Judge says Alex Jones can be sued over Charlottesville conspiracy theories
Oh, you mean you can’t just propagate false and malicious conspiracy theories to damage your political opponents without facing real consequences? Someone crowbar the pr*sident off his golden loo and tell him.
On Friday, federal judge Norman Moon said InfoWars’ Alex Jones can be sued for spreading a conspiracy theory about a protester at the infamous 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
No, Jones didn’t accuse the plaintiff, Brennan Gilmore, of creating gay frogs or attacking red states with government weather machines, but he did accuse him of being a deep state stooge carrying out a false-flag operation. (For God’s sake, what isn’t a government false flag to these whackadoos?)
“Victims of vile conspiracy theories should take comfort in Judge Moon’s ruling that Brennan Gilmore’s defamation suit against InfoWars must proceed,” Andrew Mendrala, an attorney with Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, which helped bring the case, said in a statement. “Today’s decision shows that the law will protect victims of baseless lies by holding people like Alex Jones accountable for the harm they cause.”
Gilmore sued Jones, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft and several other far-right publishers for falsely labeling him as a “deep state” operative. They claimed that a video he captures and posted online of white supremacist Alex James Fields ramming his car into Heather Heyer was part of an elaborate, staged plot to undermine the Trump administration.The defendants requested that the lawsuit be thrown out, claiming they were simply exercising their First Amendment right to share theories and opinions about the incident. But in Friday’s ruling, Judge Norman Moon of Virginia’s Western District agreed with Gilmore that they knowingly published these false stories “with actual malice.”
Apparently, Gilmore was a foreign service officer who had donated to Democrats, and this was enough to make him part of the shadowy deep state (you know, like being a Democrat who’d had the temerity to serve as president while black). Based on this highly suspicious profile, Jones claimed Gilmore was a member of the CIA who had helped foment the violence at Charlottesville. Oh, and he was drawing a $320,000-a-year salary from George Soros, because what’s a right-wing conspiracy theory without a big George Soros payoff?
Of course, if the amazingly reputable Alex Jones can be sued for this, why can’t someone sue a certain hairy Creamsicle for spreading lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate for half a decade?
I really don’t know the answer to that, do you?
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