The Lynching of an American Hero

 

The Lynching of an American Hero

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

August 22, 2022

 

 

Earlier this month, a jury issued a $49 million judgment against the heroic Alex Jones for defamation. This is a chilling blow to free speech in our country. As John Frahm puts it, “This massive 49 Million Alex Jones trial award is corrupt and is a harbinger against free speech of all sorts. And he had two other trials to go. This is really serious. Pure evil. They declared their intent. Free speech of every sort has just been targeted for destruction and lock down under a social credit system. If you offend someone you can be destroyed.  If you question a narrative you can be destroyed.   

Beware.” 

In a free society, there should be no suits for “defamation.” You don’t own your reputation, and people should be free to determine what they think of you, based on their own assessment of the evidence. As the great Murray Rothbard explains, “0ur theory of property rights can be used to

unravel a tangled skein of complex problems revolving around questions of knowledge, true and false, and the dissemination of that knowledge. Does Smith, for example, have the right (again, we are concerned about his right, not the morality or esthetics of his exercising that right) to print and disseminate the statement that ‘Jones is a liar’ or that ‘Jones is a convicted thief’ or that ‘Jones is a homosexual’? There are three logical possibilities about the truth of such a statement: (a) that the statement about Jones is true; (b) that it is false and Smith knows it is false; or (c) most realistically, that the truth or falsity of the statement is a fuzzy zone, not certainly and precisely knowable (e.g., in the above cases, whether or not someone is a ‘liar’ depends on how many and how intense the pattern of lies a person has told and is adjudged to add up to the category of ‘liar’ -an area where individual judgments can and will properly differ). Suppose that Smith’s statement is definitely true. It seems clear, then, that Srnith has a perfect right to print and disseminate the statement. For it is within his property right to do so. lt is also, of course, within the property right of Jones to try to rebut the statement in his turn. The current libel laws make Smith’s action illegal if done with ‘malicious’ intent, even though the information be true. And yet, surely legality or illegality should depend not on the motivation of the actor, but on the objective nature of the act. If an action is objectively non-invasive, then it should be legal regardless of the benevolent or malicious intentions of the actor (though the latter may well be relevant to the morality of the action). And this is aside from the obvious difficulties in legally determining an individual’s subjective motivations for any action. lt might, however, be charged that Smith does not have the right to print such a statement, because Jones has a ‘right to privacy’ (his ‘human’ right) which Smith does not have the right to violate. But is there really such a right to privacy? How can there be? How can there be a right to prevent Smith by force from disseminating knowledge which he possesses? Surely there can be no such right. Smith owns his own body, and therefore has the property right to own the knowledge he has inside his head, including his knowledge about Jones. And therefore he has the corollary right to print and disseminate that knowledge. In short, as in the case of the ‘human right’ to free speech, there is no such thing as a right to privacy except the right to protect one’s property from invasion. The only right ‘to privacy’ is the right to protect one’s property from being invaded by someone else. In brief, no one has the right to burgle someone else’s home, or to wiretap someone’s phone lines. Wiretapping is properly a crime not because of some vague and woolly ‘invasion of a ‘right to privacy’, but because it is an invasion of the property right of the person being wiretapped. At the present time, the courts distinguish between persons ‘in the public eye’ who are adjudged not to have a right to privacy against being mentioned in the public press, and ‘private’ persons who are considered to have such a right. And yet, such distinctions are surely fallacious. To the libertarian, everyone has the same right in his person and in the goods which he finds, inherits, or buys—and it is illegitimate to make distinctions in property right between one group of people and another. If there were some sort of ‘right to privacy,’ then simply being mentioned widely in the press (i.e. previous losses of the ‘right’) could scarcely warrant being deprived of such right completely. No, the only proper course is to maintain that no one has any spurious ‘right to privacy’ or right not to be mentioned publicly; while everyone has the right to protect his property against invasion. No one can have a property right in the knowledge in someone else’s head.” See this.

Regardless of what you think about Sandy Hook, though, it’s clear that Alex Jones is an authentic hero. Jon Rappoport has a good account of the essential facts about his public activities.  “Let’s start here. While Jones was supporting Trump, he also mercilessly attacked the horrifically destructive COVID vaccines. In the process, he forcefully awakened millions of Trump followers to a truth they were unaware of or didn’t want to face. In the process, lives were saved.

Decades ago, long before it was fashionable to do so, Jones explained and righteously attacked Globalism, the Rockefeller Empire, . . .

Perceived by the public as living on the political Right, Jones confounded that perception by attacking both big government and big corporations, while so-called conservatives were routinely and conveniently letting criminal corporations off the hook.

About 20 years ago, the day after George Noory interviewed me about those corporations, Jones called me out of the blue and insisted I come on his radio show and talk about the subject at length.

Very early in his radio career, he saw the gathering clouds of medical dictatorship on the horizon and spoke about it compellingly. His audience got a strong dose of something they’d never thought about.

Toxic pesticides, GMO crops—Jones contributed as much to the public understanding of these issues as any dyed in the wool environmentalist. However, for years, he’s also spoken about the psychopathic anti-human elitists who use the environmental movement as a front for a ‘green revolution’ that aims to capture humanity in an endless future of poverty.

No one has done to more to expose the predatory adults who guide and groom young children for transgender medical and psychological destruction.

Since the beginning of his career, he’s defended the Constitutional right of citizens to own guns, against the deluded crowd who’ve claimed that taking away all those guns from everybody would lead us into an era of tranquility. Millions of non-criminal gun owners owe Jones a debt of gratitude.

Every day, Jones refuses to let the idea of the original American Republic die. Try that yourself. See how much energy it takes.

I could go on and list a number of other vital issues on which he has led the way. He’s inspired many people to start their own independent news outlets, as they’ve watched him make his viable.

In a materialistic age, he has a vision of the human soul, and whether you agree with it or not, it is not a slave to government and corporate and media and church propagandists. If ‘the meaning of the soul’ sounds like a harmless position to take, it isn’t when you’re connecting with large numbers of people for hours every day, and those propagandists want to shut off your connection and force you to go down to defeat.

For more than 20 years, without let-up, Jones has not only defended the 1st Amendment to the hilt, he has stood on it to speak freely about a blizzard of issues. And now this has brought him into court rooms, where civil suits have been leveled against him.

Regardless of the outcomes of the cases, I trust he will survive and carry on. He has already won many victories during his career, and they will stand.

As for the public, there will always be those who go after Jones. There will always be whiners and screamers and critics who devote their whole lives to finding someone to pick at and scrape at, while they studiously ignore the Good that person has achieved. They feed on the bounty of the 1st Amendment like parasites, and never have to courage to see a better world and fight for it. Anyone who rises above the crowd is their target, because they ARE the crowd, gnawing their way to oblivion.

So be it. The world has its disgusting creatures.

Alex Jones was and is a pioneer. He can handle it.

He HAS, for a long time, and in the process, he’s made many other people open their eyes and see they can, too.

THAT’S the rub. When dedicated tyrants notice the contagion of courage, they panic. They look for a source.

Years and years ago, they homed in on Jones. But he’s endured.

Because he and his work are built for the storm.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.” See this. 

The Left is after Alex Jones. In a Twitter post, the journalist Alex Berenson said, “Let me be clear: I hope Alex Jones winds up destitute. He deserves to lose everything for the lies he told and encouraged about the Sandy Hook families. He is a poisonous grifter who is terrible for the country. Anyone who defends him is equally disgusting. Is that clear enough?”

It’s ironic that Berenson said this, because the Biden White House tried to ban him from Twitter owing to his dissent over Covid policy. But hatred gets in the way of reason. Let’s not be stampeded into turning on Alex Jones and instead celebrate this great and good man.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.