It’s unfortunate that the families of Sandy Hook probably won’t actually get anything close to the nearly $1 billion that a Connecticut jury assessed Wednesday against right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones for his monstrous lies about the massacre that killed their children. But the historic verdict nonetheless sends a strong message to those who inhabit the sewers of profitable misinformation out there: Society has had enough.
Within hours of the shooting deaths of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, Jones began monetizing the unimaginable pain of the families. The founder of Infowars, a website dedicated to spreading right-wing conspiracy nonsense to boost its sales of sketchy dietary supplements, claimed for years that the massacre was a hoax staged by the government as a pretext for gun confiscation. Jones accused the parents and their slain children of being paid actors. His nutty followers, believing his con, harassed and threatened these grieving parents to the point that some of them had to relocate. Stalkers pursued them even in faraway states.
Jones clearly thought this sadistic campaign was a cost-free way for him to build his gullible but profitable audience. Happily, he’s been proven wrong. Already on the hook for tens of millions of dollars from other litigation stemming from his Sandy Hook lies, Jones was hit with his biggest bill yet on Wednesday: a jury award of $965 million in compensatory damages to the families of eight of the victims and a federal first responder. That total will likely grow when a judge decides on punitive damages next month.
