To many on the right, Alex Jones is a free-speech martyr. On Wednesday, the conspiracy theorist was hit with a nearly $1 billion defamation judgment, after having smeared the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre as “crisis actors” in a government plot to ban guns. Twenty first graders and six teachers were killed in the shooting.
In response to the verdict, the second time a court has found Jones liable, prominent conservative-media figures began insisting that Jones’s free-speech rights had been violated. The right-wing personality Charlie Kirk tweeted, “This isn’t about calculating real damages from Alex Jones. This is about sending a message: If you upset the Regime, they will destroy you, completely and utterly, forever.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called Jones a victim of “political persecution” because “all he did was speak words.”
Defamation typically involves words, and defamation is a long-recognized exception to the First Amendment’s protections. There is no dispute about the falsehood of Jones’s conspiratorial statements regarding the Sandy Hook massacre, that “the whole thing was fake,” that it was “completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured.”
After all, during the first defamation trial in Texas, Jones acknowledged that the massacre was “100% real.” There is also no dispute about whether he made the statements. As a result of Jones’s false claims, the families of those slain in Sandy Hook were subjected to years of online harassment from malicious idiots who believed his lies.
Reasonable people can disagree about the size of the monetary award, but Jones’s liability seems a foregone conclusion. For his part, Jones faced default judgments because he refused to fully cooperate with the process, while also attacking the proceedings as “show trials.”
Tellingly, there were very few defenses of what he actually said, and more reputable conservative outlets simply posted news of the verdict without much commentary. Most of the time, conservatives argue that it is not easy enough to sue for defamation. The standard for defamation of public figures in the United States is high in order to protect freedom of speech in general and political debate in particular. Altering that standard would make speech in America less free.
But the response of many right-wing figures to the Jones verdict shows that rather than “freedom of speech,” what they actually have in mind is an arrangement in which liberal speech is chilled by exacting legal standards that do not apply to conservatives. Although few conservative elites explicitly hold this position, the story of the Republican Party in the last decade is one of ideas from the fringe migrating to a position of dominance within the party............
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