A little justice

A court filing showed Jones filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston. The filing said Jones has between $1m and $10m of assets and between $1bn and $10bn of liabilities. It also refers to Free Speech Systems, a Jones affiliate and Infowars’ parent, as having filed for bankruptcy in July.

  Guardian

Unfortunately it won't stop him being an asshole.  And I assume he can find supporters to keep him going after he clears his debt by this bankruptcy filing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It can be costly to be a loud-mouthed crank

If only that would shut him up.

The Jones jury speaks

UPDATE:

Jesus Christ.

How's the Alex Jones trial coming along?

I haven't been following.  I can't bear to.  But it must be an absolute circus.

The latest comment I've seen about it:

Speaking of Alex Jones' trial

Maybe he's hoping the judge will be lenient if she believes he's simply out of his mind.

He's probably not going to get it after badmouthing the judge in public, but he's going to need it, because he's not likely to get any favors from the jury.

And to top off the lying on the stand and the idiocy....

Is that prejudicial?

Courts are about analysis, and the entire project of the law is about words meaning specific things.

But modern American political culture is emotive and even artistic. It uses language like a musician uses notes or an impressionist uses brush strokes. Whether it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Bill Gates' efforts to colonize our bowels through "peach tree dishes" or Alex Jones ranting about gay frogs, modern politicians and pundits use language to convey feelings and attitudes and values, not specific meanings. If you demand Alex Jones defend the specific meaning of his words, it’s like demanding your eight-year-old defend his statement that his birthday party was the best day ever when previously that’s what he said about Disneyland. Trump was the Salvador Dali of this movement, his speeches full of melting clocks of ire and resentment. As an artist of lies he was prolific.

I’m offering a descriptive observation, not a positive normative judgment. Truth exists. Truth matters. Even if Alex Jones’ broadcasts are dreamscapes of spleen, they have real-world effects. Some people take them literally and act accordingly, as we’ve seen as the parents of murdered children tell their harrowing stories of the harassment Jones encourages. And a society where words are unaccountable, where language is just us finger-painting with our own shit, is ungovernable and unlivable.

The point is that courts are ill-equipped to deal with people like Alex Jones, and people like Alex Jones are ill-equipped to deal with courts. Jones’ catastrophic testimony in his own defense illustrates this. Jones struggled to fit his bombast within the framework of the law, within the distinction between fact and opinion. It’s a bad fit because that’s not how he uses words. If Jones had been honest — an utterly foreign concept to him — he might have said “I just go out there and say what I feel.” The notion that Sandy Hook was a hoax is a word-painting, a way of conveying Jones’ bottomless rage at politics and media and modernity, and he can no more defend it factually than Magritte could defend the logical necessity of a particular brushstroke.

It’s fit that Alex Jones is held accountable for the impact of his words. He used false statements of fact to paint his picture, and those false statements of fact caused harm. But I suspect that a vast judgment against Jones won’t have much value as a deterrent or proclamation of truth. Jones is loathsomely rich because people want to consume his art. His landscapes of hate and fear and mistrust resonate with a frightening number of Americans. The people who enjoyed his Sandy Hook trutherism didn’t enjoy it because it was factually convincing or coherent; they enjoyed the emotional state it conveyed because it matched theirs. The plodding technicalities of law are probably inadequate to change their minds.

Defamation cases like this one — or Dominion’s case against Sidney Powell, or the parade of defamation claims against Trump — are just, and it’s just that the victims receive compensation. But they don’t solve the problem. America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.

  Ken White: "Alex Jones at the Tower of Babel"

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Oopsie

[A] stunning revelation surfaced during an exchange in court between Jones and Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing the parents of a six-year-old boy killed in the 2012 attack.

Bankston provided to the Infowars host a copy of a text message he received that criticized his platform’s coverage in 2020 of the coronavirus and likened it to his false theory that the Sandy Hook killings were fake. This was deeply unfavorable to Jones because he had provided sworn testimony at a deposition that he had no text messages on his phone that referenced the Sandy Hook massacre.

[...]

Bankston replied: “Do you know where I got this? Your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of your entire cellphone, with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years.”

  Guardian

Ouch!

Bankston said he told Jones’s lawyers about the mistake, but they did not take “any steps” to label the texts as privileged, and thereby keep them out of court.

[...]

Jones mockingly told Bankston he now had his “Perry Mason moment”, referring to the TV attorney who often won cases by getting those he was questioning to confess to wrongdoing on the witness stand.

“You know what perjury is, right?” Bankston said, referring to the crime of lying under oath. “I just want to make sure before we go further.”

Ouch.

Shortly after the engrossing exchange, Rolling Stone reported that the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump would subpoena Jones’ texts.

That's gonna leave a mark.

Plaintiff is asking for $150 million.

If you're going to do the bad stuff, you should probably hire good lawyers. Perhaps Trump is paying for them and that's the best he could get?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Alex Jones is testifying in his trial

That's probably not a good idea for many, if not most, defendants. 

Looks like it's going swimmingly. Here, he exchanges words with the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble:

 

Jones is still on the air.  In fact, he was on the air this morning while plaintiff was testifying.  

Jones' attorney this afternoon objected to the prosecution playing the tape of the show in court.

“Spit your gum out, Mr. Jones,” said Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, eyeing Jones grimly from behind the bench.

“It’s not gum,” the far-right broadcaster retorted immediately. Jones claimed that he’d had a tooth pulled late last month, and that he was massaging the hole in his mouth with his tongue.

“Would you like me to show ya?” he asked, leaning in.

“...I don’t want to see the inside of your mouth,” Gamble said, admonishing him to “sit down.”

  MSN

Jones is being sued by the parents of a little boy who was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School for spreading lies about the attack, calling the massacre a hoax, and encouraging Jones' audience to make life hell for them and other parents.

Jones went so far as to take potshots at the families from afar, calling them “pawns” in an episode of his Infowars show that aired Tuesday, according to Media Matters for America.

Later in the episode, an aggrieved Jones blasted Gamble and the lawyers representing Lewis’ parents, calling them “caricatures of what you would imagine in some alternate universe of dwarf goblins.”

“It’s demonic,” he added. “They all act demonically possessed. The judge, the lawyers. It’s surreal to be around them. And it makes you feel sorry for them because these people are committed to occult ideology of the new world order.”

Jesus Christ.

Jones, who has attempted to spin the complaint against him as an attack on his First Amendment rights, had rolled up to the courthouse after the morning session. A piece of duct tape covering his mouth had the phrase “Save the 1st” plastered across it.

And calling the judge a liar. Brilliant move. And I hope he ripped facial hair out by the roots removing the tape.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: