Alex Jones brought to heel in Texas court

After years of spreading lies about the parents of murdered children, bombastic charlatan, and conspiracy pusher Alex Jones is finally being held accountable reports Buzzfeed News.

After less than a day of deliberating, a jury in Austin, Texas, on Thursday ruled that Jones must pay more than $4 million in compensatory damages to two parents of a first-grader killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. This comes after a judge earlier ruled that the Infowars founder defamed them with his frequent comments that they were crisis actors and that the mass shooting — in which 20 students and six teachers were gunned down at the school in Newtown, Connecticut — was staged as a pretext for gun control.

While on the stand Wednesday, Jones sought to walk back his past claims about Sandy Hook. Having portrayed his trial as a fight for the First Amendment in which he had merely been asking questions about established narratives about mass tragedies, Jones finally conceded the school shooting had been real. A second phase of the trial will now commence in which the jury will hear evidence about Jones’s net worth and determine how much to award in punitive damages.