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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Insists He Is Not Antisemitic During House Hearing

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      At a hearing convened by House Republicans, the Democratic presidential candidate defended himself against charges of racism and antisemitism.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Capitol Hill on Thursday and pointedly declared that he is neither an antisemite nor a racist, while giving a fiery defense of free speech and accusing the Biden administration and his political opponents of trying to silence him.Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who turned to anti-vaccine activism and has trafficked in conspiracy theories, was referring to the storm that erupted after The New York Post published a video in which he told a private audience that Covid-19 “attacks certain races disproportionately” and may have been “ethnically targeted” to do more harm to white and Black people than to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.Mr. Kennedy appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — a panel created by Republicans to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of federal law enforcement and national security agencies. He said he had “never been anti-vax” and had taken all recommended vaccines except the coronavirus vaccine.Thursday’s hearing was devoted to allegations by Mr. Kennedy and Republicans that the Biden administration is trying to censor people with differing views. It was rooted in a lawsuit, filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and known as Missouri v. Biden, that accused the administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress free speech on Covid-19, elections and other matters.The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, opened the hearing by citing an email that emerged in that case, in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet in which Mr. Kennedy suggested — without evidence — that the baseball legend Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.The tweet, which was not taken down, said Mr. Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” following vaccination. There was no such wave of suspicious deaths. As Mr. Kennedy often does, he phrased his language carefully; he did not explicitly link the vaccine to the deaths, but rather said the deaths occurred “closely following administration of #COVID #vaccines.”Representative Jim Jordan opened the hearing by citing an email in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet by Mr. Kennedy.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThursday’s session had all the makings of a Washington spectacle. A long line had formed outside the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building by the time Mr. Kennedy arrived. Kennedy supporters stood outside the building holding a Kennedy 2024 banner.Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?Democrats accused Republicans of giving Mr. Kennedy a forum for bigotry and pseudoscience. “Free speech is not an absolute,” said Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. “The Supreme Court has stated that. And others’ free speech that is allowed — hateful, abusive rhetoric — does not need to be promoted in the halls of the People’s House.”Even by Mr. Kennedy’s standards for stoking controversy, his recent comments about Covid-19 were shocking. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who is Jewish, tried unsuccessfully on Thursday to force the panel into executive session; she insisted that Mr. Kennedy had violated House rules by making “despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.” She also helped organize Democrats to sign a letter calling on Republican leaders to disinvite him from the hearing.Mr. Kennedy waved the letter about during his opening remarks. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who signed this letter who believes I’m antisemitic.”Mr. Kennedy has been steeped in Democratic politics for his entire life, but his campaign has drawn supporters from the fringes of both political parties. He has made common cause with Republicans and Trump supporters who accuse the federal government of conspiring with social media companies to suppress conservative content.Thursday’s hearing was billed as a session to “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.” One of the lawyers involved in that case, D. John Sauer, also testified, as did Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.Mr. Kennedy showed a flash of the old Kennedy style, invoking his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat and legislative giant who frequently worked across the aisle. He called for kindness and respect, recalling how his uncle brought Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican with whom he partnered on major legislation, to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.And Mr. Kennedy was joined by a former member of Congress: Dennis J. Kucinich, who served in the House as a Democrat from Ohio and is Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager.“We need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times,” Mr. Kennedy declared at one point, “and that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”Amid the vitriol, members of both parties did come together around a lament from Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia.“I’ve been in this Congress 15 years, and I never thought we’d descend to this level of Orwellian dystopia,” Mr. Connolly said.Representatives Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Harriet M. Hageman, Republican of Wyoming, nodded their heads and smiled. “I agree with that,” they said in unison. More

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      Supreme Court to Hear Dispute Over ‘Trump Too Small’ Slogan

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      In earlier cases, the justices struck down provisions of the trademark law that discriminated based on the speaker’s viewpoint.The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a California lawyer may trademark the phrase “Trump too small,” a reference to a taunt from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Rubio said Donald J. Trump had “small hands,” adding: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”The lawyer, Steve Elster, said in his trademark application that he wanted to convey the message that “some features of President Trump and his policies are diminutive.” He sought to use the phrase on the front of T-shirts with a list of Mr. Trump’s positions on the back. For instance: “Small on civil rights.”A federal law forbids the registration of trademarks “identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent.” Citing that law, the Patent and Trademark Office rejected the application.A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the First Amendment required the office to allow the registration.“The government has no valid publicity interest that could overcome the First Amendment protections afforded to the political criticism embodied in Elster’s mark,” Judge Timothy B. Dyk wrote for the court. “As a result of the president’s status as a public official, and because Elster’s mark communicates his disagreement with and criticism of the then-president’s approach to governance, the government has no interest in disadvantaging Elster’s speech.”The size of Mr. Trump’s hands has long been the subject of commentary. In the 1980s, the satirical magazine Spy tormented Mr. Trump, then a New York City real estate developer, with the recurring epithet “short-fingered vulgarian.”In 2016, during a presidential debate, Mr. Trump addressed Mr. Rubio’s critique.“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Mr. Trump said, displaying them. “And, he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”The Biden administration appealed the Federal Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar said Mr. Elster was free to discuss Mr. Trump’s physique and policies but was not entitled to a trademark.The Supreme Court has twice struck down provisions of the trademark law in recent years on First Amendment grounds.In 2019, it rejected a provision barring the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks.That case concerned a line of clothing sold under the brand name FUCT. When the case was argued, a government lawyer told the justices that the term was “the equivalent of the past participle form of the paradigmatic profane word in our culture.”Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a six-justice majority, did not dispute that. But she said the law was unconstitutional because it “disfavors certain ideas.”A bedrock principle of First Amendment law, she wrote, is that the government may not draw distinctions based on speakers’ viewpoints.In 2017, a unanimous eight-justice court struck down another provision of the trademarks law, this one forbidding marks that disparage people, living or dead, along with “institutions, beliefs or national symbols.”The decision, Matal v. Tam, concerned an Asian American dance-rock band called The Slants. The court split 4 to 4 in much of its reasoning, but all the justices agreed that the provision at issue in that case violated the Constitution because it took sides based on speakers’ viewpoints.The new case, Vidal v. Elster, No. 22-704, is arguably different, as the provision at issue does not appear to make such distinction. In his Supreme Court brief, Mr. Elster responded that “the statute makes it virtually impossible to register a mark that expresses an opinion about a public figure — including a political message (as here) that is critical of the president of the United States.” More

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      Burhan Sönmez on the Tensions Between Politics and Art in Turkey

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      Burhan Sönmez, who is president of PEN international, discusses the tension between politics and art and the role of literature in authoritarian societies.The momentous Turkish presidential election, whose second round will take place on Sunday, has more than just geopolitical consequences; it is a watershed for culture as well. Since 2016, after a failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government here has cracked down on artists, writers, filmmakers and academics, who have experienced censorship, job losses and a climate of fear.For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are only the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art.Born outside Ankara in 1965, where his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but went into exile in Britain after a police assault. He has written five novels, including the prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” newly out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.
      Sönmez now lives in Istanbul and Cambridge, and in 2021 he was named president of PEN International, where he has been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in Turkey and elsewhere.I spoke to Sönmez over video a few days after the first round of the Turkish general election, in which Erdogan finished a half-point shy of an absolute majority. This interview has been edited and condensed.Istanbul has always been a city of arrivals. When did you first come here?During the military-coup era, the 1980s. I was born and grew up in a small village in central Turkey. It’s in the middle of the countryside, like a desert village, without electricity. I moved to Istanbul to study law, and the next phase of my life began after I went to exile in Britain. So now I can combine those different spaces — small village, big Istanbul and then Europe. They all come together and sometimes they separate.Frequently, there’s an indeterminacy of setting in your novels, not only of geography but of time. You rarely use the obvious tells of technology or current affairs that some authors use to ground a reader in time.Particularly in my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I didn’t state a specific year, or period, when the events take place. When people read it, everyone feels that this is the story of their generation.For better and for worse!Yes. But, you know, only a naïve writer would feel proud of that. You would say, “OK, I am reflecting the feelings of different generations in a single novel.” In fact, it comes from the society itself in Turkey. Every generation has gone through the same suffering, the same problems, same oppression, same pain. So it is not a literary talent, actually, to bring all those times into a single story.In “Istanbul, Istanbul,” the narrators are prisoners, held without charge in underground cells, who tell one another stories. What their stories sketch in aggregate is a kind of dream-state Istanbul, where freedom is always abbreviated but with which freethinkers and artists remain hopelessly in love.This really started in the 1850s, when the first liberal intellectuals were oppressed by the Ottoman sultan and went into European exile. When we look at this history over time, 150 or 170 years, we see that, with every decade, governments used the same methods of oppression against writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals.But the tradition of oppression also created a tradition of resistance. And now look: After 20 years of the rule of Erdogan, still nearly half of society is against him strongly. We haven’t finished. This is partly our history of resistance.Turkey, like America, has a strong political fault line between the cities and the countryside. But your novels have crisscrossed from Istanbul to rural Anatolia and back.Especially in my last novel, “Stone and Shadow,” I wrote about this, comparing the eastern, middle and also the western part of Turkey over the last 100 years.What’s the difference between life in a small village in rural Turkey and in Istanbul? You could say it’s the difference between living in a small hut with a gas lamp and living on a street with flashing neon lights. Two different worlds, two different eras.But you should understand: Istanbul is now also part of rural Turkey. There has been a huge migration from the countryside. When I went to study in Istanbul, the population was about five million. Now it’s 17 million. It’s not easy for a big city to create a new citizen, a new cultural spirit.On that subject, one of the most disturbing themes of this election has been the demonization around refugees. I wonder how it sounds to you, as a former refugee yourself.The sad thing for Turkey now, we’ve seen a new rise of nationalism — in the color of racism, actually — against immigrants. There’s open racism against Syrians and Afghan people in Turkey. And every side, every political platform, has different ways of legitimizing this.Right-wingers say, “These people are underdeveloped Arabs. This is a backward race.” From secular progressive people, you hear, “Oh, they’re right-wing Islamist militants. They are here to support Erdogan, and to invade our country, to turn it into an Islamic republic.” In every case, racism or hatred of immigrants is on the top of the agenda.Nationalism now dominates almost every political movement.Yet there’s a rare lightness and freedom to your characterization of these political themes. “Labyrinth,” the story of a musician who loses his memory after jumping into the Bosporus, barely hints at the upheavals of the Erdogan years, when the amnesiac sees a torn poster of the president and confuses him for a sultan.We know the difference between art and journalism. Journalism speaks directly. Speaking this different language of art, we feel that we are no longer in the field of society, of politics. A political matter or a historical fact is just a color in my novel. That is real power. When I write a novel, I feel that I unite the past and the future. Because the past is a story and the future is a dream.Has there been a self-censorship of artists and writers in Turkey over the last few years?Well, first, every year more than 500 new Turkish novels are being published. When I was at the university, the number of new novels published in Turkish was about 15 or 20. That’s an enormous difference.With the young generation, I see that they are brave. Despite all this oppression, this danger of going to prison or being unemployed, young people are writing fearlessly. They are writing about Kurdish issues, about women’s issues, about L.G.B.T. issues, about political crimes in Turkey.Hundreds of writers are like this: writing openly, and at some point a bit dangerously, for themselves. This is something of which we should be proud.As president of PEN International, you have a particularly close view of the state of free expression. Have things gotten any better in Turkey since the crackdowns of 2016-2017, when thousands of academics and journalists were arrested or purged?No, no, it’s not better. In Turkey, we never got to distinguish between bad and good. It was always: bad or worse.In Turkey, PEN International has been supporting writers in prison. For myself, being a lawyer, I have the opportunity to go to prisons. Anytime I go to Turkey, I use this advantage. I go and I see Selahattin Demirtas, or Osman Kavala, so many people. It is sad to see great people are still in prison.But also it is great to see that we have solidarity. At the end of my novel “Istanbul, Istanbul,” I used an epigraph by a Persian Sufi from the Middle Ages. He says, “Hell is not the place where we suffer, it’s the place where no one hears us suffering.” I know that if I am arrested, I will never be left alone.I probably shouldn’t ask you what you expect when Turks vote in the presidential runoff next Sunday. …No, you should ask. I think we’ll win. I’m too optimistic in life, and very naïve. More

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      Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It?

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      Ron DeSantis’s botched, awkward entry into the G.O.P. presidential primary highlights that there are two important internecine Republican conflicts unfolding at once. First, there is the obvious argument about Donald Trump’s suitability for the presidency. But there’s a second, less obvious question that is closely related to the first and often mistaken for it: What is the nature of contemporary conservatism? Or to put it another way, if Trump loses, what will take his place? And when viewed through that prism, DeSantis is particularly significant. More than anyone else in the race, he has the potential both to defeat Trump and to end conservatism as we have known it.But first, let’s define terms. What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day. Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “three-legged stool” of the Republican Party.Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity. That’s certainly how I perceived it before Trump, and it’s why I mistakenly believed it would reject him as a standard-bearer. Though he pledged to be socially conservative as president, he was a thrice-married libertine who kept a framed photo of himself on the cover of Playboy in his office. His economic program was more populist than libertarian, and his foreign policy was far more isolationist than those of previous G.O.P. presidents and presidential nominees.In other words, I looked at him and thought, “He’s not a real Republican.” Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for. While Trump’s vision of Trumpism was primarily an extension of his personal ambition, the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.By contrast, the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).” In an excellent 2022 piece, Philip Klein, the editor of National Review Online, called this “fight club” conservatism and raised the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse, to wield the same power to punish you and to reward your opponents. The legal instruments you create to combat your foes can just as easily be turned to attack you.Which brings me back to DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.That does not mean that Trump and DeSantis are the same. There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice. He is equally content attacking Democrats and any Republicans who get in his way.DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.Trump, fighting for himself, relentlessly attacks DeSantis, including with gross and unsubstantiated rumors. DeSantis, hoping to fight the left and not Trump, largely ignores his competitor and instead doubles down on attacking his progressive enemies, including “woke” universities and “woke” companies such as Disney.But whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.Thus, DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms. DeSantis likewise attempts to regulate social media moderation, intruding on private corporations’ decisions about who to platform and what kinds of speech to moderate. He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations. He’s banned even private employers from imposing a Covid vaccine mandate.When you view DeSantis as more anti-left than conservative in the classic sense, then other aspects of his rhetoric begin to make sense. Once a Covid vaccine advocate, he has since asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongs in Florida related to the Covid-19 vaccines.” A strong supporter of lethal aid to Ukraine during the Obama administration, he recently and notoriously referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”For conservatives like me who want both to defeat Trump and to begin a restoration of the fusionist principles that once defined the G.O.P., DeSantis presents a dilemma. As I’ve written before, I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives. My colleague Ezra Klein has done outstanding work, for example, demonstrating how in California many of the best-intentioned progressive government programs are simply not working well.Here it’s worth repeating the pragmatic concerns about wielding government power. Any government strong enough to suppress my opponents’ speech is also strong enough to suppress mine, and any G.O.P. effort to erode American liberty will hand the same powers to the party’s political opponents. Republicans could live to rue the day when they rejected economic freedom and scorned free speech. This is particularly true if — as many advocates of DeSantis-like measures attest — liberalism is otherwise dominant in American culture.I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the 1990 movie “The Hunt for Red October.” A Soviet submarine captain, in his eagerness to sink a defecting Soviet submarine, recklessly launches the very torpedo that sinks his own ship. His executive officer’s final words hang in the air. Condemning his superior for his arrogance, he tells him, “You’ve killed us.”Speaking of exceptional colleagues, I want to close with a brief note about Ross Douthat’s latest column. He expertly outlines the competing arguments of pro-Trump and Never-Trump Christians:When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain.Ross is right, but there’s something else worth considering. Christian credibility is important, but not as important as Christian character. I opposed Trump for many reasons, certainly including concern over what such overt moral compromise would do to the witness of the church. I also opposed Trump because of what loyalty to Trump would do to Christians.To put it another way, after years of engagement with Trump, has Trump influenced the church more than the church has influenced Trump?The verdict is in. I see it with my own eyes. Trump has influenced the church. You see it in casual Christian cruelty online. You see it in the conspiracy-addled ReAwaken America rallies that are packing churches from coast to coast. You see it when genuine Christian candidates such as Mike Pence and Tim Scott struggle to gain traction even though they purportedly share the faith and values of tens of millions of American evangelicals, while Donald Trump self-evidently does not.Trump’s influence should not be surprising. After all, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Trump has been bad company for evangelicals since the day he rode down the escalator. And he has corrupted the morality of all too many American Christians. More

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      What Protects Fox News In the Dominion Trial Also Protects Our Democracy

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      Fox News, which is defending itself from Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit, is going to trial on Monday in a hole. In an unusual move, the judge has already ruled that on-air statements — those asserting that Dominion’s voting machines played a role in causing Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election — were false. The main task left for the jury is to decide whether Fox made those false statements with what’s known as actual malice.It’s remarkable that Dominion’s suit has gotten this far and may even ultimately prevail, thanks in part to a raft of incredibly damaging Fox emails, text messages and other evidence that show deep internal misgivings about on-air claims about the 2020 election. But proving actual malice is difficult: Dominion must show that Fox News either knew that its reporting was false or entertained serious doubts about the truth of the reporting. This high bar, set by the Supreme Court in 1964, often is insurmountable for plaintiffs.Given the evidence against Fox that already has been made public, it might seem unfair that Dominion continues to face such an uphill battle in this case. But it is a very good thing for our democracy that it is so difficult to prove actual malice.A movement to erode this legal protection has gained steam in recent years, but the main push has not come from Fox critics. Rather, conservatives have characterized the protections as unfairly enabling liberal news outlets to lie. Commentators, politicians, judges and two Supreme Court justices have urged the court to reconsider these protections.The Dominion case demonstrates why this politicization is the wrong course. Overturning nearly six decades of vital First Amendment precedent would not benefit conservatives, liberals or anyone other than those who seek to stifle reporting and criticism with the threat of litigation.Sixty-three years ago, this newspaper ran a full-page advertisement from a civil rights committee that accused Southern officials of mistreating Martin Luther King Jr. and other peaceful protesters. Some statements were untrue. For instance, although the city of Montgomery, Ala., had deployed the police near a local college, the officers did not “ring” the campus, as the ad alleged. L.B. Sullivan, a Montgomery city commissioner who supervised the police, sued The New York Times for defamation, and the all-white jury found against The Times and four Black ministers whose names were on the advertisement and awarded Sullivan $500,000.The Supreme Court in 1964 unanimously overturned that ruling, reasoning that public officials must establish actual malice before recovering defamation damages. Justice William Brennan touted the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The court later expanded this requirement to public-figure defamation plaintiffs.The merits of New York Times v. Sullivan have long been the subject of academic debate, but its survival was not seriously questioned until 2019, when Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to revisit the decision. He deemed Sullivan and its progeny “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” Two years later, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justice Thomas, arguing that the actual malice rule might enable the spread of falsehoods online and on cable news.As the Supreme Court showed last year when it overturned Roe v. Wade, no precedent is entirely safe from reversal, so any supporters of Sullivan should be quite concerned by two justices calling to revisit the case.Sullivan is increasingly under attack. This month, for instance, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida took a swipe at the actual malice standard when applying it to rule in favor of CNN in a defamation lawsuit that the lawyer Alan Dershowitz brought against the network. “Policy-based decisions” such as the actual malice rule are best left to elected legislatures, “not to an unelected judge who may be king or queen for a day (or a lifetime),” Judge Raag Singhal wrote. Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cited the media’s “bias against the Republican Party” in his 2021 call to overturn Sullivan. And at a February round table about the news media, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said the precedent enables the media to “smear” politicians.The actual malice rule protects speakers regardless of politics. It protects CNN and The New York Times. It protects Fox News and Newsmax. The rule gives them the flexibility to investigate, report on and criticize the most powerful people and companies without fearing ruinous liability because of an accidental error. It also protects individual speakers on social media.The precedent does not provide media outlets and other speakers with a blank check to knowingly lie. Actual malice is a high bar, but it is not insurmountable. Dominion has already produced emails and other evidence that Fox employees and executives privately entertained serious doubts about many claims about the election. The jury could well conclude that Fox knew of the statements’ falsity or were sufficiently aware of their probable falsity. But Sullivan gives Fox the opportunity to present this defense rather than automatically becoming liable for every error.Judges who argue that the actual malice rule may not be rooted in the First Amendment gloss over the threat to speech posed by using the power of the government — court judgments — to punish speech.Attacks on Sullivan are attacks on the building blocks of democracy, and they should concern everyone who cares about free speech, regardless of political affiliation. We have seen how the powerful have weaponized weaker defamation laws in other countries. In a December report, UNESCO noted that there has been a global increase in civil defamation lawsuits that often aim “to target journalists who publish content that makes public officials or powerful economic actors uncomfortable.” A 2020 report from the Foreign Policy Center observed that since a right-wing populist party rose to power in Poland in 2015, a Polish daily newspaper had received more than 55 legal threats from “powerful state actors,” state-owned companies and people tied to the ruling party.Fearing such an outcome, Matthew Schafer, a First Amendment lawyer (who represented The Times a number of years ago), and I came up with a backup plan: In a recent law review article, we proposed a federal statute that would codify the actual malice rule and other vital free speech and press protections. While courts and state legislatures would be free to impose even stronger protections, our proposal would prevent a sudden erosion of free speech because of a single Supreme Court opinion.Hopefully, such a plan will be unnecessary and judges will come to again recognize the enduring value of Sullivan. The Dominion trial is an opportunity for the nation to witness how this “profound national commitment” protects all speakers. And it will be in the best interests of conservatives to fight to protect Sullivan rather than to tear it down.Jeff Kosseff is a senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech Project and the author of the forthcoming book “Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.”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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      Trump Supporter Convicted in 2016 Scheme to Suppress Votes for Clinton

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      The federal prosecution of Douglass Mackey turned on the question of when free speech turns into dirty tricks.Months before the 2016 presidential election, people intent on swaying the outcome were communicating in private Twitter groups with names like “War Room” and “Infowars Madman.”The participants included obscure figures and notorious online trolls, many of whom concealed their real identities. There were fans of Donald J. Trump and avowed haters of Hillary Clinton, all working toward a Republican victory while celebrating the “meme magic” they employed to circulate lies and attacks.According to federal prosecutors, one man, Douglass Mackey, crossed a line from political speech to criminal conduct when he posted images to Twitter that resembled campaign ads for Mrs. Clinton and falsely stated that people could vote simply by texting “Hillary” to a certain phone number.On Friday, after just over four days of deliberation, a jury in Brooklyn found Mr. Mackey guilty of conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote. He is scheduled to be sentenced in August and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.Mr. Mackey, wearing a gray suit, white shirt and pink tie, was stoic as the verdict was read. His lawyer, Andrew J. Frisch, suggested that his client would appeal.“This case presents an unusual array of appellate issues that are exceptionally strong,” Mr. Frisch said, adding: “I’m confident about the way forward.”Breon Peace, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement that by convicting Mr. Mackey the jury had rejected “his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.”Mr. Mackey posted one image showing a Black woman and a sign reading “African Americans for Hillary” a day after writing on Twitter about limiting turnout among Black voters. Another image, in Spanish, showed a woman looking at her phone.Both images, posted a week before the election, were accompanied by the hashtag #ImWithHer, which was used by the Clinton campaign. Both also included logos that looked like the campaign’s, and fine print saying they had been paid for by “Hillary for President.”Prosecutors said about 5,000 people sent texts to the number shown in the deceptive images.Mr. Mackey, 33, who grew up in Vermont, attended Middlebury College and once lived in Manhattan, testified in his own defense. He said he was in dozens of private online groups before the election but did not pay close attention to everything discussed in them.While testifying, Mr. Mackey said he found the vote-by-text images on an online message board and posted them with little thought. He added that he had not meant to trick anyone but wanted to “see what happens.”“Maybe even the media will pick it up, the Clinton campaign,” he testified, adding that the images might “rile them up, get under their skin, get them off their message that they wanted to push.”Mr. Mackey was seen, according to evidence, as someone who could marshal followers and move the national conversation. He used the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn,” the name of a character in the movie “Major League.”In early 2016, the Ricky Vaughn account was included on a list of the top 150 election influencers compiled by a research group with the M.I.T. Media Lab, ranking ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Glenn Beck.As Mr. Mackey’s trial approached, people sympathetic to him claimed that he was being prosecuted unfairly. The defense sought to have his case dismissed, saying that the voting memes were protected by the First Amendment. But a judge denied that request, writing that the case was about conspiracy and injury, not speech.The star prosecution witness, a Twitter user known as Microchip, helped direct online attacks against Mrs. Clinton in 2016, but began cooperating with the F.B.I. two years later. He testified that the private groups that he and Mr. Mackey took part in had the goal of “destroying Hillary Clinton.”Communications from the groups provided a glimpse into a shadowy world of crass motives and dirty tricks in which anti-Clinton activists developed propaganda, spread falsehoods and exulted in their impact.Evidence showed that participants had shared memes about voting by social media, tried to figure out what font a Clinton ad used and circulated hashtags. One, #DraftOurDaughters, was posted on Twitter along with images suggesting that Mrs. Clinton would start wars and conscript women to fight them. Mr. Mackey advanced another, #NeverVote, that he wrote was meant to be spread in “Black social spaces.”During the trial, Mr. Frisch described his client’s posts as part of a rambunctious online discourse.“Speech regulates itself,” Mr. Frisch told jurors in his summation. “These memes were a bad idea and the marketplace of ideas killed them almost immediately.”Prosecutors countered that the false-voting images were part of an orchestrated effort to affect the election through deceit, adding that criminal activity cannot hide behind the First Amendment.“You can’t use speech to trick people out of their sacred right to vote,” one prosecutor, William J. Gullotta, told jurors.Prosecutors drew upon statements by Mr. Mackey, who wrote that the 2016 election was on “a knife’s edge,” to argue that he had tried to help Mr. Trump by suppressing votes.“Trump should write off the Black vote,” Mr. Mackey wrote at one point. “And just focus on depressing their turnout.” More

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      Warren Boroson, Who Surveyed Psychiatrists on Goldwater, Dies at 88

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      The defeated Republican presidential candidate sued Mr. Boroson and the magazine he worked for, saying it had libeled him for suggesting that he was mentally unfit for the presidency.Warren Boroson, a journalist who conducted a survey of psychiatrists that declared the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry M. Goldwater, mentally unfit to be president — provoking a libel suit from the candidate and prompting a psychiatric association to muzzle its members from ever diagnosing a public figure from afar — died on March 12 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart ailments, his wife, Rebecca Boroson, said.Mr. Goldwater sued for $2 million, and Mr. Boroson, who had been the 29-year-old managing editor of the iconoclastic magazine Fact when he initiated the survey for it, feared a judgment against him would commit him to a lifetime of indentured servitude to that Arizona senator.A federal jury in New York found in favor of Mr. Goldwater, awarding damages of $75,000. But the verdict, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, put most of the blame on editing by others, largely absolving Mr. Boroson, who had to pay only a token 33 cents.Ethical questions raised by the survey, though, have roiled the psychiatric profession to this day.In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted the so-called Goldwater rule, declaring that it was unethical for its members “to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” Only one board member, Professor Alan A. Stone of Harvard Law School, voted against the rule, calling it “a denial of free speech and of every psychiatrist’s God-given right to make a fool of himself or herself.”Since then, some psychiatrists have defied the rule when asked by journalists and others to comment about the emotional and mental state of public figures, including foreign officials, terrorists and, in particular, Donald J. Trump, both as a candidate and as president. Some have resigned from the association rather than be bound by the rule.In 1964, the Fact survey led to Mr. Boroson’s resignation from the magazine. He had suggested polling psychiatrists to Fact’s publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, but quit before the article appeared, in September 1964, because, he said, his draft had been rewritten and sensationalized.Mr. Boroson had apparently agreed that Mr. Goldwater was “out of his mind” and feared for America’s safety if he were ever entrusted with the nation’s nuclear trigger, according to a book by Dr. John Martin-Joy, “Diagnosing From a Distance: Debates Over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump” (2020).Dr. Martin-Joy, a Cambridge, Mass., psychiatrist, said that Mr. Boroson had conducted “serious research into the best current thinking on how to prevent a recurrence of fascism,” and that his original draft represented “at least an effort to explain a complex psychological idea to the general public.”“I think he, with Ginzburg, was important in trying to push forward the frontiers of free speech on behalf of public understanding of the mental health of public figures,” Dr. Martin-Joy said. “However, the job they actually did was imperfect.”Senator Barry Goldwater and his wife, Peggy, arriving at the federal courthouse in New York in 1968 to testify in his libel suit against Fact magazine.Associated PressMr. Goldwater, who had lost the election in a landslide to the incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, filed suit in 1965.“It was clearly felt by the court that this met the definition of actual malice, that Ginzburg had creatively edited responses from psychiatrists and that they were departing from what they knew to be facts,” Dr. Martin-Joy said. “I think they undermined their own case.”Dr. Jacob M. Appel, director of ethics education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in Manhattan, said that “Boroson’s work in the 1960s had the unintended consequence of muzzling psychiatrists like me today.” Mr. Boroson recalled in interviews and unpublished notes that his fears about Mr. Goldwater’s fitness were piqued when he read that the candidate had suffered two nervous breakdowns — stressful conditions that were later said to have been overstated.“I said to Ginzburg, ‘Why don’t we ask a few psychiatrists whether a nervous breakdown incapacitates someone for public office?’” Mr. Boroson recalled. “Ginzburg immediately replied: ‘Let’s ask every psychiatrist in the country.’ So we did.”Fact reached out to all 12,356 members on the American Psychiatric Association’s mailing list, asking them, “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States?” Of the 2,417 who responded, 657 answered “Yes,” and 1,189 replied “No.” The rest said they didn’t know enough about the senator’s psyche to make a determination.Mr. Boroson wrote that the magazine’s 41 pages of excerpted responses constituted “the most intensive character analysis ever made of a living human being.”The cover article, titled “The Man and the Menace,” was derived from Mr. Boroson’s draft, which was apparently rewritten by Mr. Ginzburg’s friend, David Bar-Illan, an Israeli pianist and editor.“In anger I resigned from Fact,” Mr. Boroson wrote in his notes. “And insisted that my name not be listed as the author of the Bar-Illan article.” The article appeared under Mr. Ginzburg’s byline.An appeals court concluded that Mr. Ginzburg had “deleted most of Boroson’s references to the authoritarian personality and reached the conclusion, which Boroson had not expressed, that Senator Goldwater was suffering from paranoia and was mentally ill.”Time magazine wrote that the published version depicted Mr. Goldwater as “as a paranoiac, a latent homosexual and a latter-day Hitler.”The Supreme Court upheld the jury award: punitive damages of $25,000 against Mr. Ginzburg and $50,000 against the magazine, and $1 in compensatory damages divided among the three defendants, including Mr. Boroson. Justices Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas dissented, citing First Amendment protections.Warren Gilbert Boroson was born on Jan. 22, 1935, in Manhattan. His mother, Cecelia (Wersan) Boroson, was an office manager. His father, Henry, was a teacher.Warren attended Memorial High School in West Nyack, N.Y., and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1957.In addition to his wife, Rebecca (Kaplan) Boroson, a retired journalist, he is survived by his sons, Bram and Matthew, and his brother, Dr. Hugh Boroson. In 1968, four years after the Goldwater survey, Mr. Ginzburg sought to conduct a similar survey of psychiatrists regarding President Johnson’s mental health. If he succeeded, the results were apparently never published.  Mr. Boroson later wrote for local newspapers and magazines, including Mr. Ginzburg’s Avant Garde, under pen names. (Fact, a quarterly, was published from January 1964 to August 1967.) He was the author of more than 20 books, including self-help financial guides. He also taught music, finance and journalism at colleges.“What did I learn from the experience?,” he wrote in his reflective notes about the Goldwater case. “Not much. I regret not proposing to write a book about Trump when he first became famous: Trump: In Relentless Pursuit of Selfishness.” More

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      Trial of 2016 Twitter Troll to Test Limits of Online Speech

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      Douglass Mackey tried to trick Black people into thinking they could vote by text in the Clinton-Trump presidential election, prosecutors said.The images appeared on Twitter in late 2016 just as the presidential campaign was entering its final stretch. Some featured the message “vote for Hillary” and the phrases “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”Aimed at Democratic voters, and sometimes singling out Black people, the messages were actually intended to help Donald J. Trump, not Hillary Clinton. The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Ms. Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message.The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he will go on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.“The defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution,” Nicholas L. McQuaid, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in 2021 when charges against Mr. Mackey were announced. Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said he lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.“Obviously we can win Pennsylvania,” Mr. Mackey said on Twitter, using one of his pseudonymous accounts less than a week before the election, according to a complaint and affidavit. “The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”That tweet, court papers said, came a day after Mr. Mackey tweeted an image showing a Black woman in front of a sign supporting Ms. Clinton. That tweet told viewers they could vote for Ms. Clinton by text message.Prosecutors said nearly 5,000 people texted the number shown in the deceptive images, adding that the images stated they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign and had been viewed by people in the New York City area.Mr. Mackey’s trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.People whose names may surface during the trial or who are expected to testify include a man who tweeted about Jews and Black people and was then disinvited from the DeploraBall, a far-right event in Washington, D.C., the night before Mr. Trump’s inauguration; a failed congressional candidate from Wisconsin; and an obscure federal cooperator who will be allowed to testify under a code name.As the trial has approached, people sympathetic to Mr. Mackey have cast his case as part of a political and cultural war, a depiction driven in part by precisely the sort of partisan social media-fueled effort that he is accused of engineering.Mr. Mackey’s fans have portrayed him as a harmless prankster who is being treated unfairly by the state for engaging in a form of free expression. That notion, perhaps predictably, has proliferated on Twitter, advanced by people using some of the same tools that prosecutors said Mr. Mackey used to disseminate lies. Mackey supporters have referred to him on social media as a “meme martyr” and spread a meme showing him wearing a red MAGA hat and accompanied by the hashtag “#FreeRicky.”Some tweets about Mr. Mackey from prominent figures have included apocalyptic-sounding language. The Fox personality Tucker Carlson posted a video of himself on Twitter calling the trial “the single greatest assault on free speech and human rights in this country’s modern history.”Joe Lonsdale, a founder of Palantir Technologies, retweeted an assertion that Mr. Mackey was being “persecuted by the Biden DOJ for posting memes” and added: “This sounds concerning.” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, replied with a one word affirmation: “Yeah.”Mr. Mackey is accused of participating in private direct message groups on Twitter called “Fed Free Hatechat,” “War Room” and “Infowars Madman” to discuss how to influence the election.Prosecutors said people in those groups discussed sharing memes suggesting that celebrities were supporting Mr. Trump and that Ms. Clinton would start wars and draft women to fight them.One exchange in the Madman group centered on an image that falsely told opponents of Brexit that they could vote “remain” in that British referendum through Facebook or Twitter, according to investigators. One participant in the group asked whether they could make something similar for Ms. Clinton, investigators wrote, adding that another replied: “Typical that all the dopey minorities fell for it.”Last summer, defense lawyers asked that Mr. Mackey’s case be dismissed, referring to Twitter as a “no-holds-barred-free-for-all” and saying “the allegedly deceptive memes” had been protected by the First Amendment as satirical speech.They wrote to the court that it was “highly unlikely” that the memes had fooled any voters and added that any harm was in any event “far outweighed by the chilling of the marketplace of ideas where consumers can assess the value of political expression as provocation, satire, commentary, or otherwise.”Prosecutors say that Mr. Mackey focused on “intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesProsecutors countered that illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment merely because it is carried out by language and added that the charge against Mr. Mackey was not based on his political viewpoint or advocacy. Rather, they wrote, it was focused on “intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.”Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the case should continue, saying it was “about conspiracy and injury, not speech” and adding that Mr. Mackey’s contention that his speech was protected as satire was “a question of fact reserved for the jury.”The prosecution’s star witness is likely to be a man known as Microchip, a shadowy online figure who spread misinformation about the 2016 election, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.Microchip was a prominent player in alt-right Twitter around the time of the election, and Judge Garaufis allowed him to testify under his online handle in part because prosecutors say he is helping the F.B.I. with several other covert investigations. Sunday, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly.In court papers filed last month, prosecutors said they intended to ask the witness to explain to the jury how Mr. Mackey and his allies used Twitter direct messaging groups to come up with “deceptive images discussing the time, place, and manner of voting.”One of the people whom Microchip might mention from the stand is Anthime Gionet, better known by his Twitter name, Baked Alaska; he attended the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. He was barred from the DeploraBall after sending a tweet that included stereotypes about Jews and Black people.In January, Mr. Gionet was sentenced to two months in prison for his role in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More