Ready? Here comes the single craziest statement that anyone has ever made about gun violence in the United States.

            And who made it?  None other than Marjorie Taylor Greene who said in a podcast that the recent mass shootings in Highland Park on July 4^th were ‘staged.’

            Why was the shooting which killed seven people and injured dozens more nothing other than a phony event? Because it would galvanize public opinion and push Republicans to support gun control.

            That’s what she said. She really did. Which is why we have the 1^st Amendment in this country so that people like MJT can get away with saying such loony, hurtful things.

            Except maybe they can’t, if it turns out that what they said really did result in someone else getting hurt.  After all, the Constitution doesn’t protect someone who stands up and yells ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?

            It just so happens that one of America’s most notorious fire-throwers, Alex Jones of Infowars, will be shortly going on trial both in Texas and Connecticut for having promoted the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, a non-stop series of talking points on his show which resulted in harassments and death threats suffered by the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook.

Jones has been ducking this one for years, and finally had to admit that his conspiracy theories about what happened at the Newtown elementary school were concocted out of whole cloth and that he was suffering from mental illness at the time he made those claims up. Now he’s defending himself against the damages suffered by the parents of dead Sandy Hook children by claiming that he has the ‘right’ to say anything he wants.

            The judges both in Texas and Connecticut disagree. It should be noted that the Connecticut judge, Barbara Bellis, also heard the original lawsuit against Remington whose gun was used in the massacre at Sandy Hook. In that case, she found that Remington’s argument that they weren’t liable for injuries at the school was strong enough to move the case into Federal court where Remington lost.

            That decision paved the way for Remington to make a settlement with the plaintiffs for $73 million. Obviously, Jones thinks he has a chance to move his case into Federal court over the issue of free speech.

            And who better than Marjorie Taylor Greene to come out and defend Alex Jones? For that matter, who better than MJT to explain the Highland Park killings as another fraud?  Hasn’t she been talking about the 2020 election fraud for the last couple of years?

            I said it this morning on my Medium column and I’ say it again. We are being ruined by the extent to which anything and everything which appears on the internet gets reported as some kind of newsworthy event. The idea that something as stupid and self-aggrandizing as a podcast comment on how and why the slaughter at Highland Park didn’t take place should be repeated by any internet news source just blows my mind.

            On the other hand, maybe there’s some way to bring MJT’s comment to the attention of the courts in Texas and Connecticut where the trials of Alex Jones are due to take place. Maybe jurors in those trials need to understand that every ‘right’ protected by the Bill of Rights has limits – even the ‘right’ to free speech.

            On the other hand, maybe we really need to ask ourselves if it really matters that Alex Jones has friends and supporters like Marjorie Taylor Greene.