James Gill: In the war on fake news, this Louisianian is a hero – NOLA.com

Whenever a native son gets national ink without causing Louisiana to curl up in embarrassment, we should take a little bow.

All eyes are upon us whenever one of our Republican congressmen favors us with his thoughts. Those thoughts may be breathtakingly crass, as in the Clay Higgins-goes-to-Auschwitz video, or just plain stupid, as when NRA lap dog Steve Scalise asks why 9/11 didn't occasion calls to ban airplanes.

These politicians may give us reason to blush, but Bernard Pettingill from Louisiana has been in the news recently without such an effect.

He is the forensic economist, who may just have made a second presidential term for Donald Trump a little less likely. Pettingill took the stand in a Texas courtroom to catalog some of the lies told by one of Trump's earliest, and most vocal, supporters, the arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Why Jones had any credibility to start with is quite a head-scratcher, given the preposterous yarns he spins, but he is clearly a gifted hornswoggler. The vast sums he pocketed via his Infowars website are proof enough of that.

We have a handle on just how vast those sums are thanks to Pettingill, a Jesuit graduate whose academic record includes degrees from Loyola and Tulane and who has taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Pettingill was called as a witness in a defamation lawsuit filed by the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was one of 20 children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when six teachers also died. Jones had repeatedly claimed that Sandy Hook was a hoax dreamed up to give the federal government a pretext to restrict gun rights. The parents who sued had to endure years of abuse and death threats after Jones declared they were actors hired to perpetrate the hoax.

When Jones took the stand in Texas, he conceded that Sandy Hook was 100 percent real," but he evidently does not feel obliged to tell the truth even when he is under oath to do so. Any jury award of more than $2 million would sink us, he testified.

Waiting in the wings was Pettingill, who had the numbers to prove that Jones was still telling whoppers.

Infowars has been bringing in more than $50 million a year for many years, and Jones has paid himself an average of $6 million a year, Pettingill testified. When Jones failed to respond to a lawsuit filed in Connecticut last year, and was ruled liable by default for Sandy Hook, he began dumping $11,000 a day into a shell company that Jones set up as a clawback to pay himself, Pettingill testified.

The jury came back with a damages award of almost $50 million, and it would be a great public service if that did sink Jones and his poisonous fantasies. He has been on hand to brand every terrorist act either a hoax or a government-sponsored false flag operation, joined the chorus claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and denounced Lady Gaga's halftime gig at the Super Bowl as a satanic rite. And that's just a sample of his crackpot notions.

Huge jury awards tend to get drastically reduced on appeal, however, so that, even if more Sandy Hook families are poised to sue, Jones will probably have enough in the bank to soldier on, and back Trump, should he run.

But his endorsement will be greatly devalued this time.

Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.

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James Gill: In the war on fake news, this Louisianian is a hero - NOLA.com