(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Just minutes after Infowars founder Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly US$1 billion for defaming the family members of Sandy Hook shooting victims, the embattled conspiracy theorist mocked them on air.

“Do these people actually think they’re getting any of this money?” he grunted on his live internet radio show.

The comments punctuated a rare, long-awaited moment of justice for people who have been hounded and abused following Jones’ claims that the 2012 shooting was a “complete fake” and a “giant hoax” meant to undermine support for the United States’ Second Amendment.

Jones, at one point the world’s most notorious conspiracy theorist, is already on the hook for nearly US$50 million in damages from a previous ruling, and has another Sandy Hook-related defamation trial on the horizon. He is almost certainly ruined. There will be a great many people who will take immense pleasure in the comeuppance of a man whose bile has tortured innocent and vulnerable people, all so he can sell supplements.

Counterintuitively, the verdict today cements just how ill-equipped our systems are at dealing with grifters and fear-mongers.

It has taken a decade for justice to be delivered against a man whose professional life has been spent spewing obvious lies and misinformation. But in some ways Jones was an easy target: his claims were clearly false, and he had the assets to make pursuing a defamation claim worthwhile (in 2018, Infowars was making upwards of US$50 million a year in revenue).

Pursuing a similar claim against the myriad of smaller Jones-like characters — or the swarms of communities that, taken together, can have a similar impact to Jones — is futile. This form of justice is just not tenable in all but a handful of cases.

What’s more, Alex Jones’ influence cannot be understated. His conspiratorial, reactionary mindset has infected American and even global politics. Distrust of government and the “deep state” is core to modern conservatism. His signature claim — that something was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government or your political opponents — is now mainstream.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, right-wing politicians (including Australia’s own George Christensen and Craig Kelly) questioned whether it was actually leftie bogeymen Antifa who were responsible.

Even outside of politics, obsessive true crime communities and fan culture has become increasingly conspiratorial.

It is a failure of our society that a malignant conman like Alex Jones was able to operate for as long as he has. Now it’s too late. The virus is out into the world. Alex Joneses are everywhere.