Alex Jones talks to media during a midday break during the trail at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 26, 2022.
Briana Sanchez/Austin American-Statesman via AP, Pool
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene came to the defense of Infowars’ Alex Jones over the weekend.
She claimed Jones was being “persecuted.”
Jones was ordered to pay $45 million to Sandy Hook parents he defamed last week.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene defended Alex Jones after he was ordered to pay $45 million to the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting he defamed.
Greene made the remarks in an interview with fellow Donald Trump ally and promoter of far-right disinformation Mike Lindell on the fringes of the CPAC conference over the weekend.
—Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 7, 2022
Greene cast the families suing him as seeking to “ruin” him, and argued that Infowars should not be judged solely on its claim — which Jones retracted at the trial — that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
“He didn’t build his InfoWars on that [claim]. He built it on a lot of other news. And Alex Jones has been right pretty much most of the time,” Greene remarked of Jones.
“Alex Jones has been right most of the time, except of course on Sandy Hook.”
In another interview at the conference Friday she claimed Jones was being “persecuted”, while she had praised him on Twitter for remarks about child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during his trial.
A jury decided last week that Jones should pay vast sums in damages to the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2012 after court hearings in Texas. For years on his Infowars website Jones had baselessly claimed that the parents were part of a government plot to stage the mass shooting.
Jones built a lucrative empire promoting baseless and outlandish conspiracy theories on Infowars, with an expert witness in last week’s trial testifying that he could be worth as much as $240 million.
Infowars has promoted “false flag” conspiracy theories about events including the 9/11 attacks and a series of mass shootings, has claimed that the US government covertly controls the weather, and has long pushed anti-vax disinformation.
He has also used his platform to promote the careers of politicians who have echoed his espousal of conspiracy theories, including Donald Trump in the early days of his political career and Greene when she launched her bid for Congress in 2020.
Like Jones, Greene has promoted conspiracy theories about mass shootings. She has harassed David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland shooting in Florida.
Jones filed for bankruptcy in the wake of last week’s ruling, delaying a separate defamation case being brought against him by Sandy Hook families in Connecticut, Reuters reported.