Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones continues to be one of the most malignant political voices in America, offering up asinine declarations on a daily basis about how any given major news story is a hoax perpetrated by unseen enemies and warning his audience in dire tones about the government plots behind them. He operates without regard to the danger his claims present to those he weaves the tales about.
For five years he and his "Infowars" website made the claim that America's most infamous mass shooting, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, did not happen. The parents are actors, he claims. Their children never existed; it was all a plot to make gun owners look bad. Those parents received harassment and death threats in response to the theories he so eagerly promoted. So-called "truthers" phoned parents, confronted family members and stole signs from the memorials.
So it's long past time Alex Jones got what was coming to him.
In a pair of lawsuits filed late Monday, the parents of two children who died in the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, say Jones’ repeated lies and conspiratorial ravings have led to death threats. The suits join at least two other recent cases accusing the Infowars host of defamation. [...]
“Even after these folks had to experience this trauma, for the next five years they were tormented by Alex Jones with vicious lies about them,” Mark Bankston, the lawyer handling the cases for the parents, told HuffPost. “And these lies were meant to convince his audience that the Sandy Hook parents are frauds and have perpetrated a sinister lie on the American people.”
Those lies are ongoing. The same outlet whose promotion of a bizarre theory dubbed "Pizzagate" that soon would result in an armed man storming into a pizza restaurant looking for an imaginary basement continues to promote the theory that the parents of Sandy Hook are lying about the loss of their own children; he can't hide from this one. And it comes in the wake of multiple other lawsuits by Jones's victims; he has played this game for so long, and attacked so many people, that at this point it is not hard to prove his abject disregard for whatever threats or violence might get directed at those he chooses to single out.
Both of the new lawsuits ask for about $1 million in damages; that does not sound like nearly enough, for what he put those families through. He's certainly made far more than that as the nation's leading voice of malignant falsehoods, and may the lying, conspiracy-peddling crook be squeezed for every penny.
