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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

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      The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech

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      On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter emerged from days of isolation to deliver the most important and memorable address of his life. Carter had canceled vacation plans and spent more than a week cloistered at Camp David, where he met with a “steady stream of visitors” who shared their hopes and fears about a nation in distress, most immediately thanks to another in a series of energy crises.Carter, however, discerned a deeper problem. America had a wounded heart. The president believed it suffered from a “crisis of the spirit.” The speech was among the most unusual in presidential history. The word that has clung to it, “malaise,” was a word that didn’t even appear in the text. It was offered by his critics and has since become something close to official history. Everyone above a certain age knows immediately and precisely the meaning of the phrase “the malaise speech.”I believe, by contrast, the best word to describe the speech would have been “pastoral.” A faithful Christian president applied the lessons he’d so plainly learned from years of Bible study and countless hours in church. Don’t look at the surface of a problem. Don’t be afraid to tell hard truths. Be humble, but also call the people to a higher purpose.The resulting address was heartfelt. It was eloquent. Yet it helped sink his presidency.Read the speech now, and you’ll see its truth and its depth. But, ironically, it’s an address better suited to our time than to its own. Jimmy Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.The ostensible purpose of the speech was to address the energy crisis. Anyone who remembers the 1970s remembers gas lines and the helpless feeling that our nation’s prosperity was dependent on foreign oil. Yet that was but one of a seemingly endless parade of American problems.By 1979, this country had experienced a recent string of traumatic political assassinations, urban riots that dwarfed the summer riots of 2020 in scale and intensity, campus unrest that makes the current controversies over “wokeness” look civil and quaint, the defeat in Vietnam, and the deep political corruption of Richard Nixon. At the same time, inflation rates dwarfed what we experience today.When he addressed the nation, Carter took a step back. With his trademark understated warmth, he described his own period of reflection. He’d taken the time to listen to others, he shared what he heard, and then he spoke words that resonate today. “The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” he said, and he described symptoms that mirror our current reality.“For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,” Carter said. (Meanwhile, last year a record 58 percent of Americans told NBC News pollsters that our nation’s best years are behind it.)There was more. “As you know,” he told viewers, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.” He was right, but compared to now, Americans were far more respectful of virtually every major institution, from the government, to the news media, to the private sector. Only the military fares better now in the eyes of the public.Then there was this gut-punch paragraph:We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.When we read these words after the contemporary onslaught of mass shootings, the anguish of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the turmoil of two Trump impeachments, you can again see the parallels today.We’re familiar with political speeches that recite the litany of American challenges, but we’re not familiar with speeches that ask the American people to reflect on their own role in a national crisis. Carter called for his audience to look in the mirror:In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.There is a tremendous amount of truth packed into those words. But there was a problem: Carter correctly described a country of mutual, interlocking responsibilities between the government and the people. Yet he was ultimately unable to deliver the results that matched his pastoral message.For all the scorn heaped on Carter later, the speech was successful, at first. His approval rating shot up a remarkable 11 points. Then came chaos — some of it Carter’s fault, some of it not. Days after the speech, he demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet. (He ultimately fired five.) It was a move that communicated confusion more than conviction.Then the world erupted. In November, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy and took dozens of Americans hostage. In December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and at least appeared to secure the country quickly and easily. Contrary to popular remembrance, Carter did not respond with weakness. The defense buildup for which Ronald Reagan is remembered actually began under Carter. And in April 1980, he greenlit a daring attempt to fly into the heart of Iran and rescue American hostages by force.It was not to be. Mechanical problems scrubbed the mission far from Tehran, and in the confusion of the withdrawal, two aircraft collided, and eight American servicemembers died. American gloom deepened. The nation seemed to be moving from defeat to defeat.The failed rescue was a hinge moment in history. It’s hard to imagine the morale boost had it succeeded, and we know the crushing disappointment when it failed. Had the Army’s Delta Force paraded down New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” with the liberated hostages, it would have probably transformed the public’s perception of the president. But just as presidents own military victories, they also own defeats. Carter’s fate was sealed. Reagan carried 44 states, and on Inauguration Day — in a final insult by Tehran — the hostages came home.The story of the next 10 years, moreover, cast Carter’s address in a different light. The nation went from defeat to victory: Inflation broke, the economy roared, and in 1991 the same military that was humiliated in the sands of Iran triumphed, with assistance from its allies, over an immense Iraqi Army in a 100-hour land war that astonished the world.The history was written. Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.In 1979, Carter spoke of our civil liberties as secure. They’re more secure now. A generation of Supreme Court case law has expanded our rights to free speech and religious liberty beyond the bounds of precedent. In 1979, Carter said that the United States possessed “unmatched economic power and military might.” That assertion may have rung hollow to a nation facing a Soviet Union that seemed to be at the peak of its power. But it’s unquestionably true today.We’re free, prosperous and strong to a degree we couldn’t imagine then. Yet we’re tearing each other apart now. The words that didn’t quite capture the moment in 1979 land quite differently today:We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.With these words, Carter raised the question, what is our freedom for, exactly? While we want to better ourselves and our families, we cannot become self-regarding. We have obligations to each other. We have obligations to our community. The best exercise of freedom is in service to others.Yet one of the stories of our time is the abuse of liberty, including the use of our freedoms — whether it’s to boycott, condemn or shame — to try to narrow the marketplace of ideas, to deprive dissenters of their reputations and their livelihoods. A porn-saturated culture luxuriates in its own decadence and exploitation, and then wonders why hearts break and families fail. And as Carter noted, our huge wealth cannot heal the holes in our hearts, because “consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”At the start of this piece, I used the word “pastoral” to describe Carter’s speech. But there’s another word: prophetic. His words were not the clarion call necessary for his time, but they are words for this time. As Jimmy Carter spends his last days on this earth, we should remember his call for community, and thank a very good man for living his values, serving his neighbors, and reminding us of the true source of strength for the nation he loved. More

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      Is Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes Actually Good for Democracy?

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      Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, was crucial to Brazil’s transfer of power. But his aggressive tactics are prompting debate: Can one go too far to fight the far right?When Brazil’s highway police began holding up buses full of voters on Election Day, he ordered them to stop.When right-wing voices spread the baseless claim that Brazil’s election was stolen, he ordered them banned from social media.And when thousands of right-wing protesters stormed Brazil’s halls of power this month, he ordered the officials who had been responsible for securing the buildings arrested.Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, has taken up the mantle of Brazil’s lead defender of democracy. Using a broad interpretation of the court’s powers, he has pushed to investigate and prosecute, as well as to silence on social media, anyone he deems a menace to Brazil’s institutions.As a result, in the face of antidemocratic attacks from Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters, Mr. de Moraes cleared the way for the transfer of power. To many on Brazil’s left, that made him the man who saved Brazil’s young democracy.Yet to many others in Brazil, he is threatening it. Mr. de Moraes’s aggressive approach and expanding authority have made him one of the nation’s most powerful people, and also put him at the center of a complicated debate in Brazil over how far is too far to fight the far right.Damage to the Supreme Court caused by right-wing protesters. Mr. de Moraes ordered the officials who had been responsible for securing the buildings arrested.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesHe has jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal.In the hunt for justice after the riot this month, he has become further emboldened. His orders to ban prominent voices online have proliferated, and now he has the man accused of fanning Brazil’s extremist flames, Mr. Bolsonaro, in his cross hairs. Last week, Mr. de Moraes included Mr. Bolsonaro in a federal investigation of the riot, which he is overseeing, suggesting that the former president inspired the violence.His moves fit into a broader trend of Brazil’s Supreme Court increasing its power — and taking what critics have called a more repressive turn in the process.Many legal and political analysts are now sparring over Mr. de Moraes’s long-term impact. Some argue that his actions are necessary, extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary threat. Others say that, acting under the banner of safeguarding democracy, he is instead harming the nation’s balance of power.“We cannot disrespect democracy in order to protect it,” said Irapuã Santana, a lawyer and legal columnist for O Globo, one of Brazil’s biggest newspapers.Understand the Riots in Brazil’s CapitalThousands of rioters supporting Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president of Brazil,  stormed the nation’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Jan. 8.Anatomy of a Mass Attack: After Mr. Bolsonaro lost the presidential election in October, many believed that the threat of violence from his supporters would recede. Here is what went wrong.The Investigations: Authorities face several major questions as they piece together how rioters briefly seized the seats of Brazil’s government.Digital Playbook: Misinformation researchers are studying how the internet was used ahead of the riots in Brazil. Many are drawing a comparison to the Jan. 6 attack.The Role of the Police: Their early inaction in the riot shows how security forces can help empower violence and deepen the threat to democracy.Mr. Santana voted in October for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the new leftist president, but said he worried that many in Brazil were cheering on Mr. de Moraes without considering the potential consequences. “Today he’s doing it against our enemy. Tomorrow he’s doing it against our friend — or against us,” he said. “It’s a dangerous precedent.”Milly Lacombe, a left-wing commentator, said such concerns missed a bigger danger, evidenced by the riots and a foiled bomb plot to disrupt Mr. Lula’s inauguration. She argued, in her column on the Brazilian news site UOL, that the far right posed grave perils to Brazil’s democracy, which should overshadow concerns about free speech or judicial overreach.“Under the threat of a Nazi-fascist-inspired insurrection, is it worth temporarily suppressing individual freedoms in the name of collective freedom?” she wrote. “I would say yes.”Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, center, has long accused Mr. de Moraes of overstepping his authority and had tried to impeach him.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesThe dispute has illustrated a larger global debate not only on judicial power but also about how to handle misinformation online without silencing dissenting voices..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, weighed in that Mr. de Moraes’s moves were “extremely concerning.” Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist who has lived in Brazil for years and has become a critic of certain social-media rules, debated a Brazilian sociologist this week about Mr. de Moraes’s actions. And Brazilian officials have suggested that they would consider new laws to address what can be said online.Mr. de Moraes has declined requests for an interview for more than a year. The Supreme Court, in a statement, said that Mr. de Moraes’s investigations and many of his orders have been endorsed by the full court and “are absolutely constitutional.”In the hours after the riot, Mr. de Moraes suspended the governor of the district responsible for security for the protest that turned violent and then ordered the arrests of two district security officials. Still, there is little support in the Supreme Court for arresting Mr. Bolsonaro because of a lack of evidence, as well as fears that it would prompt unrest, according to a senior court official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.Multiple Supreme Court justices instead prefer to try to convict Mr. Bolsonaro for abusing his power through the country’s election agency, making him ineligible to run for office for eight years, the official said.Mr. Bolsonaro, who has been in Florida since Dec. 30, has long accused Mr. de Moraes of overstepping his authority and has tried to impeach him. Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyer said he had always respected democracy and repudiated the riots.Mr. de Moraes, 54, spent decades as a public prosecutor, private lawyer and constitutional law professor.He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, a move denounced by the left because he was aligned with center-right parties.Mr. de Moraes with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month.Andre Borges/EPA, via ShutterstockIn 2019, the Supreme Court’s chief justice issued a one-page order authorizing the court to open its own investigations instead of waiting for law enforcement. For the court — which, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, handles tens of thousands of cases a year, including certain criminal cases — it was a drastic expansion of authority.The chief justice tapped Mr. de Moraes to run the first inquiry: an investigation into “fake news.” Mr. de Moraes’s first move was to order a magazine to retract an article that had linked the chief justice to a corruption investigation. (He later rescinded the order when the magazine produced evidence.)Mr. de Moraes then shifted his focus to online disinformation, primarily from Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters. That gave him an outsize role in Brazilian politics that grew further this year when, by chance, his rotation as Brazil’s election chief coincided with the vote.In that job, Mr. de Moraes became Brazilian democracy’s chief guardian — and attack dog. Ahead of the vote, he cut a deal with the military to run additional tests on voting machines. On Election Day, he ordered the federal highway police to explain why officers were stopping buses full of voters. And on election night, he arranged for government leaders to announce the winner jointly, a show of unity against any attempt to hold onto power.In the middle of that group of leaders was Mr. de Moraes himself. He delivered a forceful speech about the value of democracy, drawing chants of “Xandão,” or “Big Alex” in Portuguese. “I hope from the election onward,” he said, “the attacks on the electoral system will finally stop.”They did not. Right-wing protesters demonstrated outside military bases, calling on the military to overturn the vote. In response, Mr. de Moraes ordered tech companies to ban more accounts, according to a senior lawyer at one major tech firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering Mr. de Moraes.Supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro protesting in front of army headquarters in São Paulo to call for military intervention after the election in November.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesAmong the accounts Mr. de Moraes ordered taken down are those of at least five members of Congress, a billionaire businessman and more than a dozen prominent right-wing pundits, including one of Brazil’s most popular podcast hosts.Mr. de Moraes’s orders to remove accounts do not specify why, according to the lawyer and a copy of one order obtained by The New York Times. Visits to banned accounts on Twitter yield a blank page and a blunt message: The “account has been withheld in Brazil in response to a legal demand.” And account owners are simply told they are banned because of a court order and should consider contacting a lawyer.The lawyer said that his tech firm appealed some orders it viewed as overly broad, but that Mr. de Moraes denied them. Appeals to the full bench of judges have also been denied or ignored, this person said.Multiple social networks declined to comment on the record for this article. Mr. de Moraes is a potential threat to their business in Brazil. Last year, he briefly banned Telegram in the country after it did not respond to his orders. There were talks recently among some justices about the need to bring Mr. de Moraes’s investigations to an end, according to the court official, but after the Jan. 8 riot, those talks ceased. The riot has increased support for Mr. de Moraes among his peers, according to the official.Beatriz Rey, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said Mr. de Moraes’s approach, though not ideal, is necessary because other branches of the government, especially Congress, have skirted their duties.“You shouldn’t have one justice fighting threats to democracy over and over again,” she said. “But the problem is the system itself is malfunctioning right now.”André Spigariol More