Six families of victims killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the scene, filed a defamation lawsuit today against radio personality Alex Jones, who has repeatedly called the shooting fake.
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The lawsuit accuses Jones, a staunch gun rights advocate who operates Infowars, a website that routinely propagates conspiracies, of “a years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements.”
Twenty children and six educators died in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut, school.
“While the nation recoiled at the terrible reality of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Alex Jones saw an opportunity,” the families’ attorney Josh Koskoff said. “He went on a sustained attack that has lasted for years, accusing shattered family members of being actors, stating as fact that the shooting itself was a hoax and inciting others to act on these malicious lies.”
The plaintiffs are the parents of four children killed at Sandy Hook -- Jacqueline and Mark Barden, parents of Daniel; Nicole and Ian Hockley, parents of Dylan; Francine and David Wheeler, parents of Ben; and Jennifer Hensel and Jeremy Richman, parents of Avielle -- as well as Donna Soto, Carlee Soto-Parisi, Carlos Soto and Jillian Soto, the mother and siblings of first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto; and Erica Lafferty-Garbatini, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. FBI agent Bill Aldenberg is also a plaintiff.
“As a result of Jones’ campaign,” the families and Aldenberg said they have been “forced to endure malicious and cruel abuse at the hands of ruthless unscrupulous people.”
Their lawsuit also names Wolfgang Halbig, a Florida man who founded the now-defunct website SandyHookJustice, his associate Cory Sklanka and Infowars itself.
The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Bridgeport, cites Jones’ public assertions, including one from Sept. 25, 2014, in which he said video from the day of the shooting showed that the same children were cycled in and out of the school and that no emergency helicopters were sent to the school, and were “clearly staged.”
The lawsuit quotes Jones as saying on Jan. 13, 2015, “Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured."
The plaintiffs called such statements, among others, “outrageous, deeply painful and defamatory.”
The lawsuit seeks damages of an unspecified amount but in excess of $15,000.
Alan: What I despise most about "the conspiracist mindset" is how it always feeds into the bottom-line political fortunes of neo-fascist SOBMFs like Alex Jones and Donald Trump whose presidential aspirations began with his laughably bogus "Birther" claims.
Conspiracists have created a cottage industry and know full-well how to take ANY event and represent it with ginned up "evidence" that proves the event was conspiratorial.
Here's my bottom line.
Even if every alleged conspiracy proves to be true -- and that Hillary was sex trafficking in the basement of a New Jersey pizzaeria, anything that could be gained by such proof is vanishingly insignificant alongside The Fascist Solipsist-Sociopath who occupies The Oval Office.
Tragically, it is impossible to get long-time conspiracists to adopt a "meta-level view" since conspiracy theories only "hold up" (at least to their own satisfaction) if they stay focused on minutiae like "porta-potties behind the Newtown Connecticut police station" and photos that allegedly show the same "crisis actors" -- all over the world -- participating in mass murder dramas when anyone with a single functioning synapse knows that photographic evidence is not "somewhat" manipulable but "totally" manipulable.
If a skilled photo-geek wanted to create a pornographic picture of Mother Theresa humping Pope John Paul II, the resulting photograph -- and a totally persuasive photograph at that -- could be created de novo, pixel by pixel. Piece o' cake!
We also have a cesspool larger than Trump's Swamp full of "conspiracies" like Alex Jones' promoting a child slave colony on Mars that, an allegation that was so convincing to so many people that NASA deemed it necessary to issue a denial.
Donald Trump Turned A Rumor Into A Full-Blown Government Conspiracy In Just 5 Days
Why Does The U.S. Military Ban Soldiers From Carrying Guns? https://taskandpurpose.com/shouldnt-soldiers-carry-guns-military-bases/ Excerpt: "Lost in the debate about gun control is the reality that military bases within the United States have the strictest gun control of anywhere in the country."
In 2018, More Students Have Been Killed In American Schools Than GIs In Combat Zones
NFL Adds First Amendment To List Of Banned Substances
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The National Football League has expanded its list of banned substances to include the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the league confirmed on Wednesday.
Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.
Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, said that, by adding the First Amendment to the list of banned substances, the N.F.L was establishing a “policy of zero tolerance on tolerance.”
In order to enforce the ban, Goodell said that players would be tested periodically to determine whether they had used words, gestures, or facial expressions that are strictly prohibited under the new rule.
Speaking at the White House, Donald Trump applauded the league for banning the approximately seventeen hundred N.F.L. players from exercising freedom of speech, and expressed hope that the ban could eventually be expanded to include the other three hundred and twenty-five million Americans.
Missing from this picture is Patrick O'Neill who was released from a Georgia prison yesterday where he had been held for trespassing and causing symbolic damage to the nuclear weapons Navy base at King's Bay. Patrick hoped to be with us and wife Mary Rider (first woman seated on the right) but was still en route from Georgia when the restaurant closed. Welcome home Patrick!
Republican tax policy focuses on one central idea: If you cut taxes, the economy will grow. Now the man who helped write that doctrine says it's a myth. Bruce Bartlett, author of "The Truth Matters," was an economic policy adviser for presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And during the 1980s, he championed the idea that tax cuts would equal growth in the economy. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Bartlett debunks the myth that, as he puts it, he helped create. Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal talks with Bartlett about the GOP tax myth and why it's lasted so long.
Kai Ryssdal: Do me a favor and remind us what the Republican tax myth is.
Bruce Bartlett: The biggest Republican tax myth is that we had vast prosperity in the 1980s that dwarfed the growth in any other time period and that was totally and exclusively the result of the 1981 tax cut. And this is just total mythology. Real economic growth in the 1980s was less than it was in the 1970s or the 1990s.
Ryssdal: And yet, now here we are, a generation or more later, and tax cuts are still, you write, the go-to solution for Republicans.
Bartlett: That's right. They believe in one-size-fits-all economics or "cookie cutter" economics, if you'd rather. There's one policy and one policy only to deal with any economic problem that ever comes up. And that is tax cuts for the rich.
Bartlett: Of course, this is just complete nonsense. I think in their heart of hearts they believe that only the wealthy really help the economy, and they believe that the wealthy just carry the rest of us on their backs, that we're all worthless, and only the Charles Kochs and Robert Mercers of the world really add economic value to the economy, and, of course, this is just utterly ridiculous.
Ryssdal: So what's the answer then to what might constitute a sensible overhaul of the American tax system? Because everybody pretty much agrees it's cumbersome and bloated and it needs to be reshaped for a new economy. What's the answer?
Bartlett: Well, I think they should follow the example of Ronald Reagan. The 1986 tax reform was a very good piece of legislation. And the reason it worked is three key principles were followed: They got rid of tax loopholes to pay for a reduction in tax rates. Secondly, it was distributionally neutral. It gave roughly the same percentage tax cut to everybody regardless of their tax bracket. And the third thing is it was genuinely bipartisan. And the Republicans today rejected all three principles.
Ryssdal: What about this idea that you hear from Treasury Secretary Mnuchin quite a bit and also Gary Cohn that these tax cuts are going to pay for themselves with economic growth?
Bartlett: No tax cut in history has ever done that. We just had a recent example in the state of Kansas where Arthur Laffer promised that the huge tax cut that the Republicans enacted would pay for itself. And of course it did not. Revenues hemorrhaged and the first reaction that Republicans had, they said, "we must cut spending for education, for the poor, for roads for many many other programs that that are popular with voters. And eventually they did finally have to reverse themselves. I think that pretty much the same thing is going to happen at the federal level.
Ryssdal: Myths become myths because they endure for a very long time. Why do you think this Republican tax myth has lasted so long?
Bartlett: I think part of it is simple ignorance. People don't know history. But, a part of it is that they believe what they want to believe. They want to believe that taxes are too high. I mean, Donald Trump constantly says we're the highest taxed nation on Earth, which is just a rank lie. I don't think he's confused. He's been told by his own staff on many occasions that that is absolutely not true. But he keeps saying it because unfortunately there are a lot of people in his party who simply want to believe that, and they don't care whether it's true or not.
Alan: Once a month I lunch with retired Air Force General friend, AWC, whose first assignment was in China during World War II.
Several years ago, my friend confided -- and I quote verbatim -- "It seems we haven't fought a good war since World War II."
General C also told me: "Old Ho (Chi Minh) was a real patriot and a friend of the United States. During World War II, when I was stationed in China, we could always count on Ho to get to remote American Air Force crash sites and bring our boys home. Uncle Sam certainly didn't have the capability to do that. But Ho did it every time we called on him."
Excerpt: "For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins." War historian Martin van Creveld is the only non-U.S. author whose writings are obligatory reading by America's Officer Corps."
George Will: "The 2003 Invasion Of Iraq Was The Worst Foreign Policy Decision In U.S. History"
Alan: I love Ike's sentiment. But now that The Deplorable One has "Made America Hate Again," smart money bets on another war -- either with Iran or North Korea -- and this one will be a doozy - a high water mark of manufactured consent coupled with breathtaking stupefaction.