> peddling lies and inciting vile hatred

I’m not sure this is a good argument. You could say the same thing about pretty much any mainstream media, e.g. in relation to Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (and they probably resulted in more deaths than anything reported by Infowars).

Censorship is mostly arbitrary, really.

We're really saying Alex Jones calling politicians serial killers and rapists is comparable to typical mainstream media bias, and is more or less a reasonable thing to say depending on if you're 'Liberal' or 'Conservative'? C'mon:

When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can't hold back the truth anymore. Hillary Clinton is one of the most vicious serial killers the planet's ever seen.[0]

[0] http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-hillary-clinto...

I don't know anything about Alex Jones and never listen to his shows. But this is the second time now I've investigated an apparently absurd statement from him and discovered it's being selectively quoted to make him look bad.

The page you link to has a clip of the audio in question:

https://soundcloud.com/rightwingwatch/jones-hillary-personal...

Let me complete the rest of what he says:

"Am I talking about [snip some reference to a devil worshipping story], oh no, I don't mean that, I'm not talking about that, I mean 200,000+ dead Christians, with her operation with Syria, and her operation in Libya, and not let the Christians get out, and directing Al Queda and ISIS, who target and murder children and put them through sex slavery, and throw Catholic priests off cliffs, and kill people en-masse, and murder gays, and everything else you can imagine, because they don't like peaceful people."

Obviously Alex Jones is very far from being a precise user of language. Clinton has not "personally murdered" anyone. That accusation on its own is clearly absurd, but put in context as a reference to her support for various wars in the Middle East it merely becomes the sort of dumb overblown rhetoric that you tend to find at the political extremes. Likewise for the claim she directed ISIS. Clinton was/still is a supporter of the various militant groups that are allied against both Assad and ISIS, although from what I've read there wasn't that much between these groups and ISIS religiously or behaviourally. So his grip on the situation in Syria is also pretty bad.

But this is hardly unique to Alex Jones. For example here's an article that claims "For profit, Tony Blair murdered over a million humans in Iraq and Afghanistan":

https://www.dailysquib.co.uk/world/26825-the-evil-of-tony-bl...

The author of that article, Louis Cypher, is a nobody. But if I had claimed Louis Cypher said "Tony Blair murdered over a million humans" and omitted the rest he'd obviously sound totally crazy. Making someone look bad by deleting parts of what they say is just that easy.

Anyway, I have to admit, this is apparently becoming some sort of pattern - I read someone explaining on Hacker News why Alex Jones must obviously be suppressed and crushed by providing some idiotic sounding quote, I spend about 30 seconds finding the source of the quote and then I discover his words have been maliciously chopped up in order to manipulate me. I don't like this.

I know the US has very lax laws around these things, but doesn’t that rise to the level of defamation/libel even there? Out and out accusing someone of serial murder and child rape seems a bit much.

Public figures are much less protected. Imagine if this were not the case: most of the people responding to Trump's tweets would be in prison for defamation/libel now.

A random ordinary American would be protected from such accusations.