Should the law do more to punish persons who falsely assert that an election was rigged or stolen? That’s a demand being heard from some academics and officials. But any general attempt to legislate against so‐called election denial soon runs into the First Amendment. To begin by conceding the exceptions: it’s perfectly true that some false statements about election outcomes lack First Amendment protection and can land you in legal trouble under current law. The list starts with statements that the law might view as defamation: that’s why the Dominion voting machine company can and has...
Extinguishing Some Election Day Rumors
How much went right with Tuesday’s midterm election? A lot. Violence at the polls, much feared, didn’t happen. Nor did widespread intimidation. For all the talk of voter suppression, poll access was healthy and uneventful in the state of Georgia and pretty much everywhere else. Nearly all candidates who’d expressed distrust in the electoral process did in fact concede in a timely way on losing their races. (On this last, Benjy Sarlin offers one plausible explanation, which is that Donald Trump simply is unlike most persons in his willingness to commit with total intensity to a storm of lies:...
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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War
Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism
Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania
FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...