I think what Alex Jones did is more than mere defamation.
Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims?
Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.
In such a way that somebody else decided on their own do something...
Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be incitement.
That's why he wasn't convicted of incitement, he was convicted of defamation.
I am going to pick ignorant in this case.
> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”
> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”
There’s a reason even the right wing hardliners abandoned this guy.
More to the point he has Roger Stone and Steve Bannon on the show constantly, who in turn have direct access to Trump.
Alex is firmly within the mainstream of the right wing.
He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s all “just comedy” right?