I totally agree that Jones should have been punished for the harm he and his platform has caused, but I also felt like the cartoonish amount of money they expected him to pay was venturing into “cruel and unusual” territory.
I don’t think that it is of any benefit to the people that the courts can throw a $1,500,000,000 bill at an individual and it is not contested or lowered, even if he is an abhorrent human being. $1.5bn is basically a shorthand for “permanent abject poverty” for the vast majority of any person alive today, and we can apparently punish people with this?
A bill this large should be paid by multinational companies, not citizens.