I think what one person calls "lies and slander", another person can genuinely, reasonably, and justifiably call "exposing bad acts that need to be exposed".
The fact that reasonable people often disagree about what's true and what's not is exactly why we must have Free Speech codified in law. The opposite of Free Speech is when one group of people get to lay down the law and assert that their biased point of view is the one true correct world view, and forcibly shutdown the speech of those who disagree.
"Can" implies that that's not an absolute, right? That there are times where slander and libel aren't being used to "expose bad acts that need to be exposed", but rather to be used maliciously in order to benefit the slanderer at the expense of the slandered.
I suppose I'm just curious about a hypothetical, like... I'm wondering where you might draw a line, so maybe entertain me with this for a sec?
Let's say you and I work together, and for whatever reason, I don't like you. Maybe you and I are competing for a promotion, or maybe an interaction rubbed me the wrong way, doesn't matter - I want you gone. So, I decide to spread some nasty rumors about you throughout the office - you leer at co-worker's children, you're aggressively sexual with the women in the office, shit like that. Whatever I've come up with to disparage you is bullshit, but for the sake of this conversation, let's say I put a lot of effort into this and that you end up getting let go because of it. Maybe the rumors even happen to jump from your co-workers over to your friends/family. Some of them stop talking to you. Perhaps other businesses in the industry hear about it and opt not to hire you, either.
So you believe that maliciously spreading lies to get someone fired, ruin their friendships and cause them to struggle to find another job should be legally permissible. Gotcha, cheers!
We can have freedom, or we can have safety, but we cannot have both. I value freedom over safety, and so a nanny state that would investigate the telling of lies seems tyrannical to me, yes.
"That government is best which governs least." --Henry David Thoreau, 1849
For what it's worth, Thoreau was writing from the relative safety of his friend's property. I can't help but wonder if his opinion on the utility of government would have been different if, while Emerson was out, somebody decided to come along and trash his cabin for fun.
Meanwhile, the old saw about those who trade freedom for safety deserving neither Liberty nor safety actually referred to the colonial government considering allowing the Penn family to forgo taxes in perpetuity in exchange for deploying some mercenaries to fight on the colonial frontier. Benjamin Franklin was talking to the legislature, and reminding them that they have the liberty of setting the law as they see fit - by giving up that Liberty via a guarantee of perpetual freedom from taxation for temporary safety, they (The legislature) would deserve neither.
In practice, government is forever a balancing act between liberties and safety. One can start at social contract theory and work one's way out from there if one wants a formal grounding, or one can go the common sense route and understand that if you go around cheating people, eventually people are going to gang up on you because we are social creatures.
Your historical recollection is incorrect. Thoreau was a strong proponent of limited government and it's utility. What he was against was tyrannical overreach and abuse of power, such as, for example, a gov't investigating who lied in a spat between coworkers.
Reasonable people do disagree about truth frequently, but that's not what happened in this case. In fact, the standard by which one determines the difference between a statement made in ignorance and one made in malice (higher damages may be awarded) is the "reasonable person principle."
The First Amendment is there to protect objective truth from government stifling, but the judicial process recognizes truth exists (if it didn't, we'd have no use for trials) and that wanton disregard for truth can cause harm to a person.
I'm not an expert in this area of law, nor do I really know much about any Alex Jones cases, but when I found out he was fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy that seems excessive. I would hazard a guess there are many lawyers and legal experts who would agree with my opinion, so it's probably not a black-and-white issue, in this particular case.
If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him. I say there was a lot of personal hatred for him PRIOR to the lawsuit which is the true reason for the huge settlement. People hated him, and they used lawfare to get at him.
> but when I found out he was fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy that seems excessive
Yes, that's a hole in your understanding of the fact-pattern. He wasn't fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy. The error of his lawyer revealed evidence that he knew the conspiracy was false but he spread it because it made the people who listen to him keep listening and buying his products, which crosses the line into "malicious" and opens him up (in most states, including Texas) to significantly larger penalties.
Jones was hit with a level of consequence few defendants in civil suits over slander are hit with because of how egregious, continuous, and malicious the offense was and because he took actions to mislead the jury.
If you're more familiar with crimlaw, civil court is a significantly different animal and worth learning more about. It serves a slightly different function in American society but is part of the fabric of systems that let people sleep at night.
> If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him.
We are currently a pretty tribal society, so I suspect you are correct that nobody on the Left would sue. But you can bet that someone on the Right would have (for bathroom reading, look for summaries of the suits Donald Trump has brought against people in his 78 years and ask yourself if you would consider that "lawfare"). The civil courts are intended to make people who have been harmed whole; someone on the left lying about someone on the right would have to be sued by the aggrieved party for the case to exist.
And you are right that emotion enters into it. But regardless of the jury's opinion of the man before the trial (and, again, both parties, which includes Alex Jones's legal representation, tuned the jury to be maximally charitable to their side)... He lied to them on the stand. I don't know that a jury exists that is magnanimous enough to overlook that. One of the points of a jury trial is to judge not just the facts but the overall character of the defendant (because so many facts tend to originate from the defendant themselves, so if the defendant flips the bozo bit in the minds of the jurors, that matters). If you're looking for someone to blame for Jones's fate, start with Jones.
Because the evidence shows he's not crazy; he's a con artist.
On point #1, The operative word in that sentence was "excessive". $1.5B was excessive.
On point #2. Your main point is that both sides act in bad faith equally, and I disagree. Dems have been eating up CNN/MSM left-wing propaganda and brainwashing for over a decade and so now there's just no common ground between the two sides any longer.
One of the trials Jones faced in Texas was an appeal on whether the fine levied in Texas was excessive (worth noting: the $1.5 billion is a running tally, not a single ruling; his harm spread across multiple people in multiple jurisdictions, and his actions keep convincing separate courts with separate trials that punitive damages are warranted. Legal Eagle has more details on the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSm7sRx-0hA&list=PLzBQ6LRv47...).
There was a law passed in 1995 by a Democratic majority to cap damages at $750k in Texas; the judge on appeal to Jones's Texas ruling found that the law was unconstitutional.
On point 2, we will probably agree to disagree. If anything, I believe the GOP has taken the most steps to disrupt and destroy norms of legal practice and has opened the door to using the law as a tool for shaping society. The Trump administration, for example, tried to rig the census in 2020 (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-trumps-census-s...), an initiative that fell apart primarily because the daughter of a GOP political operative attained a hard drive of her father's that revealed that a citizenship question would bias the results, under-counting the population of areas with more (legal and non-legal) immigrants.
It's actually quite hard to get the Executive's authority on the topic of census questions put under scrutiny, and the evidence in the email correspondence on the drive was so damning that it caused the census change to fail to pass a judicial challenge (essentially the only way for the Executive to fail to pass that bar is if they were lying about the justification, and... They were).
What you may be observing is that both sides practice lawfare but one side seems consistently bad at it...
Back on Jones: I don't know if $1.5 billion is fair. I do note that the Information Age gives people much larger megaphones to spread information much further than ever before. I don't think we fully comprehend the effect that has on society. In the short run, I don't consider the fact that if you say something so egregiously wrong that you hurt people in multiple jurisdictions, you could be on the hook for damages in multiple jurisdictions and that could result in a sum-total civil penalty larger than any individual jurisdiction would levy to be obviously wrong? Criminal law doesn't generally work that way (federal authority would subsume), but civil law is a different beast.
On the plus side, this fate is eminently avoidable: don't maliciously push lies that hurt people in multiple states. I'm not sure you've recognized how egregious the lying was, how unapologetic he was about it, and how much that impacts a final court decision on one's fate (in general, not just if someone has an [R] after their name in a political census).
I disagree that Conservatives treat Democrats this badly. Democrats are the ones who literally invented `Cancel Culture`. Never in history have the two parties been more different.
(Wikipedia suggests the term itself originates from black communities, which is not synonymous with Democrats. I think it's fair to assert the practice without the name is much older).
My point is I don't know how we differentiate between "Cancel culture" and "shunning" or "boycotts."
The Dixie Chicks had their career derailed with only a nascent Internet in existence. It was never necessary for people to organize and decide collectively something needed to be shunned.
What is your position on repeatedly using lies to engage in slander and libel towards a specific group of people over a long period time?