Between a Sandy Hook and a Hard Place

In April of this year, silky voiced crooner and defamation lawsuit defendant Alex Jones was ordered by a jury to pay 4.1 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a child who was killed in Sandy Hook. Additionally, he was ordered to fork over 45.1 million in punitive damages. The distinction between compensatory and punitive damages is worth noting. Compensatory damages are awarded to repair reputational, economic, and emotional damage to the plaintiff(s). Punitive damage is not designed to make the plaintiff(s) whole, but to punish the defendant. Such a massive award was meant to send a message that the jury found Jones’ peddling of “conspiracy theories” very mean and hurtful, and they wanted to not only hurt him, but to send a message to other people with bad opinions. On a side note, there is a law on the books in the Lone Star State that limits punitive damages. Like all laws, a black robed wizard with a gavel can decide those limits don’t apply “because reasons.”

Jones was sued for not apologizing hard enough again, this time in Yankee Connecticut. The jury decided Jones should pay a whopping 965 million dollars to the families of 26 victims, and, oddly, an FBI agent who was one of the first responders. The now-retired FBI agent was awarded 90 million of that near billion dollar punishment to everyone’s favorite Gorilla Male Vitality peddler. The fact that one of the responding federal law enforcement agents was involved, by name in the lawsuit, shows that this was given tacit approval by the ruling-class and the government. If that weren’t the case, his retirement benefits could have been held over his head and, frankly, the judge would have been told to throw the case out.

What does this mean for Alex Jones? He is expected to appeal both decisions. Whether or not the law-wizard in the Texas case decides equal protection under the law applies to Mr. Jones remains to be seen. The award in the Connecticut case is outlandish, impossible to pay, and equally mysterious in its future. If the judge involved is a rational adult, he will reduce it to something reasonable. Given that this is a Yankee bedroom community of New York City and in 2022, it is unlikely a functioning adult will be holding the gavel.

There is no doubt Jones is hoping that he will get a similar spike in support and attention to what happened when he was simultaneously kicked off all the major social media platforms by the same people who demanded Kanye be canceled for asking who made cancel culture. This is becoming somewhat standard in our cursed modernity. The Left does something vindictive, petty, and technically illegal to one of their shibboleths. The talking heads in the media gleefully jibber on about how this is “justice” and how shocking it is that the totally unbiased, above-the-fray, FBI caught another conservative doing things that are illegal. Normal people rightly see this as the ruling-class abusing their institutional power and being spiteful, mean, and petty. Sane people vent their spleen, send some money to the actual victim, share a largely incorrect post from FreedomEagle1776 that makes them feel good, and they go back to their lives.

What dissidents, and anyone to the right of whatever the “center” is this week, need to understand is what these verdicts mean to them. Before we can understand the implications, there are a few things that must be considered to provide context. The first is that these were filed in civil court, not criminal. This is NOT because Jones didn’t violate any criminal statutes (which he didn’t), but because the burden of proof is so much lower in civil court and the rules in criminal court still have to have some pretense of being obeyed (for now). Civil courts can much more easily ignore inconvenient precedents and laws in order to get the decision desired by the regime. The second thing that is important to understand here is that in order for an incorrect statement to be libel or slander, the person must have known at the time it was wrong and must have said it on purpose with malicious intent.

The legal theory of “innocent until proven guilty,” tort laws, precedent and the basic tenants of Western civilization dictate that the plaintiff prove their complaint against the defendant. Of course, this is no longer how it works. In the deranged, accursed modern legal system under which we suffer, the burden of proof is a sliding scale. What is consistent is that the White/conservative is the one who must prove the case. When they are the plaintiff, the normal procedures are followed. When the badthinker is the defendant, they must prove the accusations are not only untrue, but couldn’t possibly be true.

The Nicholas Sandmann decisions against several major media outlets and Kyle Rittenhouse’s upcoming suits against those same disinformation spreaders are black swan events that revolved around uniquely specific accusations and mistakes that will not be made by the professional liars on television again. These are amusing examples of justice, but they were statistical anomalies, and those results should not be expected to be repeated unless the situation is precisely the same. More instructive examples of the results of the Right attempting to get any kind of equal treatment under the law in civil court would be the cases of Sarah Palin versus a former New York Times editor, Peter Brimelow’s case against The New York Times, and Donald Trump’s suits against CNN and the NYT. The ruling-class defends its own against those whom they see as outsiders, legal precedent and the letter of the law be damned.

What Alex Jones’ current situation means for the rest of us is complex and far reaching. The Connecticut decision was used to send a threat to anyone that has been labeled as a conspiracy theorist. Being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” no longer means a kooky guy who thinks things that are weird (and usually true, just six months ahead of the news cycle), but now it makes you a potential target for legal action that in a sane country would get the plaintiff fined for wasting the court’s time. It’s a two-word label that tells everyone else that this person is officially a wrongthinker, which is supposed to isolate that person because the miasma of wrongthink can stain others just by association.

This also gives the ruling-class totalitarians a new word to shut down conversations they find troublesome. The “r” word has lost much of its sting with normies, as have most of the other nonsense words meaning “you don’t clap hard enough for people that want to kill you.” Calling what someone says a “conspiracy” now carries the implication that they can be sued over thinking something they were instructed not to think.

My crystal ball is in the shop, so I am loathe to guarantee the accuracy of this prediction, but I do not think we will see the average dissident get dragged into court over a Gab post that got labeled a “conspiracy” by someone who doesn’t want it to be true. What I predict in the future is for big names to create big headlines for the media and, in turn, generate big sums of money via reasonable percentages of judgements being targeted by this process. No hotshot lawyer is going to make millions by suing the owner of a Gab account with 300 followers. No establishment media outlet is going to generate significant ad revenue by gassing on about some random person whose sin was not wanting to eat bug paste and live in a one-bedroom apartment with eight other people.

These people (and I use the term loosely) will focus on the big fish with big names and big wallets. The first topic that comes to mind, one rife with the possibility for a lawsuit over emotional distress, is COVID. The issue is that there has always been evidence that should cause a normal person to doubt the narrative’s veracity. That evidence is growing by the day in the form of CDC documentation, medical studies, state surgeon general warnings, and the consequence free confessions by Big Pharma. In fact, there is now so much evidence that flies in the face of every phase of the narrative, the enemy knows that the narrative would not only be permanently destroyed but on the record, that such a defeat in the courts could lead to countersuits and, in the right county or state, even criminal charges.

It will be interesting to see which of our niche internet celebrities and more mainstream members of the Right cool their language versus those who continue being bombastic and making accusations largely free of evidence. The latter are controlled opposition. They’re the ones who set an example that will get others into legal trouble, while mysteriously avoiding such troubles themselves. It would be wise for even small-time dissidents to observe this with interest and avoid the influence of those who, in this even more litigious reality, make accusations without solid evidence or make personal attacks of dubious accuracy.