> but when I found out he was fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy that seems excessive
Yes, that's a hole in your understanding of the fact-pattern. He wasn't fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy. The error of his lawyer revealed evidence that he knew the conspiracy was false but he spread it because it made the people who listen to him keep listening and buying his products, which crosses the line into "malicious" and opens him up (in most states, including Texas) to significantly larger penalties.
Jones was hit with a level of consequence few defendants in civil suits over slander are hit with because of how egregious, continuous, and malicious the offense was and because he took actions to mislead the jury.
If you're more familiar with crimlaw, civil court is a significantly different animal and worth learning more about. It serves a slightly different function in American society but is part of the fabric of systems that let people sleep at night.
> If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him.
We are currently a pretty tribal society, so I suspect you are correct that nobody on the Left would sue. But you can bet that someone on the Right would have (for bathroom reading, look for summaries of the suits Donald Trump has brought against people in his 78 years and ask yourself if you would consider that "lawfare"). The civil courts are intended to make people who have been harmed whole; someone on the left lying about someone on the right would have to be sued by the aggrieved party for the case to exist.
And you are right that emotion enters into it. But regardless of the jury's opinion of the man before the trial (and, again, both parties, which includes Alex Jones's legal representation, tuned the jury to be maximally charitable to their side)... He lied to them on the stand. I don't know that a jury exists that is magnanimous enough to overlook that. One of the points of a jury trial is to judge not just the facts but the overall character of the defendant (because so many facts tend to originate from the defendant themselves, so if the defendant flips the bozo bit in the minds of the jurors, that matters). If you're looking for someone to blame for Jones's fate, start with Jones.
Because the evidence shows he's not crazy; he's a con artist.
On point #1, The operative word in that sentence was "excessive". $1.5B was excessive.
On point #2. Your main point is that both sides act in bad faith equally, and I disagree. Dems have been eating up CNN/MSM left-wing propaganda and brainwashing for over a decade and so now there's just no common ground between the two sides any longer.
One of the trials Jones faced in Texas was an appeal on whether the fine levied in Texas was excessive (worth noting: the $1.5 billion is a running tally, not a single ruling; his harm spread across multiple people in multiple jurisdictions, and his actions keep convincing separate courts with separate trials that punitive damages are warranted. Legal Eagle has more details on the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSm7sRx-0hA&list=PLzBQ6LRv47...).
There was a law passed in 1995 by a Democratic majority to cap damages at $750k in Texas; the judge on appeal to Jones's Texas ruling found that the law was unconstitutional.
On point 2, we will probably agree to disagree. If anything, I believe the GOP has taken the most steps to disrupt and destroy norms of legal practice and has opened the door to using the law as a tool for shaping society. The Trump administration, for example, tried to rig the census in 2020 (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-trumps-census-s...), an initiative that fell apart primarily because the daughter of a GOP political operative attained a hard drive of her father's that revealed that a citizenship question would bias the results, under-counting the population of areas with more (legal and non-legal) immigrants.
It's actually quite hard to get the Executive's authority on the topic of census questions put under scrutiny, and the evidence in the email correspondence on the drive was so damning that it caused the census change to fail to pass a judicial challenge (essentially the only way for the Executive to fail to pass that bar is if they were lying about the justification, and... They were).
What you may be observing is that both sides practice lawfare but one side seems consistently bad at it...
Back on Jones: I don't know if $1.5 billion is fair. I do note that the Information Age gives people much larger megaphones to spread information much further than ever before. I don't think we fully comprehend the effect that has on society. In the short run, I don't consider the fact that if you say something so egregiously wrong that you hurt people in multiple jurisdictions, you could be on the hook for damages in multiple jurisdictions and that could result in a sum-total civil penalty larger than any individual jurisdiction would levy to be obviously wrong? Criminal law doesn't generally work that way (federal authority would subsume), but civil law is a different beast.
On the plus side, this fate is eminently avoidable: don't maliciously push lies that hurt people in multiple states. I'm not sure you've recognized how egregious the lying was, how unapologetic he was about it, and how much that impacts a final court decision on one's fate (in general, not just if someone has an [R] after their name in a political census).
I disagree that Conservatives treat Democrats this badly. Democrats are the ones who literally invented `Cancel Culture`. Never in history have the two parties been more different.
(Wikipedia suggests the term itself originates from black communities, which is not synonymous with Democrats. I think it's fair to assert the practice without the name is much older).
My point is I don't know how we differentiate between "Cancel culture" and "shunning" or "boycotts."
The Dixie Chicks had their career derailed with only a nascent Internet in existence. It was never necessary for people to organize and decide collectively something needed to be shunned.
Yes, that's a hole in your understanding of the fact-pattern. He wasn't fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy. The error of his lawyer revealed evidence that he knew the conspiracy was false but he spread it because it made the people who listen to him keep listening and buying his products, which crosses the line into "malicious" and opens him up (in most states, including Texas) to significantly larger penalties.
Jones was hit with a level of consequence few defendants in civil suits over slander are hit with because of how egregious, continuous, and malicious the offense was and because he took actions to mislead the jury.
If you're more familiar with crimlaw, civil court is a significantly different animal and worth learning more about. It serves a slightly different function in American society but is part of the fabric of systems that let people sleep at night.
> If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him.
We are currently a pretty tribal society, so I suspect you are correct that nobody on the Left would sue. But you can bet that someone on the Right would have (for bathroom reading, look for summaries of the suits Donald Trump has brought against people in his 78 years and ask yourself if you would consider that "lawfare"). The civil courts are intended to make people who have been harmed whole; someone on the left lying about someone on the right would have to be sued by the aggrieved party for the case to exist.
And you are right that emotion enters into it. But regardless of the jury's opinion of the man before the trial (and, again, both parties, which includes Alex Jones's legal representation, tuned the jury to be maximally charitable to their side)... He lied to them on the stand. I don't know that a jury exists that is magnanimous enough to overlook that. One of the points of a jury trial is to judge not just the facts but the overall character of the defendant (because so many facts tend to originate from the defendant themselves, so if the defendant flips the bozo bit in the minds of the jurors, that matters). If you're looking for someone to blame for Jones's fate, start with Jones.
Because the evidence shows he's not crazy; he's a con artist.