Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his credit report.
There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Besides others are in line as well.
And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less).
As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
Although it sounds like maybe this was more of a procedural rejection than a dispositive one...
This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out.
There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for.
I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
>Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
Sealed bid auctions are not some absurd rarity in this sort of situation and I have no idea why you believe they are.
The auction was indeed very public. The bids were not.
The only requirement to participate was you had to show the Trustee that you were serious and had the means to participate. Only 2 parties did that.
The auction dates were published in newspapers and various news outlets announced that it was going to happen.
Again, maximimum value not cash.
But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer.
The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer.
The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.
However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).
> It was basically an IOU from one of the families
This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?
It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant.
> the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Again, the Onion was spending real cash.
At best your are completely ignorant of the deal.
If there's a company of which he's a minority owner, they could decide to buy it, and it would be like his brother buying it.
Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors.
And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.
Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims?
This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money.
And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again.
They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.
“‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.”
is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective.
First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2]. (They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.)
The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion.
My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.
The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal.
So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.
Unfortunately, giving the victims no choice in who owns this stuff means allowing it to be reused for the same harm.
Money is not the only variable in the equation. This is not a legal interpretation of the judges decision.
Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins.
This is weird to me.
You have been lied to.
As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.
Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
What am I missing?
> That strikes me as mostly wrong? One, it is not really impossible to value the families’ claims; they have won judgments in court. Two, “whatever the Connecticut Families decide to do with distributions” obviously adds to the value of The Onion’s bid, if what they do with the distributions is give them to other creditors. Three, it is not so much “a text book example of collusion” as it is a pretty standard case of the biggest creditor of a bankruptcy estate using its debt to subsidize its bid for the assets. It’s pretty normal stuff. > > I don’t know? Global Tetrahedron’s bid was “$100,000 more than anyone else will pay,” so it’s not clear how much an auction would have helped. I suppose now they can have another auction and Global Tetrahedron can just bid $100,000 — or $1 — more than whatever FUAC bids, including the families’ waiver, and win the auction again.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-11/the-on... (https://archive.ph/uetH6)
Also, @RealAlexJones says "EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones Responds Live On Air" → is this about two separate Alex Jones, or the same Mr Jones is talking about himself in the 3rd person?
"…continue to seek a path towards purchasing…"
"…back to the drawing board…"
The article could have used those details.
-----
[edit] They've updated the article.
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
How is one situation different from the other?
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth.
That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358
"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.
Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.
(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!
That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.
The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430
My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.
That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.
I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Edit: clarification
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
Boeing killed 346 people
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-crashes-245a38...
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
Or a man who deliberately runs a person down (but his target survived), and intends to continue doing so?
Unfortunately, slander and fraud are really hard to enforce. In a just system he'd have never earned that money in the first place.
Fortunately, his legal defense was comedically incompetent.
So I'll take "all his money goes to his most-harmed victims" as a compromise.
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
This is also a good time to consider what you are saying by calling it a “political vector”. Lying about a mass shooting snd harassment aren’t traditionally a partisan position so by using that framing you’re implicitly saying they belong to his party.
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
The second-highest bidder was....an insurance company? Am I misunderstanding?
I am also confused on why it took a whole month for them to reject the sale when it seems to have been accepted for weeks.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
But 500k per person maybe, if it really heinous?
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
Definitely how that works.
If I burn down somebody's house and sell tickets to watch, the damages are easy to calculate! It's just my ticket revenue! THE MARKET DECIDED!
Gotta give you some credit though, you beat out some real competition for dumbest take in the thread.
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
Who is right I don't know.
What evidence are you basing this on?
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/supreme-judicial-court-chief-justi...
I mean, I’m not advocating it, but we saw the decision of a guy who made the news over the past week with a healthcare exec.
This is basically going to be the United States for the immediate future, if you're connected to the right people.
Downvote all you want, but we see it with our own eyes.
That seems a very foreseeable outcome.
Exactly. The lawfare must stop.
He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
BTW, this is a lot more than pharmaceutical companies pay out for actually killing people.
I remember watching the trial and it was the most ridiculous thing every. The defendant (Alex) wasn't allowed to say he's innocent because the judge defaulted him. Yet the prosecution was allowed to bring in all kinds of evidence of his guilt (other than him being defaulted) and present that to the jury.
So in essence, you're guilty because the judge said so, and the prosecution gets to pile on about your guilt, but you can't testify to the jury counter your guilt. Yet somehow this a jury trial.
The other ridiculous thing was he was defaulted for namely not showing Youtube ad revenue for his shows, after youtube deleted his channel.
They also awarded an FBI agent, I guess for hurt feelings, not even related to the families.
1.5 Billion .... apparently not a political prosecution of a critic, designed to silence him by taking InfoWars off air.
You know when Alex offered $55 million to settle. The lawyers somehow decided to get less by pushing for the bankruptcy.
Of course the judge allowed that mistake to be used in trial.
So I think he did show up as least from that memory of the trial.
A really entertaining podcast has actually done a series of episodes on the depositions in the case. If you are curious about the facts heres a list of those episodes:
https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/size/25/?search=Formulaic+...
Be warned they are...long and detailed.
Given how aggressive the partisan media is, you'd think they would have an established set of incriminating soundbites. When I did look into it deeper, I found that the case was decided by a default decision. Maybe there are reasons for these legal technicalities. I can appreciate that.
If the standard for the discussion is, "AJ was found guilty in court", then we should be clear that this doesn't mean he was found guilty in the substance of the case. Posters here should consider that before going off the deep end in demonizing AJ. HN is a site where discussions routinely involve citing sources. Yet, this part is assumed.
An unprecedented 1.5B in judgement, some of which goes to an FBI agent who worked on the case? Specifically on that point, there are compelling reasons why libel laws apply differently or not at all to government officials. Mainly this revolves around the threat of censoring regime critics. See also: lese-majesty.
Then we find that the plaintiffs' lawyers are explicitly a political group, "The Everytown Group For Gun Control", funded by Michael Bloomberg. Lawyers have claimed that they don't actually want to collect the damages for their client, rather that they have an ulterior motive in shutting down InfoWars. It isn't unreasonable to view this as a war of political factions.
The drama is on-going, but now it is viewed within the context of partisan lawfare against a former and now elected president.
None of these observations are inexplicable, but taken all-together, they fail the smell test for this poster.
I suspect he may end up buying the assets himself or someone in this circle.
InfoWars is worth nothing if not for Alex Jones right. So if you want to maximize value, you need to somehow keep him around to serve his audience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/business/media/the-onion-...
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/davidsacerdote.bsky.social/feed/aaa...
Hmm.
A useless distinction in practice.
Disclaimer, I think Trump is a buffoon, but I also think this kind of thinking is backwards.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
The trustee was explicitly granted wide latitude in how to handle the auction, including canceling it outright. [0]