A year ago, a few weeks after buying Twitter (now ‘X’), Elon Musk was asked if he would reinstate notorious Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to the social media platform and he replied with one word: “No.”

Musk later explained: “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

At the time, I praised him for this decision.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a more egregious example of what should not qualify as free speech than Jones waging a relentless campaign of deliberate lies about the Sandy Hook school massacre, branding it a hoax perpetrated by the Obama administration to enforce new gun control laws and exposing the victims’ grieving families to horrendous threats and harassment by saying they were actors hired to take part in the conspiracy.

The consequences of Jones’s sickening diatribes, which earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, were so appalling they eventually led to many of the distraught families suing Jones for defamation and being awarded more than $1 billion in damages after several court cases.

In often tearful testimony, they detailed years of horrific abuse from Jones supporters who believed his lies and acted on them.

Erica Lafferty, daughter of murdered Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, said she’d endured death and rape threats from people telling her that her mother was fictional.

Mark Barden, father of 7-year-old victim Daniel Barden, said one of Jones’s followers urinated on his son’s grave, and another accused him of dismembering and killing his own little boy.

David Wheeler, father of slain Ben Wheeler, endured in-person confrontations at his home with Jones supporters claiming he was a “crisis actor.”

Robbie Parker, who lost his daughter Emilie, was chased in the street by a Jones supporter who hurled abuse and asked him how much he had earned from the government for lying about the shooting.

Parker said he could always tell when Jones had attacked him again on his show because threats to his family instantly surged.

None of this surprised me, given my own ugly experiences with Jones.

Soon after the Sandy Hook massacre, he launched a petition on a White House website to have me deported from America for supposedly “Attacking the Second Amendment.”

When he came on my old CNN show to explain why he’d done it, he behaved like a shrieking maniac, infamously bellowing: “Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns. And I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try and take our firearms!”

Ironically, President Obama ruled in my favor, saying: “The Constitution not only guarantees an individual right to bear arms, but also enshrines the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press — fundamental principles that are essential to our democracy.”

Jones took this well, ambushing me several months later as I taped a show from a Houston gun store, and as I left, noisily threatening me with a mob of 50 heavily armed supporters.

So, the truth about Alex Jones is that he’s a vile, disgusting piece of work whose entire business model is predicated on fuelling crackpot conspiracy theories for clickbait and cash, regardless of what pain he causes innocent people in the process.

And when it comes to free speech, he’s a rank hypocrite who wanted to have me deported for exercising mine.

Yet inexplicably, Elon Musk has now welcomed Jones back to X, after holding one of his frequent snap polls that he claims represent “the voice of the people,” but actually represent the vast array of anonymous trolls, fringe extremists and bots who inevitably dominate all such amateur polling.

Worse, Musk yesterday promoted Jones in a huge “Spaces” event on X during which he allowed him to spin a ludicrously disingenuous version of what he’d done to the Sandy Hook families and falsely claim he was merely reporting what other experts were all saying.

As a result, Jones – who declared bankruptcy to avoid paying damages to the families – is now being perceived as some kind of free-speech hero and will already be raking in new revenue from X as he posts his usual conspiracy claptrap.

All of which makes me puke.

What Jones did to the Sandy Hook families wasn’t him exercising free speech, it was him spewing deliberate lies to make huge amounts of money by exploiting terrible grief.

And as the Supreme Court ruled, defamation isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Nor is hate speech that provokes physical intimidation and death threats.

Musk says he “vehemently disagreed” with Jones’s statements about Sandy Hook, but then defended bringing him back by saying: “Are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”

He added that the move would be “bad for X financially” but “principles matter more than money.”

Yes, Elon, they do.

So, what happened to your principle on Alex Jones that you so personally and powerfully articulated a year ago?

The one about having “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame?”

All you’ve done by showing this monster mercy is reward him for his repellent treatment of already devastated families experiencing the same awful grief you felt when your son died.

You were right the first time about him.