By Steve BermanDante reserved the 8th circle of Hell, he called Malebolge (“the evil pits”), for fraudsters: “panderers and seducers, flatterers, sorcerers and false prophets, liars, thieves.” Were there a human judge who could pronounce sentence to such a place, for the parents of Sandy Hook victims, it would not be severe enough for Alex Jones.
In an Austin, Texas courtroom, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ordered Jones and his Free Speech Systems media company to pay a measly $4.11 million to parents of Sandy Hook children who were killed in the 2012 school shooting massacre. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis are seeking $150 million in damages, and the jury still gets to decide the amount of the punitive portion of the judgment. It’s too bad they can’t sentence Jones to where he is heading for eternity.
Remember the scene in “The Princess Bride” where Inigo Montoya fights the Six Fingered Man. After the Six Fingered Man wounded Inigo, “you’ve been chasing me your whole life, only to fail now,” he calmly spoke. “I think that’s the worst thing I ever heard.” Then, “I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
Inigo: Offer me money.
Six Fingered Man: Yes.
Power too, promise me that.
All that I have and more. Please.
Offer me everything I ask for.
Anything you want.
I want my father back, you son of a bitch.
And vengeance was had. There will be none for the parents of the Sandy Hook children. For nearly a decade, Jones plied his conspiracies on television, radio, social media, streaming, and everywhere he could make a buck. The children are still gone and the parents won’t get them back. What the Six Fingered Man got is too good for Jones, though I’m sure some of the parents might opt for it if that sentence was on the menu.
Jones was still at it, standing in front of the courthouse, calling the court “a kangaroo court” and “show trial” infringing on his First Amendment rights. Funny how I don’t hear Jones defending The Washington Post and CNN having to pay millions to Nicholas Sandmann for their defamatory story about him wearing a MAGA hat at the Lincoln Memorial. I believe the First Amendment also protected the freedom of the press.
Among the many conspiracies Jones flung from his platform, there was Pizzagate, which led to violence at a Washington D.C. pizza joint, COVID-19 idiocy, and all kinds of stolen election QAnon fodder. Every penny he ever earned should go to his victims, and the world should be free of his voice, forever. But our justice system doesn’t allow that kind of punishment.
Listen, Virginia, there are conspiracies. There are real people in the government whose mission in life is to control you in some way that they’ve spent their careers preparing for. Dr. Anthony Fauci spend his life preparing for the Big Pandemic, and when it came, he found it so far over his head, he could barely see the sun shining through the depths. He tried to be a social engineer, when we pay him to be a epidemiology expert. Of course, the huckster Trump made things so much worse, because the lizard brain in his head could not help himself from exposing Fauci’s manipulations, and replacing them with his own.
Now there’s monkeypox, which is not new, and has a vaccine. It’s also spread by close contact, namely the same way HIV is spread. The New York Times can’t figure out how to cover this. The CDC has lost all its shine and its integrity. Former FDA head, Scott Gottlieb, now an AEI fellow, wrote, “The failures that got us here fit a now familiar pattern.” So-called “science journalist,” (aka shill for the industry) Kai Kupferschmidt (who is gay and has HIV) added: “talking about reducing the number of sexual partners, creating ‘pods’ of sex partners (where people keep sexual activity within a group) and other strategies to reduce the risk.”
The cultural taboos that someone like Alex Jones might use monkeypox to further stigmatize the gay community is not a good reason to keep the fact that monkeypox’s spread has been almost exclusively through that community some secret. Then when monkeypox breaks out into the larger population, they’ll blame the homophobes for it. That’s not medicine, it’s conspiracy, only one step adjacent to Jones himself. People like Jones don’t get a voice in policy-making. Fearing their reaction is just stupid, and using a health issue to silence other voices is horrible policy.
Offered without comment
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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