Famous right-wing broadcaster Alex Jones and some of his supporters are claiming that the Deep State is on the verge of shutting down him and his media company, Free Speech Systems, including his Infowars operation.
Pure nonsense. It’s not the Deep State that is threatening Jones with a shutdown. It’s a U.S. bankruptcy court that is doing so. And that’s because Jones placed himself under the jurisdiction of a federal bankruptcy judge when he filed for bankruptcy protection after courts in Connecticut and Texas entered judgments against him for $1.5 billion. In filing for bankruptcy, Jones prevented the plaintiffs in those cases from immediately enforcing those judgments against him. He was also hoping to come up with a reorganization plan under U.S. bankruptcy law that would enable him to pay only a small portion of the $1.5 billion judgments against him.
After all, there are lots of people in the United States who declaim against the Deep State. The U.S. government is not seizing their assets and shutting them down. The U.S. government is also not arresting them and incarcerating them, as the Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and Russian governments do to people in those countries who rail against their government. In fact, U.S. officials have not arrested and incarcerated Jones for his anti-government pronouncements. He remains free to exclaim against the government to his heart’s content.
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Jones bears full responsibility for his legal travails. A legal principle in the law since the beginning of the United States is that the right of free speech does not encompass the right to defame another person. That’s where libel and slander laws come into play. If a person defames another person with a false and scurrilous accusation, the person who is defamed has the right to sue for damages.
I fully understand that some libertarians are opposed to libel and slander laws. But that belief is quite irrelevant. The fact is that whether libertarians favor libel and slander laws or not, such laws are part and parcel of America’s judicial system and have been for more than 230 years. Alex Jones, like everyone else, knows that.
When Jones accused families who lost children in the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, mass shooting of having perpetrated a hoax, he subjected himself to lawsuits for defamation. Those families did, in fact, sue him for defamation and ended up winning massive judgments totalling $1.5 billion in both actual and punitive damages.
That’s what motivated Jones to seek relief in a U.S. bankruptcy court. Ordinarily, bankruptcy operates to discharge a person’s debts.
Jones filed what is called a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which entitles a person or entity to continue operating but requires them to come up with a plan that creditors approve. According to Wikipedia, the creditors rejected the plan that Jones came up, which entailed the payment of $55 million over the next ten years. The creditors came up with their own plan, which entailed the payment of $85 million over a period of ten years. Jones rejected their plan.
Since Jones and his creditors cannot agree on a reorganization plan, Jones’ creditors are seeking to convert the bankruptcy into what is called a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If they are successful, that will mean that all of Jones’ assets, except his home and some exempt personal property, will be sold at auction, with the money paid to the creditors.
There is more bad news for Jones: The bankruptcy judge has ruled that the $1.5 billion judgments against him will not be discharged by the bankruptcy. That’s because bankruptcy law holds that if a judgment is based on intentional and malicious conduct, it will not be discharged by the bankruptcy proceeding. That means that unless Jones is able to reach a settlement with his creditors, he will owe the $1.5 billion forever. As soon as Jones accumulates any assets for the rest of his life (except his home), they will be subject to immediate seizure by his creditors.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the Deep State is not a party to Jones’ bankruptcy proceeding, and there is no evidence that the bankruptcy judge is a member of the Deep State. Jones’ legal woes are entirely of his own making. In retrospect, he might have been wise to have accepted the $85 million settlement offer from his creditors.