Right, but did he make a specific claim that he had specific, direct knowledge of Sandy Hook being a hoax (e.g., his usual trope of "we've got documents")?
A parent (individual) isn't a corporation with profits to be damaged. I don't doubt a claim of emotional distress, but it's a stretch to say every single parent's character was defamed. As far as I saw from trial clips, one nutjob lady claimed Info Wars radicalized her into going after parents.
Defamation in that case doesn't make much sense based on the stuff I saw presented.
Yes, that was well established --- as it has to be in any defamation case, lest the case be dismissed. Moreover, it doesn't much matter, because he deliberately defaulted the trial itself, so the only question for the jury was damages. If you haven't followed this case at all, it's pretty easy to quickly Google the background, and you'll immediately fine that "defamation in this case doesn't make much sense" is probably not a coherent thing to say about the Jones case.
> Moreover, it doesn't much matter, because he deliberately defaulted the trial itself, so the only question for the jury was damages
Which seems to indicate that his end game is to hope for the broader political winds to shift so radically rightward that this judgement against him is somehow unenforceable, perhaps because the very enforcement apparatus has been destroyed by that shift.
They were harassed by his followers across state lines, so yes, even a broke person’s life can be made orders of magnitude more difficult than it should be under normal conditions.
Also, let’s not walk this eggshell here of “did he make any specific claim”, this is the same bullshit that defends trump from calling covid hoax and whatnot.
Those are individuals who should be tried independently of Jones. By that standard, anybody who goes and commits a crime because of song lyrics should find the artist tried as an accomplice.
It's not "walking on eggshells," it's a matter of legal accuracy. You may not like it, but it's important for maintaining a fair courts system (without which, we forfeit a civil society and revert to tribalism).
So far no part of the argument you've presented has had anything to do with US defamation law, just for what it's worth. If you're trying to be persuasive, that might be the part of your argument you should opt to shore up. In the alternative, you could adopt the somewhat more popular strategy of "the entire edifice of US defamation law is incongruous with the Constitution and should be thrown out". That argument is wrong too, but it'll get you farther.
later edit; I wrote the following I think as the reply below was being written
If you watched the Texas Jones trial, you saw the jury be instructed in some detail on what forms of damage they could and could not attribute to Jones. But you can also just look this up; there's no shortage of documents on the Internet that lay out the procedure for attributing damages to a proven case of defamation.
Long story short: if you damage somebody's reputation with false statements and, following causally from that damage, they suffer losses because lunatics start harassing them on the street, you are in fact liable for those losses.
We were editing at the same time. When I finished editing my comment, I noticed you'd replied, and so I went back and noted that, so it wouldn't look like you'd ignored the last two paragraphs of my comment in your response.
There’s criteria for defamation. Jones likely met them, but it didn’t matter here because he lost by default in the trial due to his overwhelming failure to engage with the legal system in his own defense.
If an artist published songs with lyrics that met the criteria for defamation, and then people heard the song and committed crimes, the artist would be liable for defamation and the listeners who committed crimes would be guilty of those crimes (notably, defamation is civil, not criminal).
A parent (individual) isn't a corporation with profits to be damaged. I don't doubt a claim of emotional distress, but it's a stretch to say every single parent's character was defamed. As far as I saw from trial clips, one nutjob lady claimed Info Wars radicalized her into going after parents.
Defamation in that case doesn't make much sense based on the stuff I saw presented.