It counts as a service that Tom Rogan took the effort at the Washington Examiner to explain that Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN is a load of crap and should fail. It’s rare to see anything produced for that audience that is level-headed and factual.
The suit, which takes issue with the on-air talent at CNN fairly consistently comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler, can’t overcome the First Amendment right to speak one’s mind. When it comes to public figures like the president of the United States, people have strong opinions and they’re allowed to express them provided there’s no malice. “Malice” is defined as knowing what you’re saying is false and not caring. But comparing contemporary political figures to historical ones isn’t subject to factual verification.
Rogan makes a straightforward case both for why Trump’s suit will not succeed and for why it should not succeed. He also knows who he’s trying to persuade:
In this case, Trump’s lawyers must prove either that CNN knew said statements were false or recklessly and deliberately aired them without concern for accuracy…
…In Europe, defamation lawsuits are used to deter reporting and commentary as much as to contend with it after the fact. The wealthy and powerful can threaten bankruptcy with legal fees and drawn-out proceedings, even if what was said is ultimately upheld. Were this standard applied to the U.S., vibrant conservative blogs and social media commentary would cease to exist in any form similar to today.
Europe is a constant punching bag of the right, but it’s true that the U.S. has more press freedom. It’s also true that U.S. conservative blogs and social media are so committed to recklessly and deliberately false activities that they’d face an existential crisis if held to a stronger defamation standard.
It’s ironic, but our country is struggling to contend with the repercussions of the right-wing’s commitment to misinformation. Most famously, this led to the mass-delusion coup attempt on January 6, 2021, after which Trump was suspended from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
The way I see it, the right has been abusing their First Amendment rights to such a degree that they’re responsible for restricting everyone else’s freedom of expression. This gives them little ground to stand on when complaining about comparisons to Nazis.
What they’ve done is force us all to consider the limits of free speech. We have a government to protect, and we can’t have insurrections based on nothing but lies. We also have to protect people from fraud and incitement to crime. How many people are on trial or have already been convicted of criminal activity related to January 6? Most of them were victims of The Big Lie.
Suspending people from social media for spreading malicious lies is one way of trying to deal with the problem, but it resets freedom of expression for everyone. It’s a sign that there are only so many lies the system can bear before it begins to crack.
Rogan didn’t raise these points, perhaps because he doesn’t agree with them, but also because his audience wouldn’t listen. But they might be receptive to the message that if CNN is restricted in what they can say, then they too will have their freedom of expression curtailed.
Unless I am reading things wrongly, it seems overtly obvious to me that the right wing audience you refer to is more than willing to sacrifice everything that is near and dear to them, as long as they end up feeling that it “owns the liberals.” They don’t seem to have given a minute of thought to the fact that they might actually suffer as a result of restricting the First Amendment rights of those with whom they disagree. Such is the product of tens of millions of people perpetually existing in a comfortable bubble of misinformation and propaganda. They are unable to rationally connect the dots, or to contemplate any sort of “slippery slope” argument that might blow back on them. For fuck’s sake, God is on their side, and they spend every minute of every day having smoke blown up their asses that they are the one and only true patriots in this country, and that everyone who is not in their tribe is the fucking enemy, and is not deserving of even being recognized as a citizen of the United States.
Simply on their face, the correlations between the rise of Hitler and Trump are persuasive. No one should shy away from pointing this out. The rhetoric and the cult-like allegiance to the message of demonization and exclusion are not simply coincidental. The mainstream media is more than reluctant to go there, but that, in no way, minimizes the accuracy of the observations, and the similarities are ignored at our own peril. It’s understandable that making these sorts of observations make the media uncomfortable. But if they wish to live up to the reputation they long to embrace, of speaking truth to power, then they need to suck it up, grow some balls, and speak that truth to fucking power. The first thing that will happen when the fascists take over this country will be the crushing of the independent media. How in the hell they can not see this obvious fact is beyond me, but it seems like they are all thinking that we are just living in another ebb and flow moment of democracy, vacillating between the acceptable conservative and liberal orthodoxies we have seen over the centuries. Nothing could be further from the truth. American democracy is teetering at the precipice of its demise, more than maybe it ever has in its history. Treating this as just another normal swing of the political pendulum almost insures that our form of governance will implode, and we will enter a period of time which we cannot even imagine. Our complacency in believing in the perpetual existence of our democracy, in the face of our massive apathy and ignorance, will be the shame we will live with forever.