Lori Falce: Alex Jones damages the First Amendment

Without a doubt, the best and simultaneously hardest thing about the U.S. Constitution is the First Amendment.

Specifically, that tug-of-war is represented in the words, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

It is a masterpiece of protection. It enshrines the absolute right to raise your voice for your beliefs or your cause and to shout down the powerful who would stop you from calling out some and gathering others to your side.

It is a trial, as well, because sometimes, well, sometimes people are just wrong.

Sometimes, it is a wrongness born of bad information. Sometimes, it is a willful desire not to believe. Sometimes, it is both.

Believe me, I have spent my whole life with a sister who will fight to the death to defend something someone told her that was just not true. I will show her documents and pie charts. I will open the window to prove it is not raining and she will mutinously maintain there is a hurricane outside.

But sometimes it is more than a refusal to see. It is a deliberate attempt to sway — sometimes for power and sometimes for profit. And this is where things get hairy. How can the law protect people from the speech that is supposed to be free?

We have to acknowledge the difference between a statement and a lie. Surely the Founding Fathers never intended to protect the practice of deception.

“It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785. “There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.”

Oh, what would Jefferson think of Alex Jones? The Infowars host built his business on incendiary language branded as truth. Nowhere was the opposite more obvious than in his repeated assertions that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Conn., was a deception, that 26 people did not die and that 20 murdered children not only weren’t killed but never existed.

He said it over and over for years. Those falsehoods spread like an infection through his audience. The families were hounded and harassed. And on Wednesday, the law in Connecticut caught up with Jones. He was ordered to pay $965 million on top of the $50 million he was ordered to pay other parents in Texas in August.

How is this possible? What about his freedom of speech?

Despite the language of the First Amendment, there are any number of laws that abridge false speech — especially when it causes pain and suffering. The example usually used is that of shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater, risking the hazards of a stampede to safety.

Jones did not shout “fire!” His words sparked flames, over and over again, burning already devastated families anew every time.

“I’ve already said ‘I’m sorry’ hundreds of times, and I’m done saying I’m sorry,” Jones said during the proceedings he called a “kangaroo court.”

He can never apologize enough. He can never take back what he said. He can’t pay the $1 billion in penalties because he has declared bankruptcy. The judgment printed in a legal document may be all the families ever see.

But in addition to the pain he has caused those families, he needs to say sorry for something else.

Jones did grievous injury to the First Amendment. He hid behind it, using it for cover while committing verbal arson. America is a crowded theater, and every time he sits at a microphone, Jones shouts “fire!”