gunman in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February. Mr. Fontaine, who lives in Massachusetts, has never visited Florida. The Pozner family and Mr. Fontaine are being represented by Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball, a law firm based in Houston.

Mr. Jones is trying to have the Pozner and Fontaine cases dismissed under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, which protects citizens’ right to free speech against plaintiffs who aim to silence them through costly litigation. Mr. Jones is seeking more than $100,000 in court costs from the Pozner family. Efforts to reach Mr. Jones on his cellphone and through the Infowars email were unsuccessful. Mark Enoch, his lawyer in the case, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

Mr. Jones has emerged as an avatar for a “post truth” ethos that flourished online during the last presidential campaign. He gained a national spotlight and millions of followers after Donald J. Trump appeared on his show during the campaign, praising his reputation as “amazing.” Since then, many of Mr. Jones’s bogus theories have targeted President Trump’s perceived adversaries and reflect opinions held by his political base.

Last week Mr. Jones broadcast a bizarre accusation that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was involved in a child sex ring. In an online broadcast, Mr. Jones addressed Mr. Mueller while repeatedly imitating firing a handgun, saying: “It’s the real world. Politically. You’re going to get it, or I’m going to die trying.”

The videos removed included one called “Prevent Liberalism,” in which a man chokes a child and throws him to the ground. Another one was called “Shock Report: Learn How Islam Has Already Conquered Europe.”

 

[agricola]

the rest of the article:

Mr. Jones and his lawyers say in court filings that the Pozner family’s suit is an effort “to silence those who openly oppose their very public ‘herculean’ efforts to ban the sale of certain weapons, ammunition and accessories, to pass new laws relating to gun registration and to limit free speech.”

That stance echoes Mr. Jones’s original false claims that Sandy Hook was staged by government-backed gun control activists. Mr. Jones’s lawyer says in court filings that Mr. Jones’s theories are opinion, which is more broadly protected by the First Amendment. He also maintains that Mr. Pozner and Ms. De La Rosa are public figures, because Mr. Pozner has created a nonprofit to combat the harm caused by online falsehoods and Ms. De La Rosa has advocated a ban on assault weapons, like the AR-15-style rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting.

If the parents are found to be public figures, they will have to prove actual malice, or that Mr. Jones knew the claims were false, but repeated them anyway.

The Pozner family’s story is recounted in the court filings: In 2015, after Mr. Pozner succeeded in having an Infowars video taken down from Mr. Jones’s YouTube channel, “Mr. Jones went on an angry rant about me for nearly an hour,” Mr. Pozner said in an affidavit. Mr. Jones “also hosted a call with an obsessed fellow conspiracy theorist who issued a threat to me.”

“Mr. Jones then showed his audience my personal information and maps to addresses associated with my family,” the affidavit says.

Lucy Richards, an Infowars devotee, was arrested the next year for repeatedly threatening Mr. Pozner’s life. She was sentenced to five months in prison last year. As a condition of parole, a judge ordered that she cease consuming Infowars programming, the court documents state.

“This type of misinformation is a bit of a societal crisis,” Ms. De La Rosa said. “This isn’t someone on a soapbox in Times Square spewing nonsense. It’s someone who every day generates income from his demonstrably false utterances.”

Starting days after the shooting, Mr. Jones helped spread false claims that the Sandy Hook parents were “crisis actors” in a government conspiracy. A month after the shooting, he began broadcasting excerpts from Ms. De La Rosa’s interview with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, which was taped in front of the Edmond Town Hall in Newtown. Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the interview was taped in a studio before a “green screen.”

In an April 2017 Infowars broadcast titled “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed,” according to the court documents, Mr. Jones aired the clip of Ms. De La Rosa’s interview, noting that when Mr. Cooper turns his head, “his nose disappears repeatedly because the green screen isn’t set right.” The Pozner filings include an affidavit from Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst and expert witness, in which he attributes the anomaly in the videotape to “postproduction compression,” common in video production, and said “no credible video professional, editor or web-content specialist would conclude” that the interview was taped in front of a screen.

In court filings responding to the Pozner suit, Mr. Jones’s lawyer says that “certain comments that he had previously made in connection with possible faking or staging events at the Sandy Hook shooting was not an accusation against the children or families, but against the media and government officials, whose actions led many to question the official version of the event.” The parents, the filing says, “isolate specific statements, take them out of context while ignoring other relevant portions, and misinterpret what was said.”

Ms. De La Rosa and Mr. Pozner will not appear in court on Wednesday, in part because of safety concerns.

 

[teqniq]

You have to laugh.

 

[editor]

You have to laugh.

He's really unwell. Yet so many people choose to follow his insane nonsense.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

He's really unwell. Yet so many people choose to follow his insane nonsense.

I wouldn't underestimate the level of cynicism behind all that. It's very clearly an act. I doubt he's unwell. Just a very fucking evil cunt who's in love with his own act.

 

[bimble]

I wouldn't underestimate the level of cynicism behind all that. It's very clearly an act. I doubt he's unwell. Just a very fucking evil cunt who's in love with his own act.

I don’t know if it’s even that, also possible he is a businessman who sells crap (“supplements”) that can only be sold to the most gullible, so his act creates his clientelle. That’s where he makes his living so.

 

[teqniq]

Actually yes. He has claimed this in the past, doubtless in an effort to avoid any repercussions.

InfoWars' Alex Jones is a 'performance artist playing a character', says ...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don’t know if it’s even that, also possible he is a businessman who sells crap (supplements) that can only be sold to the most gullible, so his act creates his clientelle. That’s where he makes his living so.

Yeah, that too. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he holds his fans in complete contempt.

 

[DaveCinzano]

He's really unwell.

Often when it looks like a shitty arsehole, smells like a shitty arsehole, and tastes like a shitty arsehole, it really is just a shitty arsehole.

 

[Yossarian]

That last Jones clip is crying out for a remix from these people.

 

[Treacle Toes]

Yeah, that too. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he holds his fans in complete contempt.

Given the snake oil nonsense he is selling them and all else I would say so.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Of course, his followers, hypocrites that they are, are screaming about censorship. They want the NFL to ban players who take a knee in protest of police shootings, but take down a few nasty posts by this moron and they start screaming about censorship.

It seems that Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify have all taken down his videos, but Twitter has done nothing. This cements my view that Twitter is just a playground for children, not too much above 4Chan and its ilk.

I hope this is the beginning of the end for him as a media personality. Fuck Alex Jones and the horse he rode in on.

 

[DotCommunist]

they start screaming about censorship.

I might have some disquiet about the way that online spaces that are ubiquitous (facebook and youtube) can function de facto as public spaces/fora for opinion and yet are moderated badly by profit seeking entities. But its still not censorship is it.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I might have some disquiet about the way that online spaces that are ubiquitous (facebook and youtube) can function de facto as public spaces/fora for opinion and yet are moderated badly by profit seeking entities. But its still not censorship is it.

I too have some disquiet about the potential for censorship. I don't want to see anyone getting in there and being the arbiters of public taste. He's going beyond bad taste, or even hate speech. What he's doing is akin arson, except he's providing the gasoline and inviting others to light the match. Enciting violence has never been speech protected by the Constitution. If you listen to many of his videos, he's doing exactly that.

 

[8ball]

I might have some disquiet about the way that online spaces that are ubiquitous (facebook and youtube) can function de facto as public spaces/fora for opinion and yet are moderated badly by profit seeking entities. But its still not censorship is it.

It doesn't cease to be censorship just because you are in favour of it.
What YW says about inciting violence is fair, though that standard never seems to be applied to Donald Trump.

 

[Voley]

He's bemoaning the censorship and his denial of the right to free speech on Twitter right now. This looks remarkably like a man exercising his right to free speech uncensored to me, but there you go.

 

[DotCommunist]

It doesn't cease to be censorship just because you are in favour of it.

I didn't say it does ballbag m8, I said I'm uncomfortable with the idea of for profit entities ineptly moderating what is 'sort of' a public space. But its not actually is it, none of the platforms ever have been, not even in ethos. So the cries of censorship are nonsense, especially as nobody has banned him from the entire internet

 

[8ball]

I didn't say it does ballbag m8, I said I'm uncomfortable with the idea of for profit entities ineptly moderating what is 'sort of' a public space. But its not actually is it, none of the platforms ever have been, not even in ethos. So the cries of censorship are nonsense, especially as nobody has banned him from the entire internet

Privately-owned spaces can still censor - it’s part of the definition.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Here's a bit of an explanation of why Twitter hasn't banned Jones:

We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.

NPR Choice page

They must have some awfully lax rules if he hasn't managed to run over and stomp their rules into the dust. I suspect, that a lot of their decision is based on the money factor, as all things seem to be. His supporters are going to be flocking to Twitter--yet another reason to give Twitter a wide berth.

 

[bimble]

Infowars' website's own rules for comments include this bit, to the great amusement of some people on twitter;

 

[8ball]

They must have some awfully lax rules if he hasn't managed to run over and stomp their rules into the dust.

Can’t say I fancy giving his page clicks checking up on it. Maybe the format doesn’t give him space to get worked up into fully apoplectic rants.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Can’t say I fancy giving his page clicks checking up on it. Maybe the format doesn’t give him space to get worked up into fully apoplectic rants.

Maybe he has an intern doing the posting over there. I'll be giving it a pass, as well.

 

[8ball]

Infowars' website's own rules for comments include this bit, to the great amusement of some people on twitter;
View attachment 143534

Which is the similar to Twitter’s rules, pretty much. So not sure why the Twittersphere should make anything from that.

 

[ska invita]

I wouldn't underestimate the level of cynicism behind all that. It's very clearly an act. I doubt he's unwell. Just a very fucking evil cunt who's in love with his own act.

The modern equivalent of a evangelical money grabbing fake preacher... Conspiracy the new religion for those who will believe in anything

 

[agricola]

The modern equivalent of a evangelical money grabbing fake preacher... Conspiracy the new religion for those who will believe in anything

I'd bet there is an almost total overlap between the people who fell (and still fall in huge numbers) for televangelism and the people who fall for Jones's rubbish.

 

[alex_]

I'd bet there is an almost total overlap between the people who fell (and still fall in huge numbers) for televangelism and the people who fall for Jones's rubbish.

They are the same thing.

Alex

 

[bimble]

The modern equivalent of a evangelical money grabbing fake preacher... Conspiracy the new religion for those who will believe in anything

I think thats spot on. Hadn't seen it before. It is no coincidence that he makes his living selling 'wellness' pills.