AUSTIN, TEXAS — Fiery Austin conservative shock jock Alex Jones — who’s long promoted his theory that that the 20 Connecticut children killed by a mass shooter were merely young actors in a ploy to compel gun control and are still alive — has hired a high-profile Los Angeles lawyer to defend him against lawsuits lodged by the dead kids’ parents.

The central allegation made in the parents’ litigation is whether Jones defamed and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the parents of children who were killed in the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., as the Austin American-Statesman reported. Jones has spent years airing his theory in suggesting it was a hoax designed to promote gun control via his nationally syndicated broadcasts and social media platforms.

There is no evidence to suggest the massacre was an elaborate hoax. A refresher: On Dec. 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza massacred 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members at the Newtown, Conn., Sandy Hook Elementary School. He fatally shot his mother first before committing suicide by shooting himself in the head as police closed in on him.

The shooting was the deadliest mass shooting at a school — either a high school or grade school — in U.S. history. But Jones seems to believe the whole thing was made up, and the young victims were merely child actors intent on compelling gun control in the U.S. Still-grieving parents have sued Jones for emotional distress for using the tragedy as fodder to energize his ultra-conservative followers via his Infowars broadcast media empire in suggesting the tragedy was make-believe.

Enter Robert Barnes, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who shares Jones’ belief that the lawsuits are part of a broad conspiracy to silence the broadcaster, as the Statesman reported. As Jones’ newly appointed attorney, Barnes lacked the right to appear in court in Austin as a legal representative at a Thursday hearing, the newspaper noted, relegating him to silence as State District Judge Scott Jenkins ruled that a four-hour deposition of the shock jock will take place next week.

But in a courthouse hallway after the hearing, Barnes — whose law firm slogan is “I fight for the underdog and win the impossible” — framed his defense as one centered on freedom of the press, painting the dead children’s parents as an effort to squelch those rights.

“The biggest impact will be far bigger than Alex Jones,” Barnes told the Statesman. “This is, does freedom of the press exist for the small press or is it only protect for the big press? That is what this case is going to come down to.”

Jones painted himself as a victim — a First Amendment freedom fighter, as it were — in a subsequent interview with the Statesman. He told the newspaper of the parents’ motivations: “They are using me as a Trojan horse, they are using me as a vehicle to try to trick the left into giving up their journalistic privilege and protection. They are tricking the leftist liberal press into getting aboard the bandwagon to silence me and other right wingers and all they are doing is silencing themselves. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Jones has recently been banned from a number of platforms for his hateful rhetoric, including Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify. Apple was the first to implement a ban, pulling five of Infowars’ six podcasts from its iTunes and Podcasts apps. The reason for the bans: Repeated violations of the platforms’ hate speech policies.

>>> Read the full story at Austin American-Statesman

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