With malice toward all.

 It takes some massive deformities of mind and character to make a person as despicable as Alex Jones.  It is a serious mistake to attribute his malevolent dementia to a  matter of political choice.  There is a deeper, fundamental moral defect that drives him to do what he does.  As a nation, we mount extensive responses when the nation is physically threatened, as we are doing with the Covid-19 pandemic.  More than a million Americans have died from the disease and the fatalities are down to about 375 per day.  We haven't conquered the disease, but have adjusted to living with it, and progress is  being made in prevention and treatment.   We have still to confront the pathology that possesses people like Alex Jones.

We have laws that make the intentional spread of germs a crime:

SDCL 34-16-2. Release of disease germs as felony. Any person who releases or spreads any disease germs intending thereby to accomplish the infection of one or more persons or domestic animals is guilty of a Class 2 felony.

We do not have laws regarding the spread of mental pathogens that make minds unsound.  And the intentional contagion of mental malignancies among the public is what Jones and his ilk do.

People like Alex Jones cite the First Amendment when what they say and do is challenged.  They insist that the right to free speech gives them the freedom to say anything they want.  There was once (and still is in some states) laws against criminal libel.  They largely have been suppressed because aspects of them seem in violation of the First Amendment.  Some legal scholars hold that the civil libel laws are sufficient to deal with destructive acts of libel, although that is demonstrably not true.  Among people like Jones, malicious libel flows like beer at a college fraternity kegger.  

When people tell malicious lies about people and events in our country, we have applied the misleading term "conspiracy theory" to what they are saying, putting them in the category of a superstition.  Denying that the Sandy Hook massacre of children and teachers did not happen, but was a stunt , is easy to refute from the testimony of those who experienced it.  The damage done by the deniers of the mass shooting is a crime as lethal as the shooting itself.  While Jones has been successfully sued for almost a billion dollars for the damage he has done to the lives of affected people, he still is free to spread malice and hatred.

The First Amendment permits freedom of speech, but people still are accountable for what they say.  Jones' spreading of lies should be seen as a crime, just as the intentional spreading of disease germs is.  And people who commit felonies have their freedom and rights suspended so that they cannot commit crimes on the public.  While juries have awarded a billion dollars to those affected by Jones' pathogens, those awards are more symbolic than real.  It is unlikely that anywhere near that amount of money will reach Jones' victims.  And Jones is still free to criminally assault innocent people with his verbal pathogens.

We live in a time when the country is bitterly divided.  Malice-inspired lies play a major role in that division.  Those lies are not  harmless.  They cripple and kill.  And we tolerate them as "conspiracy theories."  

A country that that can't tell the difference between inane babble and lethal crimes against humanity doesn't have much of a future.