It’s All Over for Alex Jones With New Sandy Hook Ruling

A federal judge ruled Friday that conspiracy theory—and supplement—hawker Alex Jones can liquidate his assets in order to pay the $1.5 billion he owes the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Jones originally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022, which would allow him to retain operations of his business and use reorganization to scrape together the cash. But it wasn’t enough to pay off what he owed.

Last week, Jones’s lawyers wrote in a filing that there was “no reasonable prospect for a successful reorganization,” and that filing for liquidation under Chapter 7 was the massacre denier’s only option.

On Friday, a bankruptcy judge ruled that Jones would be able to convert that Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing into a Chapter 7 liquidation, according to NBC News. Judge Christopher Lopez of the Southern District of Texas ordered that Jones be assigned an interim trustee to help him through the process and oversee the sale of Jones’s personal assets.

With this newest ruling, Jones inches closer to losing everything, including his stake in InfoWars, the pulpit from which the podcaster has continued to spew misinformation.

The ruling came as Lopez was weighing arguments to liquidate Jones’s media company, Free Speech Systems, in addition to his personal assets.

Ahead of Friday’s hearing, the families of Sandy Hook victims accused Jones of intentionally lowering the value of Free Speech Systems by attempting to siphon funds from the company to his father’s supplement business. They alleged that Jones was saving the money to go toward his future business operations instead of paying them what he owes.

But a unique detail of Jones’s case is that he can’t skirt payments even by declaring bankruptcy. When Lopez presided over Jones’s bankruptcy filing last year, the judge made his debt “non-dischargeable” through bankruptcy, meaning Jones has to continue paying the families until he has fully settled the $1.5 billion debt.

In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday morning, the once Twitter-banned Jones warned that the decision to liquidate Free Speech Systems would be a “canary in the coal mine,” as he continued to whine that losing InfoWars as a result of lying about murdered children was a symbol that “the globalists are turning America into a giant prison.”

This story has been updated.

There are endless possibilities for the creative uses of artificial intelligence—but recreating the voice of a civil rights icon for your own political benefit is definitely not one of them.

Republican congressional candidate Anthony Hudson did just that, releasing possibly the most distasteful, cringe-worthy political ad of 2024 to date by using A.I. to resurrect Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice to urge people to vote for him in the House race for Michigan 8th district.

“I have another dream!” begins the skin-crawling video, which was posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Friday. “Yes, it is me, Martin Luther King. I came back from the dead to say something, as I was saying, I have another dream—that Anthony Hudson will be Michigan 8th district’s next congressman. Yes I have a dream, again.”

Then, in a nearly equally bizarre decision, Hudson’s campaign decided to force the voice to return to the dead.

“OK, now I am going back to where I came from,” King’s cheaply manipulated voice says. “Goodbye.”

At the end of the clip, Hudson can be heard approving the message. But whoever pitched the clip and told Hudson that fabricating the approval of a racial justice legend would make voters like him rather than be utterly repulsed by the vile postmortem should probably be fired.

They can’t be the only one to blame, though—everyone involved in the production of the ad must be completely removed from contemporary American culture for making such an unnerving gaffe, since just weeks earlier, multi-platinum pop singer Drake earned the ire of the entire West Coast for using A.I. sorcery to recreate Tupac Shakur in a diss track against rapper and poet laureate Kendrick Lamar.

Hudson deleted the video off of his TikTok account, and hours later, he claimed that he had nothing to do with the disturbing ad. Instead, he blamed a volunteer’s friend for making the post, though just how or why an unpaid staffer got Hudson’s social media credentials is still unclear.

“A volunteer gave my social media credentials to one of his friends who then posted an AI video without my knowledge. It appears that they not only used AI for MLKjr’s voice but also with my voice to make it appear more authentic,” Hudson wrote on X. “The volunteer has been released and all my social media credentials have been updated. I would have NEVER approved such a STUPID and DISRESPECTFUL video!”

“I sincerely apologize that all of you have seen this and I’m extremely furious about this situation. This could happen to any of us so please be cautious and aware of who has your person information,” he added.

Listen to Hudson’s ad below, if you dare.

This story has been updated with Hudson’s statement.

Trump met with at least 80 CEOs on Thursday to promise tax cuts and scaled-back business regulations if he’s elected president. Among those present were Apple CEO Tim Cook and the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Trump spoke for about an hour, during which he rambled nonsensically, throwing off those in the room, according to sources who shared details of the meeting with CNBC.

“I spoke to a number of CEOs who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish, or thinking that they might be leaning that direction,” said CNBC’s Ross Sorkin. “[CEOs] said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map.”

Trump promised the CEOs to cut taxes and bring the federal corporate tax rate down from 21 percent to 20 percent, a lackluster attempt to elicit excitement from the suits. One attendee summarized Trump’s message as, “We’re going to give you more of the same for the next four years,” according to CNBC.

“These were people who, I think, might have been actually predisposed to him,” said Sorkin. “And [they] actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him, actually predisposed to thinking ‘This is not necessarily—’ as one person said, ‘this may not be any different or better than a Biden thought, if you’re thinking that way.’”

Trump also excitedly detailed to the corporate juggernauts his promise to eliminate taxes on worker tips—a questionable offer he stole from a Republican nominee for Senate and which, darkly, provoked laughter from the room full of CEOs.

As a leading infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci was thrust into a leadership role during the Covid-19 pandemic and experienced volatile treatment from Donald Trump during his presidency, Fauci wrote in his new memoir.

Trump would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone,” Fauci wrote of the abusive behavior in On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, due to be published next week.

“Let’s just say, I found this to be out of the ordinary,” Fauci wrote. According to the immunologist, Trump would drop f-bombs often in conversations, including one where the then-president claimed Fauci cost the U.S. economy “one trillion fucking dollars.”

In his new book, Fauci talks about how badly Trump wanted to reopen the country and his embrace of poorly qualified advisers pushing unproven treatments, according to The Daily Beast. Fauci also discussed Trump’s hospitalization with Covid and his outrageous claim that bleach could kill the virus.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump was not in a good mood. Fauci wrote about his “first experience [of] the brunt of the president’s rage,” just a few months into the outbreak.

“On the evening of June 3 [2020], my cell phone rang,” Fauci writes, “and the caller—the president—started screaming at me,” angry that Fauci told a journalist that immunity to coronaviruses was “usually six months to a year.” This meant that when a vaccine for Covid was developed, it would probably need booster shots.

While Fauci said this was common for illnesses like the flu, his remark was “wrongly reported on Twitter and in some media outlets as the Covid vaccine protecting people only for a very short time,” and this drew Trump’s fury.

“It was quite a phone call,” Fauci writes. “The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him. He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse.”

“I have a pretty thick skin,” Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”

Fauci’s time as the public face of the government’s efforts during the pandemic, as well as Trump’s treatment of him, led to right-wing figures spouting conspiracy theories about him and attacking efforts such as lockdowns and masks. Conservatives still hate the immunologist, and Republican lawmakers attempted to wildly smear him on a recent visit to Capitol Hill and proposed getting hold of his personal emails. If he makes public appearances to promote his book, as authors usually do, he’s likely to get more vitriol and attacks, despite his career in public service.

Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor torched her colleagues Friday in a dissenting opinion on the federal bump-stock ban.

In a 6-3 decision, the nation’s highest court tore up a Trump-era ban on bump stocks for semiautomatic rifles. All six conservative justices determined that although the attachments transform the guns into automatic rifles by allowing them to discharge hundreds of bullets a minute, the weapons do not qualify as machine guns and therefore do not face a legal precedent for a ban.

Joined in her opinion by the other liberal justices on the bench, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor described how the court’s decision to uproot the ban—which was instituted after a mass shooter in Las Vegas shot thousands of rounds at a music festival and killed 60 people—would result in “deadly consequences.” She also slammed the court’s intense focus on trigger mechanics, rather than a shooter’s motions, as “myopic” and “contemporaneous,” noting that during oral arguments, the lawyer opposing the ban couldn’t point to a “single piece of evidence that supports the majority’s reading.”

“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote.

“The majority’s logic simply does not overcome the overwhelming textual and contextual evidence that ‘single function of the trigger’ means a single action by the shooter to initiate a firing sequence, including pulling a trigger and pushing forward on a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle,” Sotomayor continued. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter. I respectfully dissent.”

And in a brutal move, Sotomayor cited each of her conservative colleagues in her dissent. She highlighted past arguments they had made in favor of respecting congressional intent, rather than imposing their own view on something—skewering their hypocrisy in Friday’s ruling.

The majority’s opinion hinged on a minute, hair-splitting distinction on the difference between assault rifles and machine guns, pitching that using a stock to “rapidly re-engage the trigger” did not constitute continuous shooting. Interestingly, Justice Samuel Alito threw the ball back into Congress’s court, arguing that the 2017 massacre demonstrated “that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun,” and “strengthened” the case for amending the country’s gun laws.

It’s officially Martha-Ann Alito’s favorite holiday: Flag Day. And the internet won’t let her forget it.

When it was first officially signed into law in 1949, Flag Day was meant to serve as a reminder of a unified nation, which found common ground under one symbol. Cut to 75 years later, and the wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice has gleefully subverted that edict, cheered on the destruction of Democracy, and fantasized about new ways to sow division and hate.

So it’s only right that users on X, formerly Twitter, are having a little fun with it.

Things even got a little topsy-turvy…

But we’re sure that Alito will figure out which way it’s supposed to go.

Just last month, it was first reported that an upside-down flag was seen hanging at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the weeks following the January 6 insurrection, a common symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” MAGA mob. Desperate to retain the illusion of neutrality, Alito blamed his wife for the flag, and thus her reputation as a virulent vexillologist began. Since then, it’s only gotten more apparent that Martha-Ann Alito sure does love her flags.

Shortly after the first flag came to light, it was reported that an Appeal to Heaven flag, a symbol favored by a Christian nationalist sect, was once flown outside their family’s beach home. House Speaker Mike Johnson flies this flag outside his office, and—desperate for some culture-war currency—MAGA Senator Tom Cotton now has one too.

Earlier this week, in a secret recording, Alito revealed that once her husband is no longer a pillar of the U.S. judiciary, she hopes to use flags to communicate every little political thought she has. Meanwhile, she whined about her neighbor’s flying a Pride flag.

“I’m gonna send them a message every day. Maybe every week I’ll be changing the flags. They’ll be all kinds,” she gushed. She revealed that she’d even designed a flag of her very own, displaying the Italian word for “shame,” that she dreamed of raising in an effort to antagonize those neighbors.

Instead of continuing to get dredged up in Alito’s drama, please enjoy this list of really cool flags.

The Supreme Court released an extreme ruling on Friday overturning a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, an attachment used to convert a semiautomatic rifle into an automatic rifle and which dramatically increases capacity for causing mass death. The Supreme Court overturned that ban in a 6–3 vote on Friday, with all liberal justices dissenting.

Bump stocks were initially banned by the Trump administration following the Las Vegas massacre, where a shooter using a bump stock fired more than 1,000 rounds at concertgoers over the course of 11 minutes in October 2017, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500. But even gun-friendly Trump’s restriction was a step too far for the high court.

Delivering the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that bump stocks don’t convert rifles into machine guns, which are banned. Thomas’s logic is that because a bump stock allows a shooter to “rapidly re-engage the trigger” instead of continuous shooting, bump stocks don’t convert assault rifles into machine guns. This splitting-hairs distinction evacuates any consideration for how much a bump stock transforms a rifle—converting the number of bullets that can be shot per minute from 180 to anywhere between 400 to 800.

The Supreme Court’s ruling focuses on granular differences between high-capacity weapons of mass death—as if how frequently a finger pulls a trigger makes much difference to the loved ones of those killed under a hail of bullets.

Speaker Mike Johnson tried to claim to Sean Hannity that Donald Trump didn’t trash Milwaukee in his meeting with House Republicans on Thursday, despite the fact that Trump admitted he made the insult.

On Fox News Thursday night, Hannity asked Johnson point-blank if Trump called Wisconsin’s largest city, the site of the Republican National Convention this summer, a “horrible city.”

“No, I didn’t hear it, and I was sitting right next to him,” Johnson said, seemingly unaware that Trump had already doubled down on his comments on Fox News itself. 

Trump’s insult of Milwaukee spread quickly and prompted denials and explanations from Republicans Thursday, including Wisconsin representatives who were present. Johnson appears to have taken his cue from Representative Bryan Steil, who also denied that Trump attacked the city, while three other Republicans from the state tried to explain it away, not knowing that Trump would later own his comments.

Wisconsin Democrats have already pounced on Trump for his words, with Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson mocking the convicted felon and former president and Representative Gwen Moore joking that Trump’s presence in Milwaukee would raise the city’s crime rate. Meanwhile, the Republican presidential nominee’s other bizarre comments in his House meeting have been overshadowed, including his mention of Taylor Swift and his even stranger claim that one of Nancy Pelosi’s daughters had told him he and her mother “would be perfect together.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea: that get-in-line remark from Donald Trump was definitely a compliment.

The MAGA soldier was thrilled that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee even recognized her among the crowd of House Republicans during his closed-door meeting with the caucus on Thursday.

“He’s always so sweet, recognizing me, and he said, ‘Are you being nice to Speaker [Mike] Johnson?’” she told CNN’s Lauren Fox.

“He was joking. And I said, ‘Eh,’” she continued, gesturing with her hands. “He said, ‘OK, be nice to him,’ and I nodded my head.”

But interpreting the interaction as anything other than high praise from an idol to his sycophants is completely off the books. Greene made a point to furiously correct Politico’s Olivia Beavers, who reported that the room had “erupted” after Trump ordered the instruction.

“Nothing’s worse than a reporter that only reports half the story,” Greene wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of Beavers’s description of the meeting. “She left off all the nice compliments Pres Trump said about me to our conference.”

“President Trump is right. I’m loyal and unapologetically support him everywhere and all the time, and I am capable. That’s why I’ll be nice to Johnson as long as he’s nice to my favorite President,” she continued. “And that means Speaker Johnson better use the full weight of his office to stop the politically weaponized government and pass our Republican agenda, not Biden’s agenda.”

Greene and Johnson were diametrically opposed as recently as last month, when the Georgia Republican forced a vote to strip Johnson of the gavel. Her motion to vacate fell apart after the House voted 359-43 to keep Johnson in leadership.

But the time-consuming and chaotic effort came at the cost of Greene’s already minimal popularity in the lower chamber, with Republicans insisting that she be stripped of her committee assignments for leading another attempt to divide an already thin and historically unproductive majority.

Lawrence O’Donnell tore into Senator Ted Cruz for submissively applauding Donald Trump, who famously hates him, even after the presumptive GOP nominee had walked out of his meeting with Senate Republicans.

During his show on MSNBC Thursday night, O’Donnell reminded viewers that during Trump’s first run for president, he made several depraved comments about Cruz. Trump had made the wild assertion that Cruz’s father killed President John F. Kennedy. He also attacked Cruz’s wife’s appearance, threatening to “spill the beans” on her. Cruz tossed a few volleys of his own, calling Trump a “pathological liar,” a “sniveling coward,” and a “serial philanderer.”

O’Donnell reminded viewers that, “There was real suspense then going into the 2016 Republican Convention about whether or not the deeply offended Senator Cruz would even endorse Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. But Senator Cruz looked into his heart and found … nothing,” O’Donnell said.

“Nothing that would prevent him from endorsing the presidential candidate who attacked and lied about his father and attacked and lied about his wife. And there was Senator Cruz today in that lineup of utterly egoless Republican men craving their moment with Donald Trump, craving a possible handshake, or a possible pat on the back, or a wink or a smile, a glance, anything from Donald Trump.”

When it became apparent that Trump would seize the nomination in 2016, the Texas senator put the bad blood aside, and has since repeatedly sold his soul for a ticket on the Trump train. In January, Cruz announced he was “enthusiastically” endorsing him for president.

O’Donnell highlighted how Cruz’s spinelessness was once again on display during Trump’s meeting with Republican senators Thursday. In footage from the event, Trump can be seen moving down a line of senators hoping for a handshake. He stopped in front of his fanboy, Cruz, for a moment, before swiftly moving down the line. As Trump made his way out the door, Cruz kept clapping—and continued applauding even after Trump was out of the room.

“He kept clapping after Donald Trump left the room, after the door was closed,” O’Donnell scoffed. “Did he think Donald Trump could see through the door?”