by Ryan McMaken, Ron Paul Institute:

In the latest demonstration of the absurdity of defamation laws, radio show host Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965 million to people whose didn’t like things Jones said about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

In the years following the massacre, Jones repeatedly stated that he thinks the shootings were staged and that the purported parents were so-called “crisis actors.” (He has since said he thinks the shootings were real.) Some of Jones’s listeners chose to agree with Jones’s claims that the shootings did not occur, and this allegedly informed the decisions by some listeners to engage in the harassment of some of the parents of murdered children.