A Small Blow to the Defamation Peddlers

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 03, 2021

 

A Texas court has ruled that conspiracy entrepreneur Alex Jones is liable for damages in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which Jones has alleged was a staged, “false flag” propaganda operation carried out by “crisis actors.”

 

This is bad news for kindred figures such as Julie Kelly, one of the habitually dishonest contributors to the habitually dishonest American Greatness, who has similarly claimed that D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, one of the officers assaulted during the Capitol riot, is a “crisis actor.” It is, indeed, very bad news for the whole bullsh** industry, from cable news to the rage-retailers of Twitter, because defamation is central to that industry’s business model.

 

Jones should, of course, be bled white. In this matter, he is unquestionably on the wrong side of the law, to say nothing of the law’s very distant relation, morality. His culpability is beyond doubt, though it has been very entertaining to observe the evolution of his excuses in this and related matters, first claiming to be in the grip of some “psychosis,” then insisting that he could not effectively defame anybody because nobody would be so monumentally stupid as to take him at his word.

 

It is worth noting the utter cowardice at work there, which is one of the most powerful political and cultural influences of our time.

 

It’s no coincidence Jones has in effect offered for himself the same justification that many of Donald Trump’s admirers put forward in his defense, which is, to borrow from Salena Zito, that he should be taken seriously but not literally. He isn’t a habitual liar — he’s just “owning the libs,” sticking a thumb in the eye of elite sensibilities, whatever. Trumpism, like Alex Jones-ism and its left-wing equivalents, is built on defamation, and its foundation is the confidence that such defamation imposes no real cost on those who traffic in it.

 

That confidence is not entirely misplaced. Sometimes, defamation is legally actionable, and sometimes it isn’t. But actionable defamation often goes unchallenged because of the cost and inconvenience involved in litigation. In that respect, the Sandy Hook families did a public service by suing Alex Jones. We owe them our gratitude, and more of us should follow their example.

 

I have some experience with the law of libel, which is what you call defamation in print. I spent the first part of my career as a newspaper editor, meaning that I was threatened with a libel lawsuit about once a week, though few of those threats ever amounted to much and none ever saw the inside of a courtroom. In my present post as a political commentator in the Golden Age of Bullsh**, I attract a fair amount of slander and libel, too — manufactured quotations from the likes of Matt Bruenig, completely fictitious inventions from the likes of NARAL, etc.

 

This kind of thing happens all the time, and it isn’t just the usual assortment of nobodies on Twitter: Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times, for example, slandered venture capitalist Marc Andreessen earlier this year, in another case of a manufactured quotation. Other than a well-deserved vivisection by Glenn Greenwald, nothing came of it. But the examples set by people associated with institutions such as the New York Times and the Atlantic — and the White House — matter a great deal, because elite institutions enjoy prestige and credibility that make their transgressions powerful weapons.

 

As noted, these sorts of episodes rarely produce legal action, in part because initiating such action is a pain in the butt that often costs more than it is worth, and in part because public figures have — wrongly, I think — come to accept defamation as an inevitable part of modern life, something that must simply be endured.

 

American libel law is, for the most part, very good. It requires only that a complainant show that a claim is both false and defamatory, and, when public figures are involved, that the claim was made with the actual malice of reckless disregard for the truth. The complainant does not have to document further economic loss to claim damages — the defamation itself is the damage.

 

The substance of the law is reasonable, but the world is full of unpredictable judges and juries, and good lawyers are expensive. Worse, this kind of defamation is often trafficked in by entrepreneurs looking for free publicity — people who, in at least some cases, want their targets to sue them, because a lawsuit will give them what they most crave: attention.

 

On top of that, social media and other technological and social changes have complicated the situation a little bit. Without the New York Times connection, nobody would care who Taylor Lorenz is, but she did not libel Marc Andreessen in the pages of the New York Times. If you are a lawyer looking to buy yourself a vacation home in Aspen, then you don’t want to sue Taylor Lorenz — you want to sue the New York Times. I don’t know what Taylor Lorenz’s savings account looks like, but I am willing to bet that it is not very close to the New York Times Company’s market capitalization of $8.3 billion.

 

Social media has, to some extent, given institutions the opportunity to outsource their defamation to Twitter, where individual writers can drive traffic and revenue to your publication while giving the institution itself a layer of legal insulation. Firms get to enjoy the benefits of irresponsible social-media-rage-monkey antics without being exposed to much risk. That is emblematic of our time, which is characterized by intellectual and moral cowardice.

 

In one sense, we could think of this phenomenon as a moral failing on the part certain media entrepreneurs. But in the larger sense, we should think of it as a moral failing on the part of their audience. If the market treated an Alex Jones or a Dan Bongino with the contempt they deserve, then there would be no incentive to behave as dishonestly and irresponsibly as such figures do. But markets are like democracies: They are a blessing in that they ultimately end up giving people what they want, and they are a horror in that they ultimately end up giving people what they want. And that isn’t really a problem that can be fixed with legislation. Corruptissima republica plurimae leges.

 

Alex Jones has been a wonderful boon to the Left — he is exactly the kind of foil you would want if you were a left-wing culture warrior. If he didn’t exist, they would have had to invent him — they are, in fact, busy trying to invent a replacement for him as we speak. And the Trumpist Right will, of course, oblige, coughing up as many Proud Boys or Newsmax grifters or Claremont Institute poseurs as the market will bear.

 

There are limits to how far a business model based on defamation can go. Alex Jones probably is not a big enough fish that making an example of him will have much salutary effect, but putting a real price on lying for a living is still a baby step in the right direction.