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Palin v. The New York Times... still
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals holds:
For those unfamiliar with the background, in reaction to the 2011 Tucson Shooting of Representative Giffords and several others, the New York Times, among many other media, tried to tie then-relevant once-Vice-Presidential candidate to the shooter. Like all those other media, the proposed connections the Times gave were entirely imagined: the shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic that had become obsessed with Giffords by August 2007, before Palin had been offered the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, and before any of the proposed 'incitement', and there was never any evidence that the shooter had even seen any of Palin's supposed 'incitement'.
However, the Times slipped particularly aggressively: it revisited the claim years after it was obviously false in the piece America's Lethal Politics in 2017, arguing that the link to Palin's political incitement was extremely clear, unlike the then-current Congressional Baseball shooting. Not only would anyone remotely familiar with the case know that was false, claims in the piece America's Lethal Politics were in direct contradiction with the link used to support those claims, and/or with other claims in the same paper, or other sites under the Times umbrella. While these were corrected eventually in the most dismissive manner possible, the organization never actually apologized to Palin or made clear that the statements about Palin specifically were false: even the current piece just sputters off a correction that never mentions her name and a main piece that now merely points and winks when it says "... in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established".
In 2017, Palin brought a lawsuit for defamation. This Did Not Go Well. The district court first held that Palin would have to prove impossible claims and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice. After an appeals court overturned that dismissal, New York State 'refined' its law so that defamation lawsuits became harder and more financially risky to bring; the trial court held this applied retroactively. The same district court then had an actual trial, where the same judge refused to allow a wide variety of relevant information in as evidence, required again that Palin prove a novel and impossible standard -- that the Times' editor not only knew the claim was false, but that it was defamatory -- and eventually dismissed the case while the jury were deliberating. Some number of the jurors received phone notifications of that dismissal while they were deliberating.
As a result, the appeals court has ordered Mrs. Palin a new trial.
It's... not clear how much this is gonna matter, though. Yes, Palin can demonstrate that the New York Times knew or should have known that the claims were false, and that being accused of inciting a assassin-turned-child-murderer is defamatory, while the defense is stuck with "owo, we fowgot". And yes, that's the traditional understanding of what it takes to defame even a public figure. But that's not what actually wins a court case, and when it comes to the things that do:
That is, all Palin must do is prove to twelve jurors the contents of a New York Times editors brain the better part of a decade ago, in a jurisdiction where the state has already retroactively changed statutes to make this trial harder, in front of a judge that has repeatedly made errors going on direction, while the defendant openly misleads the court, with the bare minimum opportunity to reduce bias on the part of jurors selected from part of the country heavily opposed to Palin. That trial -- maybe happening in mid-2025 -- in the exceptionally unlikely chance Palin and her legal team do win, will still do nearly bupkiss in actually making anyone whole or seriously discouraging the Times from making shit up; given reporting on the earlier 'victory' for the Times, it probably won't even persuade anyone not already certain of it that the Times was making shit up.
There's a lot of fun comparisons, of better and worse validity, to other recent defamation lawsuits, but I think they're a bit of a distraction. I tell that story so I can tell this one:
Trump v. Hostages
Big, if true! There's long been rumors about Reagan delaying recuse of hostages from Iran or Nixon sinking Vietnam-era peace talks, although they tend to end up just shy of conspiracy theory only because Dem cranks don't count. Someone like Trump doing it, in the middle of a war with tens of thousands of casualties and over a hundred
corpseshostages, some American? With people willing to give first-hand knowledge of it?And then the other shoe drops:
That post reads, in full:
There's a bit of a missing note, here: the problem isn't just that the Trump or Netanhayhu offices denied it -- they would, after all -- it's that she made it up, herself. Neither the original Axios or Reuters articles even imply that Trump has encouraged Netanyahu or other Israeli politicians to delay any deals of any kind. Indeed the Axios story managed to say the exact opposite:
Woodruff will, of course, suffer absolutely zero for making up a fat fib in the middle of a major media discussion on national news. But don't worry, we have really strong true-finding tools, right? Oh, no, they just need people to prove a negative or 'unproven' is all we get. Hope that won't be a problem!
Attempted Assassins v. FBI
Which is kinda fascinating, given that the FBI sent out a wide variety of Emergency Disclosure Requests for accounts supposedly tied to the shooter, including a Gab account tied to the man was filled with progressive-aligned trolling, which the FBI lumped into the "the general absence of other information to date from social media". It'd be fascinating to know if that means that the FBI believes this Gab account wasn't the shooter's at all, or if anyone else with other accounts tied to him got EDR'd.
Too bad! And we're not gonna find out.
The FBI also released some photos of the shooter's gear; those that remember early testimony by the FBI about a 'collapsible' stock making it hard to notice while the shooter was walking on the ground can now know (again) that FBI Directory Wray is a moron.
Trump v. Arlington National Cemetery
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery with a number of 'Gold Star' families, close relatives of those who died in service to the United States military, in this case the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal. To borrow from Douglas Adams, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I'm not a particular fan of using gravestones as political props, in a lot of the same ways that I'm not a huge fan of parents dressing their kids up as political props, and because Trump, this manages to be DARE-level incompetence at doing it, too. On the other hand, I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated and long been ugly and partisan, without it becoming a national news story or involving physical confrontations that get reported to police. Trying to track down the actual authority or past enforcement for the rule ends up finding 'something something Hatch act', which is just shy of Logan Act for a red flag for incoming inconsistent application.
Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting.
But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell. Too bad!
How about the trans school shooter's manifesto that can't be released because of copyright?
At this point I have to wonder what could possibly be written there, that they are so defensive about it. If Trump's shooting got effectively moved on from like nothing ever happened, so can this manifesto.
Given that it's actually the school that owns the copyright (apparently "sorry our daughter killed your family, here's the copyright to her writings" is a thing now...), my guess is that there's discussions of the school environment in her writings that the school believes would be damaging, even if the ground truth is actually anodyne.
Even very light discussion of "my school didn't affirm my gender identity and led me through Unfixable Trauma, they're horrible homophobes and transphobes" could very easily rile up the rainbow mafia against them. From what we've seen of her writings, and especially considering she hated these people enough to kill them in cold blood, my guess is she wasn't afraid to call them all sorts of evil names and accuse them of all kinds of wickedness. It would be even more damaging if we set aside my assumption of good faith on the part of my ingroup and assume these accusations were of genuinely terrible things that really happened.
I don't think this is an action by the woke mob, I think it's an action in defense against the woke mob. Given that the parents who transferred the rights to the school liked it enough to send their child to there, I expect that their action was in solidarity with them.
It was a good strategic move. If the parents of the killer had tried to keep them out of the press, they would have failed.
Regardless of what's in them, I would imagine the victim families would prefer it not go out and become the subject of more discussion. Regardless of their politics.
Are the ideological motivations of spree killers politically relevant, or are they irrelevant?
If they're irrelevant, then how do we stop Blue Tribe from pretending otherwise when they find it convenient to do so?
If they're relevant, then how do we stop Blue Tribe from pretending otherwise when they find it convenient to do so?
The last several years have seen multiple spree killings and attempted spree killings directly motivated by Blue Tribe ideology. The Dallas police shooting, the congressional baseball shooting, and this case here are three examples. None of them have actually been taken seriously as ideologically-motivated killings by the culture generally; I see no indication that people actually remember that they happened. By contrast, numerous spree killings have been attributed to Red Tribe ideology, even when that attribution was preposterous, as in the case of the Giffords shooting.
It seems to me that this is a serious, chronic problem. I see no indication that anyone has any ideas for how to solve it within our existing system. I see no indication that our current system even sees it as a problem,m as opposed to a positive feature.
This is an example of why I am not in favor of maintaining the present system.
Irrelevant. Certainly irrelevant in the sense that as little attention should be paid to them as possible. We shouldn't know the names or manifestos of people who murder children. It encourages child murder.
I hold that belief personally, but even if I didn't: I'd still defer to the actual parents of the actual Christian school kids murdered and say that if they want to keep the manifesto out of the press to protect their own sanity, then that deference seems fitting and proper. If they said that they wanted it out there, they could post it themselves on a website and there ain't shit the Blue Tribe can do about it. The motivating force behind this isn't some nebulous cabal of NYT editorial staff, it's the actual parents of the actual children.
Either way, I don't really think this is a serious, chronic problem. Paranoid schizo blue tribers tell me that black and trans people are murdered in the streets by racists, paranoid schizo red tribers tell me that white kids are regularly beaten to death in inner city school districts by bloodthirsty gangs of migrants. The issue such as it is seems to be immune to media bias, red tribers are just as likely to imagine political violence as blue tribers. Whose manifesto gets the most airtime seems less related to media bias than to how effectively they broadcast that manifesto prior to the shooting, if the trans whatever had livestreamed the shootings then it would be out there regardless of copyright.
If anything, I more associate talking about motivations with Red Tribe speakers post-shooting, the Blue Tribe mainstream just wants to keep the focus on guns guns guns. Who cares why he did it when it offers me an opportunity to take away someone's constitutional rights?
There is definetly a chronic problem of anti white and really anti all the groups progressive dislike.
Right wingers shining a light on genuine problems suffer from actual censorship. There isn't an equivalence.
Conversely, liberals promoting completely false pictures about black epidemic of being falsely killed by polcie believe in false facts.
Lets just say for any right wing exaggeration believed or suppressed, much more truth is suppressed by censorship, or dishonestly pretending it is BS, or extremism. While conversely, progressive false narratives are dominant.
We would definitely benefit by starting to understand real problems and stop hiding facts. IIRC there were leaks about the trans shooter who did it motivated by the pervasive antiwhite, antichristian, narrative.
The people who censor rightists talking about genuine problems like say black crime, or any other of the taboo topics, are contributing to creating a distorted narrative that leads to a far left extreme result. What we need is to remove from positions of power people who suppress such issue, and promote false narratives, over those who would promote the truth.
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