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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful

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      Before Covid, Gabe Whitney, a 41-year-old from West Bath, Maine, didn’t think much about vaccines. He wasn’t very political — he didn’t vote in 2020, he said, because he thought Donald Trump was a “psycho” and Joe Biden was “corrupt.” It wasn’t until the pandemic that Whitney started regularly watching the news, but as he did, he felt like things weren’t adding up. He doubted what he called “the narrative” and struggled with the hostility his questions about vaccines and other mitigations elicited from those close to him. He described being “blamed and labeled as someone who’s part of the problem because you’re questioning. Like not taking a stance on it, but just questioning. That was the worst.”Whitney started gravitating toward people who see skepticism of mainstream public health directives as a sign of courage rather than selfishness and delusion. He began following anti-vax figures like Del Bigtree, Robert Malone and, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Whitney already admired for his environmental work. Kennedy has long touted an illusory connection between vaccines and autism, and has repeatedly said that pandemic restrictions arose from a C.I.A. plan to “clamp down totalitarian control.” If Kennedy was so wrong, Whitney thought, it didn’t make sense that his critics wouldn’t debate him. “When someone is taking such an unpopular position, and then nobody wants to debate them, that says something to me,” he said.I met Whitney this month at a rally for Kennedy, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at Saint Anselm College, just outside Manchester, N.H. I’d gone because I was curious about who was turning out to see the candidate. Among many Democrats, there’s an assumption that Kennedy’s surprising strength in some polls — an Emerson College survey from April showed him getting 21 percent in a Democratic primary — is mostly attributable to the magic of his name and anxiety about Joe Biden’s age. This is probably at least partly true. As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent Saint Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent, barely ahead of Marianne Williamson.At the same time, Kennedy has a sincere and passionate following. When I arrived at the St. Anselm venue, I was surprised by the enormous line snaking out the door. It quickly became clear that many people weren’t going to make it into the 580-seat auditorium. (I requested an interview with Kennedy, but never heard back from the person I was told could schedule it.)In New Hampshire, I didn’t meet any loyal Democrats who were there just to scope out the alternatives. The 2020 Biden voters I encountered were dead set against voting for him again; some, disenchanted by vaccine mandates and American support for Ukraine, even said they preferred Donald Trump. Like Whitney, several people I spoke to hadn’t voted at all in 2020 because they didn’t like their choices. Some attendees said they leaned right, and others identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.What brought them all together was a peculiar combination of cynicism and credulity. The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.In 2021, Charles Eisenstein, an influential New Age writer, described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the primal wound that brought America to its current lamentable state. “It is like a radioactive pellet lodged inside the body politic,” he wrote, “generating an endlessly metastasizing cancer that no one has been able to trace to its source.”Eisenstein takes it for granted that J.F.K.’s murder was orchestrated by the national security state, a view also held by R.F.K. Jr., the former president’s nephew. Because the official story “beggars belief,” Eisenstein argued, it engendered in the populace a festering distrust of all official narratives. At the same time, the cover-up led the government to regard the people it’s been continually deceiving with contempt, as “unruly schoolchildren who must be managed, surveilled, tracked, locked up and locked down for their own good.”A Kennedy restoration, Eisenstein believes, would heal the corrosive injury that separates the people from their putative leaders, putting America back on the confident and optimistic trajectory from which it was diverted in 1963. In May, he joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign as a senior adviser working on messaging and strategy.“There was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving towards greater and greater virtue,” Eisenstein said in a podcast he and Kennedy recorded together. J.F.K.’s assassination jolted America onto a different, darker timeline, but perhaps not permanently. “I feel like maybe that timeline hasn’t died,” Eisenstein said of the earlier era. “Maybe we can pick up that thread. And it’s so significant that a Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. It’s one of the synchronicities that speak to, or speak from, a larger organizing intelligence in the world.”To those of us who see Kennedy as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick, one boosted by MAGA figures like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon to weaken Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election. But to many in his substantial following, it has a messianic cast, promising deliverance from the division and confusion that began with J.F.K.’s assassination and reached a terrifying apotheosis during the Covid pandemic. “We are in the last battle,” Kennedy said in a 2021 speech at a California church famous for defying pandemic restrictions. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”In Kennedy’s campaign, this chiliastic vision is translated into a story about the renewal of a lost American golden age, before the murders of his uncle and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. In New Hampshire, his appearance was more than just a campaign stop — it commemorated the 60th anniversary of J.F.K.’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where the young president had called on his countrymen “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”Standing before a row of American flags in that packed Saint Anselm auditorium, wearing a suit and a 1960s-style skinny tie, Kennedy reworked his uncle’s speech as a call to empathize with Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine. He cast American support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a continuation of our country’s forever wars, which he posited as the cause of American decline. As he often does, he mixed highly tendentious arguments — attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in part to “repeated deliberate provocations” by America — with resonant truths. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” he said. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.”A new Kennedy presidency, he claimed, could revive us. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he said. It was a softer, more eloquent version of Make America Great Again, and the audience loved it.When the speech was over, the crowd was invited to join one of three breakout sessions. I chose “Peace Consciousness in Foreign Policy,” a dialogue led by Eisenstein. “You could say manifest, or you can say prophesize, but we need to see that this is possible,” a woman at the talk said about the prospect of a Kennedy presidency. “We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.” The people around her hooted and applauded.It is in fact possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.It’s also both a show of strength and a potential recruiting vehicle for what Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker call “conspirituality,” the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture that flowered during the pandemic. In their new book, “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” they show how crunchy yoga influencers were pulled into the paranoid orbit of QAnon. Conspiritualists warned that “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, Big Pharma and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination,” they wrote. “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.”In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.“There’s a huge political realignment going on in this country, where a lot of the old categories — liberal, conservative — just don’t make sense anymore,” Eisenstein told me after the New Hampshire event. The Kennedy campaign, he said, “is unifying people who have really lost trust in the system, lost trust in politicians, lost trust — no offense intended — in the media.”A few days after the speech, I met Aubrey Marcus, who co-founded a multimillion-dollar nutritional supplement company, Onnit, with the podcaster Joe Rogan, at the cafe in the Soho Grand Hotel. Marcus, a self-help guru, author, podcaster and ayahuasca promoter based in Austin, Texas, who recently led the football star Aaron Rodgers on a darkness retreat in Oregon, is an ardent Kennedy backer, though he’s never voted in his life. “This is as strong a belief in a cause as I’ve ever had,” he said. Many people he knows, he told me, share his enthusiasm: There’s “more excitement than I’ve ever seen about any politician, ever.”That excitement is only intensified by a sense that the establishment is trying to silence Kennedy, who during the pandemic was booted from major social media platforms for promoting untruths about vaccines. Marcus denounced “the broad application of censorship for very complicated issues” and attempts to “remove people from the conversation and saying they don’t deserve a voice.”The celebration of Kennedy as a free-speech icon creates a dilemma for those who think that by discouraging lifesaving vaccinations, he’s going to get people killed. This month, after Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine scientist, criticized Joe Rogan for letting Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he’d debate Kennedy on his show. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, offered an additional $150,000, and one Covid contrarian after another chimed in to add to the pot. “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Elon Musk tweeted. As the pile-on mounted, anti-vaccine activists showed up at Hotez’s house, harassing him for his refusal to square off against Kennedy.Hotez, whose book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” was inspired by his autistic daughter, has actually spoken to Kennedy several times in the past in an effort to convince him that he’s wrong about vaccines. It was, Hotez told me, frustrating and fruitless. “You’d debunk one thing and then he’d come up with something else,” he said. Hotez has been a guest on Rogan’s podcast before and is more than willing to return, but said, “Having Bobby there will just turn it into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”I sympathize with Hotez’s position, which is the same one taken by experts in many fields when challenged to debate cranks. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, refuses to debate creationists because he doesn’t want to treat them as legitimate interlocutors. Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian and diplomat, has written that trying to debate Holocaust deniers is like “trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. It’s impossible because no matter what you say to them, they’re going to make something up.” To debate a conspiracy theorist, one must be fluent not just in facts but also in a near-limitless arsenal of non-facts.Still, it’s obvious enough why Kennedy’s sympathizers view it as a moral victory when experts refuse to engage with him. To successfully quarantine certain ideas, you need some sort of social consensus about what is and isn’t beyond the pale. In America, that consensus has broken down. Liberals, justifiably panicked by epistemological chaos, have sometimes tried to reassert consensus by treating more and more subjects — like the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — as unworthy of public argument. But the proliferation of taboos can give stigmatized ideas the sheen of secret knowledge. When the boundaries of acceptable discourse are policed too stringently — and with too much unearned certainty — that can be a recipe for red pills.A Kennedy presidency, some of the candidate’s supporters hope, will knock those boundaries down. One of those supporters is my old boss David Talbot, a co-founder of the online magazine Salon.com. “Bobby talks about the censorship culture coming out of the left,” Talbot told me when we talked recently. “I think that’s a dangerous trend. On the left, liberals used to be against censorship. We’re now shutting down free speech.”This is, no doubt, a lament you’ve heard before, and maybe one you agree with. A common theme among old-school liberals disenchanted with contemporary progressivism is that it’s sanctimonious and intolerant. But talking to Kennedy fans, I heard something more than just complaints about cancel culture. I heard an almost spiritual belief that Kennedy, by being brave enough to speak some unspeakable truth, could heal the hatred and suspicions that make Americans want to shut one another down.For Talbot, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” that truth is that the American government killed both J.F.K. and R.F.K., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared the former president’s assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “It’s the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that’s stinking up our house of democracy,” he said. Being honest about it, he believes, “would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who’s willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.”This notion of wiping the slate clean — or Eisenstein’s idea about returning to an aborted timeline — is a powerful one. Who wouldn’t want to reach into the past and undo the errors and accidents that have brought us to this miserable moment? As politics it’s a harmful fantasy; movements that promise to restore a halcyon era of national unity always are. As a quasi-religious impulse — or as the drive of a candidate seeking to return to a time before his uncle and father were murdered — it’s perhaps more understandable. “A lot of people fall into despair when they take in the hopelessness of our situation,” Eisenstein said on Marcus’s podcast last week. “And it is in fact hopeless if you don’t incorporate what we’re calling miracles.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Supreme Court Just Helped Save American Democracy From Trumpism

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      To understand both the Trump-led Republican effort to overturn the 2020 election and the lingering Republican bitterness surrounding that contest, it’s important to remember that the G.O.P.’s attack on American democracy had two aspects: a conspiracy theory and a coup theory. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to both. In a case called Moore v. Harper, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” doctrine, reaffirmed the soundness of the 2020 election and secured the integrity of elections to come.First, a bit of background. The effort to steal the 2020 election depended on two key arguments. The first, the conspiracy theory, was that the election was fundamentally flawed; the second, the coup theory, was that the Constitution provided a remedy that would enable Donald Trump to remain in office.The disparate elements of the conspiracy theory varied from truly wild claims about voting machines being manipulated and Italian satellites somehow altering the outcome to more respectable arguments that pandemic-induced changes in voting procedures were both unconstitutional and disproportionately benefited Democrats. For example, in one of the most important cases filed during the 2020 election season, the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that changes in voting procedures mandated by the State Supreme Court violated the Constitution by overriding the will of the Pennsylvania legislature.The Pennsylvania G.O.P. argued for a version of the independent state legislature doctrine, a theory that the Constitution grants state legislatures — and state legislatures alone — broad, independent powers to regulate elections for president and for Congress. The basis for this argument is found in both Article I and Article II of the Constitution. The relevant provision of Article I states, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” And Article II’s electors clause says, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.”The question was whether those two clauses essentially insulated the state legislatures from accountability to other state branches of government, including from judicial review by state courts.The Supreme Court refused to hear the Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s petition, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting. But the issue was bound to come back to the court, and in Moore v. Harper it did.The case turned on a complicated North Carolina redistricting dispute. After the 2020 census, the Republican-dominated state legislature drew up a new district map. The Democratic-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the map as an unlawful partisan gerrymander under state law, and the legislature appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the State Supreme Court had no authority to override the legislature. The Supreme Court accepted the review.After SCOTUS took the case, last November’s midterm elections handed control of the North Carolina Supreme Court to Republicans, and the new, Republican-dominated court reversed itself. It held that partisan gerrymanders weren’t “justiciable” under state law, but it did not reinstate the legislature’s original map. This new North Carolina decision raised the question of whether the court would decide Harper on the merits or if it would dismiss the appeal as moot, given that it was based on a state ruling that had already been overturned.In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court not only declined to dismiss the case; it also flatly rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Chief Justice John Roberts — writing for a majority that included Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson — was unequivocal. “The elections clause,” Chief Justice Roberts declared, “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”Or, to put it another way, the relevant provisions of the federal Constitution did not grant state legislatures independent powers that exempt them from the normal operations of state constitutional law. Chief Justice Roberts cited previous Supreme Court authority rejecting the idea that the federal Constitution endows “the legislature of the state with power to enact laws in any manner other than that in which the Constitution of the state has provided that laws shall be enacted.”The implications are profound. In regard to 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision strips away the foundation of G.O.P. arguments that the election was legally problematic because of state court interventions. Such interventions did not inherently violate the federal Constitution, and the state legislatures did not have extraordinary constitutional autonomy to independently set election rules.In regard to 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court’s decision eliminates the ability of a rogue legislature to set new electoral rules immune from judicial review. State legislatures will still be accountable for following both federal and state constitutional law. In other words, the conventional checks and balances of American law will still apply.Trump’s coup attempt was a national trauma, but if there’s a silver lining to be found in that dark cloud, it’s that the political and judicial branches of American government have responded to the crisis. Late last year, Congress passed significant reforms to the Electoral Count Act that were designed to clarify the ambiguities in the original act and to reaffirm Congress’s and the vice president’s limited roles in counting state electoral votes.And on Tuesday, a supermajority of the Supreme Court, including both Democratic and Republican appointees, reaffirmed the American constitutional order. State legislatures are not an electoral law unto themselves, and while Moore v. Harper does not guarantee that elections will be flawless, it does protect the vital role of courts in the American system. The 2020 election was sound. The 2024 election is now safer. The Supreme Court has done its part to defend American democracy from the MAGA movement’s constitutional corruption.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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      In the summer of 2006, I jumped into the ring for a few rounds of debate with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was peddling reckless claims about an important issue on which he lacked expertise. It wasn’t vaccines. It was the 2004 presidential race. In an article for Rolling Stone, Kennedy suggested that the election had been stolen from John Kerry — a suggestion that, after thorough reporting, didn’t hold up.But now I see where I went wrong. Not on the merits; there’s still no case that Kerry actually won in 2004. My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.After getting in the mud with Kennedy all those years ago, I realized something important that we’d do well to remember now, as Kennedy mounts a long-shot run against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination: You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.I got to thinking about all of this last week, when Kennedy went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and served up a helping of misinformation on the issue for which he is best known, his conviction that several common, widely-used vaccines are harmful.When Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine researcher, tweeted a link to a Vice story critical of Rogan’s anti-vaccine statements and Kennedy’s appearance on the show, Rogan offered a $100,000 charitable donation if Hotez would come on the podcast to debate Kennedy. Not long after, Elon Musk chimed in, and soon an avalanche of Twitterati were pledging money for a debate; according to one Twitter user who claims to have been tracking the pledges, the pot is now over $2 million.So far, Hotez has courageously refused to take the bait, rejecting, as a physician and scientist, an effort to goad him into defending his work from a skeptic who has for years resisted evidence on vaccines. A back-and-forth between Kennedy and Hotez or another vaccine expert wouldn’t prove anything. And that’s not scientists’ method, anyway. They have established ways of assessing empirical questions — you know, things like lab experiments and clinical trials — and none of them involve owning an interlocutor on a popular podcast.And what would winning a debate with Kennedy even mean? As I learned when I argued with him about the 2004 election, trying to fight misinformation with facts is a tricky business. One side is bound by clearly documented evidence; the other side is free to cherry pick factoids from anywhere, to assert that establishment institutions are inherently suspect and that efforts to fact-check their claims amount to nit-picking, and that anyone who doesn’t see a bigger narrative in a collection of loosely related stories is, in effect, a naïf.I was a reporter at Salon during the 2004 election cycle. I’d spent several months before Election Day covering the ways America had been changing its voting systems since the fiasco of 2000, including the adoption in some places of electronic voting machines that could be vulnerable to hackers or other security lapses. Throughout that time I’d cultivated many sources in the insular, nerdy world of election administration and I’d become familiar with the minutiae of how elections are run.This left me well-prepared for what happened after Election Day — a barrage of theories from people on the left that, due to the electronic voting machines or other problems, the election had been stolen. In his Rolling Stone piece, referring to George W. Bush, Kennedy wrote that he’d “become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.” He argued that in Ohio, where Bush’s victory put him over the top in the Electoral College, enough Kerry votes were uncounted, flipped or otherwise kept out of the race to cast doubt on Bush’s roughly 118,000-vote margin in that state.I investigated many of these theories, often by consulting the sources I’d cultivated. Kennedy was right that the 2004 election had been rife with irregularities and efforts at disenfranchising voters, particularly in Ohio, where a partisan secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, had overseen several divisive voting measures and obstacles. But pretty much every expert I talked to said that none of the issues were likely big enough to have undone Bush’s win. An investigation by the Democratic National Committee which looked at precinct level voting counts found that the data “does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”And so: I wrote a point-by-point debunking of Kennedy’s breathless claims. Then Kennedy wrote a rebuttal to my rebuttal, which I, again, rebutted.For a week or two this dust-up took over my life. Salon, a generally liberal-leaning publication, was deluged by letters from readers angry that I was defending Bush’s win. Thankfully, my editors supported me, and I remember coming away from the episode feeling bruised but journalistically vindicated: A man with a famous political name was wrong on the internet, and, armed with the facts, I had stepped in to correct the record.Looking back, though, I cringe. The other day I went back and listened to a debate I had with Kennedy on public radio’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” Lehrer opened the program by asking Kennedy for his big-picture case. But whether Kennedy is talking about vaccines, elections or other out-there topics (he told Rogan he is “aware” that he could be assassinated by the American government) he tends to present his theories in a particular way. He starts with a few sprinkles of truth — Ohio’s vote was run by a partisan official, some vaccines have serious side effects — and then swirls them up with enough exaggerations, omissions and leaps of logic to create a veritable McFlurry of doubt.Such was his effort when we met on Lehrer: Kennedy offered an assortment of claims about the election that, in big and small ways, were unsubstantiated. So when Lehrer turned to me, I felt I had no choice but to start out by correcting Kennedy’s misstatements. I did so pretty handily, but because I had to point to sources and tease out the nuances Kennedy had elided, I couldn’t help but sound like the boring, persnickety nerd stuck in the weeds. After a few rounds of this back-and-forth, I can’t imagine that much of anything had been clarified for the audience. Instead, the impression was one of earnest complexity: One side says X, the other says Y, but whoever is right, it sure seems like this is a debate we should be having.At one point, Kennedy even made this plain: “You’ll be able to dispute the numbers till the end of time,” he told Lehrer of the faults I found in his case. “Mr. Manjoo,” he continued, “has made a cottage industry of reciting the Republican talking points” by bringing up “arcane disputes of each of these numbers.” “The numbers are correct,” Kennedy claimed, but the arguments over facts were “almost a side issue.” The real story, he said, is that Republicans tried to suppress Democratic votes and “they probably succeeded or may or may not have succeeded in shifting the vote to President Bush, but they certainly tried, and the press has not covered this issue.”In other words: Each side has their own numbers. We’ll never know what actually happened. This guy sounds like a Republican. My story could be right. And isn’t it suspicious that no one is talking about it?Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Some Top Republicans Embrace Early Voting, Reversing After Years of Claiming Fraud

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has said that until Republicans gain power and can change the law, they have “no choice” but to support voting by mail.After years of deriding early and mail-in voting, claiming they lead to fraud and help Democrats to steal elections, top Republicans are changing their position, leading to a split in the party as the 2024 election approaches.The converts atop the party warn that they must adapt or risk further electoral setbacks, especially in key states where early and mail balloting are in place. However, the entrenched foes within Republicans’ election-denier ranks could muddle the party message on voting.The Republican National Committee recently announced that it had created a program to promote early voting, both by mail and in person. The effort, called Bank Your Vote, further calls for Republicans to take advantage of “ballot harvesting” where it is legal, a practice that allows a third party to collect voters’ completed ballots.“To win close elections, we need to close the gap on pre-Election Day voting,” Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chair, said in a rollout video for the program.The reversal is a concession to math and the realities of the moment, as the popularity of mail-in voting shows few signs of receding, three years after the pandemic began and accelerated its use. It also is a grudging recognition that Republicans have failed to gain traction with their baseless claims that mail voting compromises election integrity.While Donald Trump has said Republicans should accept mail voting, he also continues to claim it encourages fraud.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesEven former President Donald J. Trump, whose lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss heightened the party’s distrust of mail voting, has been saying for months that Republicans have “no choice” but to embrace the method, at least until the party has the power to change voting laws.As Mr. Trump seeks the Oval Office for a third time, his soft-pedaled shift illustrates the divide between the party’s candidates, who want to avoid adding to the string of defeats in 2020 and 2022, and his fervent base of supporters.Still, Mr. Trump and some of the party’s other standard-bearers have tried to straddle both sides of the issue, sometimes in awkward ways, further confounding their voters.While headlining the Georgia Republican Party convention this month in a state that doomed his 2020 re-election and is the center of a criminal inquiry into his attempts to subvert his loss, Mr. Trump again sowed distrust of voting by mail.“Mail-in ballots, by the way, will always be dishonest,” he said.Mr. Trump, who has regularly voted by mail, falsely claimed that chain-of-custody issues involving mail ballots compromised election integrity.“It’s going to be corrupt, whether it’s — I would never say this about our mailmen because we love our mailmen — but whether it’s the mailmen or all the many people who touch those ballots,” he said. “They find them in rivers. They find them in streams. They find them all over the place. Many people got many ballots.”Kari Lake, a Trump ally whose repeated legal challenges of her 2022 loss in Arizona’s governor’s race have been denied by the courts, has also thawed on mail balloting.“While you know how I feel about mail-in ballots, if this is the game we have to play, if we’ve got to work in their rigged system, we’ll work in their rigged system,” Ms. Lake said in late May.In Arizona, the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has lost repeated lawsuits challenging her loss. She now says she will encourage mail voting in her likely next race.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMs. Lake had been speaking at a news conference after the dismissal of her latest election lawsuit, which had claimed that Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, had neglected to review voters’ signatures on mail ballots. Now, she said, she would focus on banking mail-in votes as she teases a potential run for the Senate in 2024.Just days after entering the 2024 presidential race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief G.O.P. rival, said Republicans had hurt themselves in 2020 with their assault on absentee voting.“I think telling people not to send in a mail ballot is a huge mistake, and it ends up reducing the pool of prospective voters,” Mr. DeSantis said during a May 26 radio appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.But the mistrust of early voting that Mr. Trump planted still permeates the G.O.P., leaving many holdouts among election deniers, who called the acceptance of mail-in ballots misguided.“They are 100 percent wrong,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, said in a text message. “Same-day voting!”Mr. Lindell also renewed calls for elections to be conducted entirely using paper ballots that would be counted by hand, not electronic tabulators.Since the 2020 election, Republican attacks on mail voting have been unrelenting. Some declared absentee voting as “un-American,” including Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and a Trump ally, who termed mail-in ballots a “threat to democracy” in a 2020 online commentary.But in a review prepared by the Republican National Committee after the party’s underwhelming showing in last year’s midterm elections, G.O.P. leaders acknowledged that opposition to voting by mail was a flawed strategy.A demonstration in November 2020 in Philadelphia celebrating Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesKarl Rove, the G.O.P. strategist who has been a target of Mr. Trump’s barbs, said in an interview that the former president’s repeated calls for Republicans to eradicate mail-in and early voting once they gain power were delusional.“It’s fanciful,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”Mr. Rove said that failing to turn out early votes in Arizona and Georgia in 2020 hurt the party’s chances — Mr. Trump lost both states narrowly — and he described the effort to simultaneously embrace and attack mail-in voting as “not helpful” for Republicans.Even so, Republican state lawmakers and governors have continued to press for legislation that makes it harder to vote by mail, to mixed results.In Nebraska, a push by two Republican senators to require most people to vote in person stalled this year in the unicameral legislature. In Arkansas, Republicans used their power monopoly this year to ban ballot drop boxes, in a state that does not use them.Tyler Dees, a G.O.P. state senator who was the bill’s main sponsor, suggested that drop boxes in other states were prone to being vandalized and facilitated illegal ballot harvesting, claims that have been refuted by independent election monitors and studies.“They act as a beacon of mistrust,” Mr. Dees said of drop boxes during a February floor speech. “They do not encourage a fair and equal process.”But the party’s pragmatists point to the success Democrats have demonstrated by taking advantage of laws that allow voting for a longer period, rather than just on Election Day.“We need to treat this more like Lent and less like Halloween,” said Jeff Roe, a longtime G.O.P. strategist who is advising a super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential bid and has worked on Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for Virginia governor, Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid and a lengthy list of other campaigns.Andy Reilly, a Republican National Committee member from Delaware County, Pa., next to Philadelphia, said the strength of Democrats’ early voting operation was difficult to match.“You better have a damn good Election Day operation,” he said. “There’s no such thing as Election Day operations now. It’s election season that they have to embrace.”Mr. Reilly said Republicans had not grasped that unforeseen events can arise on Election Day that keep voters from going to the polls.“Life gets in the way,” he said, adding that it was a mistake to limit voting to one day. “It is, in essence, suppressing the Republican vote.” More

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      These Activists Distrust Voting Machines. Just Don’t Call Them Election Deniers.

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      As election activists rally against new voting machines, they are drifting into territory now dominated by conspiracy theorists.For decades, Lulu Friesdat made election integrity her life’s work. Drawing support from activists and academics, she co-founded Smart Elections, a nonpartisan group that is opposed to some voting machines that Ms. Friesdat believes would increase wait times and cost a small fortune to purchase and maintain.But since 2020, things have changed. Former President Donald J. Trump catapulted concerns about voting machines into the Republican mainstream by falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged, partly because of electronic voting machines.Election integrity advocates, like Ms. Friesdat, now find themselves in an uncomfortable position, pushing for election security while sometimes amplifying claims made most vocally by conspiracy theorists, including those involved in the so-called Stop the Steal movement.Some election activists warn that election machines could be hacked or compromised, for example, while some conspiracy theorists say, without evidence, that those hacks have already taken place. Election officials say no hacks have taken place.Misinformation watchdogs say that the somewhat overlapping arguments illustrate another consequence of Mr. Trump’s false and exaggerated voter fraud claims, which have led to doubts about election integrity among a wide swath of the American public. Ms. Friesdat and other activists like her fear that their work may become too closely tied to conspiracy theorists and Mr. Trump’s cause, making potential allies, like progressives, wary of joining the fight.“If you read an article that says that these voting machines are coming in, and people’s concerns about these issues are very similar to those of the Stop the Steal movement, then it makes it very hard for Democrats to work on this issue,” Ms. Friesdat said. “And it has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with the Stop the Steal movement.”Misinformation watchdogs say that the two movements could erode trust in American elections even further, intentionally or not, because conspiracy theorists tend to exaggerate legitimate criticisms to rile up supporters and raise questions about the entire electoral system.“You sow a seed of doubt, and that will grow and fester into a conspiracy theory,” said Tim Weninger, a computer science professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies misinformation on social media. “It always starts off with one untruth, and that grows into two untruths, and that grows into more, and before long you have an entire conspiracy theory on your hands.”The debate has played out nationally as multiple states have faced pushback on electronic voting machines. It is now happening in New York, where officials are considering certifying new voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, a manufacturer based in Omaha. The company has been targeted in Mr. Trump’s voting fraud narrative, alongside competitors like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Yet, ES&S and its machines have also come under scrutiny by election activists and security experts.The new machines, ExpressVote XL, use an “all-in-one” design: Voters make their selections on a 32-inch touch-screen, which also prints their votes on a narrow summary card. Unlike a traditional ballot, the card records the votes in bar codes at the top of the paper, which the machine reads electronically, followed by a written summary of each pick.How the ExpressVote XL WorksImages shared by the Pennsylvania government show how the ExpressVote XL uses summary cards instead of traditional ballots. More

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      ‘Ron DeSoros’? Conspiracy Theorists Target Trump’s Rival.

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      Ron DeSantis, a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination, must court far-right voters who consider him a tool of the Deep State.To some, he is “Ron DeSoros,” a puppet of the Democratic megadonor George Soros. To others, he is “Ron DeSatan,” a vaccine-supporting evildoer. And to still others, he is “Ron DePLANTis,” a “plant” of the so-called Deep State.As the governor of Florida — real name Ron DeSantis — explores a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he has made overtures to supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. But he is finding that the conspiracy theories and outlandish attacks that Mr. Trump and his allies have aimed at rivals for years are coming for him as well.The attacks often nod to one of the many unfounded conspiracy theories floating around in far-right circles: election fraud, vaccine dangers, Mr. Soros and even QAnon, the online conspiracy movement that believes, among other things, in the existence of a fictional cult that preys on children.The attacks underscore the power that conspiracy theories continue to hold over Republican politics heading into the 2024 presidential election. To win the party’s nomination, Mr. DeSantis would probably need support from a Republican base that has produced many of the attacks against him. And while Mr. DeSantis enjoys broad support among Republicans, soaring to re-election victory just six months ago, the latest primary polls show Mr. Trump gaining a sizable lead.“It’s a tug of war over who is going to grab the all-important conspiracy constituency,” said Bond Benton, an associate professor at Montclair State University who has studied QAnon.The demeaning nicknames for Mr. DeSantis have spread widely on conservative social media, growing this year as Mr. Trump’s attacks increased. There were more than 12,000 mentions of “DeSoros” on social media and news sites since January, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. “DeathSantis,” a term progressives used when the governor began relaxing Florida’s Covid-19 restrictions that has since been adopted by some conservatives, received 1.6 million mentions over the past two years.In recent months, Mr. DeSantis has responded by adopting some themes popular among the conspiratorial set, opposing vaccines he once endorsed and raising doubts about the 2020 election even though Mr. Trump handily won Florida in that year’s vote.Mr. DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and an election denier, said, falsely, that Florida was spared from widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election because Mr. DeSantis had a close relationship with Dominion Voting Systems.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe attacks have come from some of the loudest voices in Mr. Trump’s corner.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and an election denier, quickly found a role for Mr. DeSantis in his elaborate election fraud narrative. Mr. Lindell said, falsely, that Florida was spared from widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election because Mr. DeSantis had a close relationship with Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company targeted by election deniers.“Ron DeSantis is a Trojan horse,” Mr. Lindell said in a recent interview with The New York Times.Mr. Lindell pointed to an appearance Mr. DeSantis had had with a Dominion lawyer shortly after the election as a sign that the governor had conflicting loyalties.The lawyer, Elizabeth Locke, was speaking with Mr. DeSantis on a panel about the dangers of defamation by mainstream media. She has also represented Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the 2020 election and no evidence that Mr. DeSantis had any special relationship with Dominion.In an email, Ms. Locke pointed to a podcast appearance where she called the claims “silly” and said that she had known Mr. DeSantis since before he entered politics.Kari Lake, a Republican who lost her campaign for governor of Arizona last year, once praised Mr. DeSantis on the campaign trail. But she turned on him in February, as Mr. Trump’s attacks grew.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesKari Lake, a Republican who lost her campaign for governor of Arizona last year, once praised Mr. DeSantis on the campaign trail. But in February, as Mr. Trump’s attacks grew, she shared a story claiming Mr. DeSantis was endorsed by Mr. Soros, calling it “the kiss of death.” (Mr. Soros had only said that Mr. DeSantis was likely to become the nominee.)“The broader narrative is that he is connected to the shadowy forces that seek to bring down Trump,” said Mr. Bond, the Montclair professor.Mr. DeSantis was forced to play catch-up, making broad appeals to conspiratorial groups within the Republican Party.Last year, he announced a crackdown on voter fraud, arresting 17 people for charges of casting illegal ballots in 2020. Many of the voters had received voter registration cards from the government.Mr. DeSantis had once endorsed Covid-19 vaccines and celebrated as Floridians were rapidly vaccinated. By late last year, though, he had impaneled a statewide grand jury to investigate vaccine makers for potentially misleading Floridians, reflecting a false belief among Trump supporters that the vaccine is dangerous.Believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory do not seem swayed by Mr. DeSantis’s appeals, said Josephine Lukito, a media professor at the University of Texas who studies the relationship between disinformation and violence. “For them, that is more indicative of what a faker they perceive DeSantis to be.” More

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      What Tucker Carlson’s Dismissal From Fox News Means for the Network

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      The host’s abrupt dismissal upends Fox News’s prime-time lineup — and the carefully honed impression that the ratings star was all but untouchable.In the days after the 2020 election, the Fox host Tucker Carlson sent an anxious text message to one of his producers. Fox viewers were furious about the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The defeated president, Donald J. Trump, was eagerly stoking their anger. As Mr. Carlson and his producer batted around ideas for a new Carlson podcast — one that might help win back the audience most angry about Mr. Trump’s defeat — they saw both opportunity and peril in the moment.“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Mr. Carlson warned, in a text released during Fox’s now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion.Mr. Carlson proved prophetic, if not entirely in the way he had predicted. His nearly six-year reign in prime-time cable came to a sudden end on Monday, as Fox abruptly cut ties with the host, thanking him in a terse news release “for his service to the network.”And while the exact circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday evening, the dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes — and already high-priced — legal battles emanating from Fox’s postelection campaign to placate Mr. Trump’s base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham.Mr. Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved capable of withstanding controversy after controversy.The network stuck by him — as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation — after Mr. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He seemed to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” along with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the company’s own dirty laundry. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Carlson’s show frequently promoted the Kremlin’s point of view, attacking U.S. sanctions and blaming the conflict on American designs for expanding NATO.The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — driven away by boycotts targeting his more racist and inflammatory segments — did not seem to dent his standing within the network, so long as the audience stuck around. Disdainful of the cable network’s top executives, Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was close to the Murdoch family and, perhaps, untouchable.Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: His own conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the party during the Obama years. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.Despite his private disparagement of Mr. Trump — “I hate him,” Mr. Carlson texted a colleague in January 2021 — Mr. Carlson electrified the president’s white, older base with vivid monologues about elite corruption, American decay and a grand plan by “the ruling class” to replace “legacy” Americans with a flood of migrants from other countries and cultures. With deliberate, hypnotic repetition, he warned viewers: “They” want to control and destroy “you.”Crucially, he worked to help Fox woo Trump supporters back to the network in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat.In 2022, Mr. Carlson’s program averaged three million total viewers a night.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn broadcast after broadcast, he unspooled a counternarrative claiming falsely that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters” and suggesting that the voting had been rife with fraud and corruption. After Trump supporters — whipped into a frenzy in part by Mr. Trump and Fox — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, he recast the assault as a largely peaceful protest against legitimate wrongdoing, its violence the product of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the F.B.I.As a programming strategy, it worked: Last year, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged more than three million total viewers a night. At his height, and perhaps still, Mr. Carlson counted among the most influential figures on the right.But if Fox and its star host once prospered because of Mr. Trump, their efforts to deny or overturn the election results have also thrust both the network and the former president into legal peril.Mr. Trump faces one investigation by a federal special counsel over his efforts to retain power after losing and another by a local prosecutor in Georgia that began after the defeated president, determined to prevail, asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results there.A lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems speaking to reporters last week. Fox has agreed to pay the voting software company $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesFox agreed last week to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation claim brought by Dominion, which had sued Fox for spreading false accusations that the voting software company was at the center of a vast conspiracy to cheat Mr. Trump of victory in 2020.Mr. Carlson and his show featured prominently in the Dominion case. And thousands of pages of internal texts and emails released as part of the suit revealed that the network’s embrace of election-fraud theories — and their promotion by guests and personalities at Fox News and Fox Business — were part of a broader campaign to assuage viewers angry about Mr. Trump’s loss.They also revealed that neither Mr. Carlson nor his fellow hosts truly believed that the election was rigged, despite their on-air commentary. And texts showed that Mr. Carlson held Fox’s titular executives in low regard, slamming them for “destroying our credibility” — for allowing Fox to accurately report Mr. Biden’s win — and belittling them as a “combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down.”Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer, is also suing the network.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe company is also facing a lawsuit from a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossberg, who said that she faced sexual harassment from other Carlson staff members and was coached by Fox lawyers to downplay the role of news executives in allowing unproven allegations of voting fraud onto the air.Yet another election technology company that featured in Fox’s coverage of supposed election fraud, Smartmatic, is still suing the network. In its complaint, Smartmatic said that Fox knowingly aired more than 100 false statements about its products. A day after the suit was filed in 2021, Fox Business canceled the show hosted by Lou Dobbs, who had been among the foremost spreaders of baseless theories involving election fraud.In the wake of Mr. Carlson’s abrupt dismissal, current and former Fox employees buzzed with speculation about the true reasons for his firing, and what it said about the company plans moving forward.Few seemed to believe that Mr. Carlson was being punished for his lengthy history of inflammatory remarks on-air — if so, why now? — or for his formerly private criticisms of Fox executives. (Some pointed out that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were similarly scathing in their own text messages.)A more interesting question, perhaps, is what Mr. Carlson will do next.Like his clearest intellectual predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J. Buchanan, Mr. Carlson is one of the few people to find success as not only a television entertainer, but also an institution-builder — he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller — and a movement leader. More than any other figure with a mainstream platform, he succeeded in bring far-right ideas about immigration and culture to a broad audience.He is also, now, among the very few television talents to have been canceled by all three major cable news networks. Before Fox, he had a long run as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and later headlined a show at MSNBC. In recent years, he served as both a pillar of Fox News’s prime-time lineup and the biggest-name draw on the company’s paid streaming network, Fox Nation, where he aired a thrice-weekly talk show and occasional documentaries.Within hours of his firing on Monday, at least one putative job offer was forthcoming.“Hey @TuckerCarlson,” tweeted RT, the Russian state-backed media channel. “You can always question more with @RT_com.” More

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      Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. But the Misinformation War Continues.

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      False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More