Voices: As Alex Jones faces a $1bn comeuppance it looks like the good guys have won

Nearly one billion dollars. If you google Alex Jones, here is what will not currently appear first in your search field: Internet provocateur; Infowars; right-wing. You may not even see the words “Sandy Hook” until you scroll down past the headline. What will appear first, when you enter the name Alex Jones, is a staggering figure: one billion dollars. It is the amount that, earlier today, a Connecticut jury determined would be the penalty for Jones’ years and years of reprehensible behavior.

The total settlement — it amounts, in fact, to $965m, to be split among 15 plaintiffs, 14 of whom are relatives of the Sandy Hook school massacre and one of whom was an FBI agent defamed by Jones and fellow conspiracy theorists — comes at the close of three weeks of testimony in Waterbury, Connecticut. In August, Jones received what now feels like a veritable slap on the wrist, when a Texas jury ordered him to pay $49m in damages in a nearly identical case.

That latter case had appeared to send one message: in the United States, the right-wing media is free to spin lies about whomever they please, just as Jones did about the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, whom he framed as actors, politicizing the event and turning his listeners against the grieving parents of young children. What was $49m, after all, to a man who had confessed, over email, to earning more than $800,000 per day?

It took a jury in Connecticut to finally fell this beast. No amount of fundraising can save Alex Jones now. One billion dollars is an insurmountable debt — as insurmountable, some might argue, as having to relive the death of your child over and over again in the public eye for almost an entire decade, without apology. Alex Jones is finished. Infowars is dead. It’s hard to believe that decency can always overcome evil, or, indeed, that it can ever even overcome evil, but today a small part of the world feels capable of healing.

Alex Jones, no doubt, will accept no real lesson from this settlement. The gravity of one billion dollars will not chip away at his hardened heart, and we shouldn’t expect any grand gestures from him. In fact, that was never the point. The point was both to punish and to deter, to let Jones know that, no, he would not get away with this, but also to ring out a warning bell, loud and clear.

For Mr Jones’ proteges, the ones who have not yet taken the stage, but who plan to develop careers predicated upon the same poor practices: bullying, invention, a lack of ethics, nonsense journalism, lies. To those dark and ill-intended provocateurs who have wished to emulate the husky smoker’s cough and thrilling angry gesticulations of Jones, who built a career based on scaring the weak-minded, the jury has made one message painfully clear: there is no sanctimony in choosing this path. This verdict is not only the end of Alex Jones. It is the end of his methodology. It is the end of those who wish to get away with lying for a living.

Tonight, Fox News and OANN likely won’t be airing the Alex Jones verdict — or, if they do, they will be covering it in a narrow, soft way that doesn’t betray their true feelings. The Jones verdict is a threat, of course, to every so-called journalist (and every so-called news network) that lies and defames, that uses victims as pawns. No doubt Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson will sleep a little worse tonight under the specter of a one-billion-dollar settlement. No doubt their networks will pay closer attention to the content.

As ever, it’s hard to know if one man’s fall from grace will make any real and sustaining impact in the way that we absorb information. Will we tack toward decency? If that is the sole outcome of this massive settlement, it will all be worth it. In the meantime, I’m ready to call it: the war against Infowars is over, and, yes, the good guys have finally won.