Alex Jones

the child porn story is three years old (and a difft courtcase i assume)

Okay, yeah, just saw the date on that article. That Laufler tweet is misleading as fuck.

ah yes

I mean, it's not wrong, but tweeting that link out now is a little disingenuous.

it's definitely worded in a confusing way. otoh, I fully expect more heinous shit to turn up at any second

EIGHT FULLY GROWN ELEPHANTS!

I just

Unbelievable.

Alex Jones' lawyer just closed his argument in the Sandy Hook defamation case with German pastor Martin Niemöller's "First they came for the socialists... Then they came for the Jews..." prose poem.

Again, this was Alex Jones' lawyer.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 3, 2022

Are they done for the day, or is this picking up again soon?

... then they came for the insane, ranting conspiracy theorists who monetized others/ grief and pain, and I did not speak out - because I thought "good riddance."

i really do want to know more about the luke wilson lawyer, after this is over. hopefully someone looks into him, just as a human interest story if nothing else. i can't help but think that alex jones' case was horrible that his legal representation knew that it would be reputation-ruining to stand up for him, so they sacrificed luke wilson to do it? but i'm thinking wilson also knew that it would be a bloodbath, so he decided to demand extra compensation and turn the antics up to 11 for what he knew would be his final bow as a performance comedy lawyer? i'm just asking questions about all this and it's only my opinion

these will be financial penalties rather than carceral penalties, right?

Correct, unless the perjury stuff has legs, which would be a separate criminal case.

This thing is like a Beckett play (or late period Adam McKay) - it begs to be dramatized, somehow, even if the cause for the hearings was altered to something less tragic/soulless.

wanna see it turn into a neil labute play

So, today. Hahahahaha.

Pretty much!

I literally cannot imagine a minimally competent attorney having things play out quite this way by accident. But that’s complicated and weird. So Occam’s says his counsel is unimaginably awful then?

I mean, pretrial you may (likely even) have agreements on unintentional production or go by rcp or maybe local rules on failure to produce, and i dunno here.

Given we have an atty flipping off opposing counsel in the courtroom, i’m still just— wtf are these ppl. It’s so fucked up. In layers.

I should probly go read a law blog but fuck that lol.

On the other hand, imagine having Alex Jones as your client.

Legal experts will tell you it’s difficult to get the death penalty in a civil trial, but I really think Alex Jones can pull it off here

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) August 4, 2022

Did closing statements finish yesterday? I had to go to work while Reynal was talking about how much $150M would weigh.

Yup, jury now deliberating as of yesterday late afternoon

His lawyer basically went "Uh can we do that over?" re phone stuff and the judge said:

"I'm not going to seal the quantity of information without knowing what's in it."

— Travis County Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, rejecting Alex Jones's motion as to the phone data — as well as his bid for a mistrial

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) August 4, 2022

Sounds like the J6 Committee could have the phone as soon as today -- and Bankston talked about it containing "intimate messages to Roger Stone," and I'm not going there.

I have transferred
the data
that was on
your cell phone

and which
you were probably
hiding
from prosecution

Forgive me
they were incriminating
so guilty
and so many

— Johnny McNulty (@JohnnyMcNulty) August 3, 2022

omg

jury's deliberating on a restitutional figure and after that a punitive figure, i believe

xp lol at the icebox poem

This Popehat piece is good.

When modern American political culture winds up in court, the... participants are speaking different languages, and using language in different ways. Courts are focused on a taxonomy of words. Are they factual? Are they opinion? Are they literal or figurative? Courts also care about the literal truth of words. That’s central to defamation law — it’s not defamatory unless it was false. 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.

jury's deliberating on a restitutional figure and after that a punitive figure, i believe

― mark s,

I've seen the punitive stuff to come referred to as a separate trial. Will they use the same jury or a new one?

xpost Yeah, that's good. It's even more complicated when someone's previous invoked abstract word art is cited in a strict legal setting. You hear Alex Jones say frogs make people gay, and the reasonable response is "what did he just say?" You cite it in court, and the challenge becomes delineating exactly what he *did* say. Is that legal proof that he is a liar, or a lunatic?

Reminds me of when my kids were younger and they would (for example) ask where I'd been, and I'd say, or, I was just having dinner on the moon. They would call that a lie, and I would say it's not a lie, because it could never be true.

xp -- same jury, a Dan Solomon tweet from a few minutes ago clears it up

Indeed

worth being clear that whatever number they do eventually come back with does NOT represent the total damages—they are deliberating on compensatory damages only. once they're done, there are two more witnesses, then the jury goes back to determine punitive damages

— dan solomon (@dansolomon) August 4, 2022

the verdicts are split so the jury is not thinking about how much money Alex and Infowars have when they are deliberating on compensatory damages—this part is about the plaintiffs and what fairly compensates them, not about Alex and what he can afford to pay

— dan solomon (@dansolomon) August 4, 2022

yeah it reminds me of my brother, who watches Rogan & Alex Jones (he admits Jones is a clown, but that "he turns out to be right a lot", with no further elaboration on what, exactly, he was ever right about)

it's one thing to try to convince others of this bullshit, who can use actual facts to refute them, where everyone gets frustrated and insists the other guy is wrong. what I don't get is how these people convince themselves. they're always wrong about everything. half the shit they say is utterly insane and all the "just you wait" shit never comes to fruition. and yet they never seem to do any self-reflection, cuz you can always convince yourself you were right all along somehow.

solomon also notes* there are three more defamation cases to come! and that's before the aggravated perjury charge (not yet paid) even lands!

*noted yesterday actually i think

Alex Jones' lawyers were just now arguing for a mistrial because they accidentally sent the Sandy Hook family lawyers the entire contents of Jones' phone.

Judge denies the motion.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 4, 2022

xpost Yes apparently three other ones to come, one more in Texas and then others in Florida and Connecticut. Jones blew them all off and now he gets to deal with the results.

Sorry just saw a tweet above reporting it

I can think of like 20 separate @dril tweets that would apply to this trial right now

Chances are good that "he turns out to be right a lot" just means "he accurately reflects how I perceive the world around me", which also means "I am hopelessly incapable of self-reflection".

perjury charge (not yet paid) s/b perjury charge (not yet laid), confusion fans

number three. i will never take the advice of my lawyers, my loved-ones, and colleagues to #StopThePosts

— wint (@dril) September 11, 2013

Meanwhile over in Jones' head

Jones said he started making phone calls to his wealthy acquaintances today asking for money. Says the "orders have come down from on high" to shut him down so he can't report on fraud in the upcoming midterms. He's called this new fundraiser "Operation David." Ok man.

— Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) August 4, 2022

wasn't that asshole mysteriously gifted millions in Bitcoin at some point?

It's worth $899 now though

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.

This is a comically stupid take from someone I thought to be otherwise pretty intelligent. It's a trivial matter to take the statements Jones makes about Sandy Hook and "defend them factually". The defense fails not because he's T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, it fails because he is making transparently and obviously untrue statements. Yeah, prose and poetry can be like surrealism or jazz is some ways. But in other ways, words are not at all like surrealism or jazz, in that they make testable assertions about reality. Jones lied, he knew he was lying, and bottomless rage (and huge profits) making you speak carelessly isn't a defense.

This is a comically stupid take from someone I thought to be otherwise pretty intelligent.

Agreed. Like Wile E. Coyote, he takes an idea that appears to have some minimal amount of plausibility and then uses it to rocket himself straight over a cliff into a void of absurdity.

telling magritte his lawyers just uploaded ceci into my dropbox and asking him if he knows what perjury is

that passage is, to my reading, describing how unmoored from reality Jones' statements are, and that as a consequence Jones himself is not only unequipped to defend them factually, but unable to conceive of doing so. it's saying his words are not only prima facie indefensible in court, but that Jones is constitutionally incapable of mounting a defense. it's not supporting the notion of his words as art, it's saying the height of Jones' fuckedness is courtesy of his own petard.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I agree with sick’s reading; it was a very elegant way of calling Jones a colossal dumb fuckstick