I really hate this lazy argument, that what happened to Alex Jones is another step on the slippery slope to fascism or something. He was sued for defamation and lost. Defamation has been a tort in the US this entire time. Defamation as a concept goes back centuries before the US was even founded. There wasn’t some change to defamation laws that brought down Alex Jones, there wasn’t some novel interpretation of the statutes or jurisprudence. The facts aren’t even novel, this is clearly defamation of the families of Sandy Hook. Alex Jones losing his lawsuit is the system working the way it always has. This isn’t a step towards fascism; it isn’t a step at all!
Jones has been wrong about multiple things. So has every media outlet especially since someone came down some escalators. I don't personally think someone should lose their entire business for being wrong. CNN has called all conservatives Nazis for years, and they are liars. Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence? Personally I think CNN has every right to lie. They've now done it so much that they self-destructed over it, and no one watches CNN because it's well KNOWN that they lie. All that's needed is more sunlight, not more politically motivate lawfare.
What happened to Alex Jones is not some new phenomenon, it is the status quo. There are tons of carve outs and exceptions in defamation law, particularly to protect journalists being sued for "getting it wrong." Amon other things, plaintiffs had to demonstrate that Jones acted with "actual malice", which essentially means that Jones either knew what he was saying was false or acted with deliberate disregard for the truth.
Despite that, he lost. He lost multiple times in multiple cases across multiple jurisdictions spanning a decade. He has appealed, and lost, multiple times. Multiple judges and multiple juries have found him liable for a litany of incidents of defamation. Hell, at one point he even lied under oath! Which, depending on the circumstances and the judgement of the prosecutor, could have turned into criminal charges!
And CNN and other news outlets DO get sued for defamation. The most famous such case would probably be Richard Jewell, a security guard who was falsely accused by news outlets of planting a pipe bomb at the 1996 Summer Olympics. A more recent example would be Nicholas Sandmann, falsely accused of racist and aggressive actions at a demonstration.
Nothing is new about Alex Jones. You say "All that's needed is more sunlight, not more politically motivate lawfare". By your own words, you aren't calling for some return to the status quo, you are calling for a change. You think that existing defamation laws should be reformed, because without that you get totalitarianism. But then the burden is on you: if defamation laws are the road to totalitarianism, why haven't we slid into totalitarianism in the last few centuries?
Alex Jones haters always fixate on that law suit, because it's a win for them. However in my view 99% of what Alex Jones says is important for people to hear, and about 90% of his claims (even the ones that sounded wild and crazy) ended up being proven true. So I think Alex Jones was a net/net benefit to America, by uncovering facts the Deep State Blob doesn't want people to know. Jones is very performative and an entertainer too, so he's not perfect. Nobody is.
Regarding totalitarianism: Democrats have been fighting against Free Speech in countless ways, but thus far keep getting defeated in their efforts, by conservatives with more wise minds. Take Britain as an example. People over there are now being JAILED over non-violent political speech, and even speech that is merely "impolite" to protected groups. So to think totalitarianism can't happen to Western Countries is wrong. It can. It is. Currently in the USA however, the good guys have just won an election, and a clean sweep and a mandate to restore Freedom and Common Sense.
He didn't lose his entire business for being wrong. He lost his entire business for being wrong, doubling down on being wrong in light of contradictory evidence, tripling down on the doubling down, being sued, ignoring the lawsuit, having a default judgment rendered against him, getting to a trial-based penalties phase, and performing so badly on the stand (along with a major error on the part of his lawyer, but one the law accounts for and has a process to ameliorate, which the lawyer did not follow) that a jury of his peers awarded a $1.5 billion dollar finding against him.
If anything, the takeaway from this story is that the United States Court System is still a system of law and when they demand your attention, you ignore that demand at your peril.
> Do you think CNN should be sued out of existence?
Perhaps it should give us pause that nobody they are ostensibly calling Nazis can make a defamation case stick against them. And to corroborate your point: perhaps whether or not they lie, the public opinion already holds them accountable so no legal action is needed. But to properly answer the hypothetical: they retain a legal department in preparation for such lawsuits. Perhaps Jones should have done that, since he had quite a bit of spare money to spend on engaging with the law of the land he lives in. Instead, he chose to flout the authority of that legal system, to his loss.
Translation: Yes our Legal System allows a prosecutor and 12 jurors to vent their pre-existing highly-biased hatred towards a man to the tune of awarding $1.5 billion to a group of people who were at worst, insulted. Same thing happened to Trump. A bunch of his political enemies are using the Legal System to go after him because of their personal hatred. That's evil, if you ask me.
The court system is adversarial, no doubt. It is built to be so; there's a reason what happens to a defendant is called a "trial."
But the legal defense of both Trump and Jones had every opportunity to take every rule that favors the defendant to their advantage and... They didn't. That set of 12 jurors with "pre-existing highly-biased hatred" was filtered by Jones's own representation. The evidence that Jones had evidence the rules of the Court require him to disclose that he did not disclose was revealed by his own lawyers. There are rules to this process and he either chose to ignore them or he retained incompetent representation.
Powerful men believe they don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of their fellow citizens. The system disagrees.
You seem to dislike powerful rich men. It comes thru loud and clear in all your posts.
The sum total of your last post can be summarized as: "They both lost Lawfare Fair and Square, because the system works how it works, and their lawyers failed, and thus they probably deserved to lose, especially because of their wealth and fame, making them probably bad people."
I disagree.
The biggest weakness in our Legal system is that people who think exactly like you do get themselves onto Juries, by saying all the right words, and appearing unbiased when you're absolutely not.
Juries are the worst system except for other systems. There's a reason defendants have the option in many cases to waive trial by jury. But do we like them more or less than one judge deciding facts and sentencing? Do we believe a judge would be more or less forgiving of a defendant who just skips his deposition?
The biggest stumbling block to Alex Jones prevailing in the civil case against him was Alex Jones, by treating a legal proceeding as a minor inconvenience.
Anyway, I wouldn't put much worry in my opinion of powerful rich men. Neither of us will ever be enough of one for it to matter.
(FWIW... Jones losing a civil suit doesn't make him a bad person. Accusing the families of eight dead kids of making up that their kids were massacred, then profiting off of that lie, would have made him a bad person whether or not he ever saw justice over it.)
I agree there may not be a better system than a Jury based one. The problem is that humans are fallible, and there are people who want other people in jail for being "bad people".
My position is that being bad isn't a crime. Telling lies isn't a crime. Insulting people isn't a crime. etc. Trump and Jones were treated badly because people like you are willing to wage lawfare against the powerful and the wealthy simply because they hate people for being powerful and wealthy.
Since you bring up my own wealth, I indeed am in the top 1% of population, so speak for yourself.
I think what one person calls "lies and slander", another person can genuinely, reasonably, and justifiably call "exposing bad acts that need to be exposed".
The fact that reasonable people often disagree about what's true and what's not is exactly why we must have Free Speech codified in law. The opposite of Free Speech is when one group of people get to lay down the law and assert that their biased point of view is the one true correct world view, and forcibly shutdown the speech of those who disagree.
"Can" implies that that's not an absolute, right? That there are times where slander and libel aren't being used to "expose bad acts that need to be exposed", but rather to be used maliciously in order to benefit the slanderer at the expense of the slandered.
I suppose I'm just curious about a hypothetical, like... I'm wondering where you might draw a line, so maybe entertain me with this for a sec?
Let's say you and I work together, and for whatever reason, I don't like you. Maybe you and I are competing for a promotion, or maybe an interaction rubbed me the wrong way, doesn't matter - I want you gone. So, I decide to spread some nasty rumors about you throughout the office - you leer at co-worker's children, you're aggressively sexual with the women in the office, shit like that. Whatever I've come up with to disparage you is bullshit, but for the sake of this conversation, let's say I put a lot of effort into this and that you end up getting let go because of it. Maybe the rumors even happen to jump from your co-workers over to your friends/family. Some of them stop talking to you. Perhaps other businesses in the industry hear about it and opt not to hire you, either.
So you believe that maliciously spreading lies to get someone fired, ruin their friendships and cause them to struggle to find another job should be legally permissible. Gotcha, cheers!
We can have freedom, or we can have safety, but we cannot have both. I value freedom over safety, and so a nanny state that would investigate the telling of lies seems tyrannical to me, yes.
"That government is best which governs least." --Henry David Thoreau, 1849
For what it's worth, Thoreau was writing from the relative safety of his friend's property. I can't help but wonder if his opinion on the utility of government would have been different if, while Emerson was out, somebody decided to come along and trash his cabin for fun.
Meanwhile, the old saw about those who trade freedom for safety deserving neither Liberty nor safety actually referred to the colonial government considering allowing the Penn family to forgo taxes in perpetuity in exchange for deploying some mercenaries to fight on the colonial frontier. Benjamin Franklin was talking to the legislature, and reminding them that they have the liberty of setting the law as they see fit - by giving up that Liberty via a guarantee of perpetual freedom from taxation for temporary safety, they (The legislature) would deserve neither.
In practice, government is forever a balancing act between liberties and safety. One can start at social contract theory and work one's way out from there if one wants a formal grounding, or one can go the common sense route and understand that if you go around cheating people, eventually people are going to gang up on you because we are social creatures.
Your historical recollection is incorrect. Thoreau was a strong proponent of limited government and it's utility. What he was against was tyrannical overreach and abuse of power, such as, for example, a gov't investigating who lied in a spat between coworkers.
Reasonable people do disagree about truth frequently, but that's not what happened in this case. In fact, the standard by which one determines the difference between a statement made in ignorance and one made in malice (higher damages may be awarded) is the "reasonable person principle."
The First Amendment is there to protect objective truth from government stifling, but the judicial process recognizes truth exists (if it didn't, we'd have no use for trials) and that wanton disregard for truth can cause harm to a person.
I'm not an expert in this area of law, nor do I really know much about any Alex Jones cases, but when I found out he was fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy that seems excessive. I would hazard a guess there are many lawyers and legal experts who would agree with my opinion, so it's probably not a black-and-white issue, in this particular case.
If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him. I say there was a lot of personal hatred for him PRIOR to the lawsuit which is the true reason for the huge settlement. People hated him, and they used lawfare to get at him.
> but when I found out he was fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy that seems excessive
Yes, that's a hole in your understanding of the fact-pattern. He wasn't fined $1.5 billion for believing and furthering a conspiracy. The error of his lawyer revealed evidence that he knew the conspiracy was false but he spread it because it made the people who listen to him keep listening and buying his products, which crosses the line into "malicious" and opens him up (in most states, including Texas) to significantly larger penalties.
Jones was hit with a level of consequence few defendants in civil suits over slander are hit with because of how egregious, continuous, and malicious the offense was and because he took actions to mislead the jury.
If you're more familiar with crimlaw, civil court is a significantly different animal and worth learning more about. It serves a slightly different function in American society but is part of the fabric of systems that let people sleep at night.
> If Alex Jones had been some left-wing commentator, who just went crazy and was wrong about this shooting, who the left loved, they wouldn't have done this lawfare against him.
We are currently a pretty tribal society, so I suspect you are correct that nobody on the Left would sue. But you can bet that someone on the Right would have (for bathroom reading, look for summaries of the suits Donald Trump has brought against people in his 78 years and ask yourself if you would consider that "lawfare"). The civil courts are intended to make people who have been harmed whole; someone on the left lying about someone on the right would have to be sued by the aggrieved party for the case to exist.
And you are right that emotion enters into it. But regardless of the jury's opinion of the man before the trial (and, again, both parties, which includes Alex Jones's legal representation, tuned the jury to be maximally charitable to their side)... He lied to them on the stand. I don't know that a jury exists that is magnanimous enough to overlook that. One of the points of a jury trial is to judge not just the facts but the overall character of the defendant (because so many facts tend to originate from the defendant themselves, so if the defendant flips the bozo bit in the minds of the jurors, that matters). If you're looking for someone to blame for Jones's fate, start with Jones.
Because the evidence shows he's not crazy; he's a con artist.
On point #1, The operative word in that sentence was "excessive". $1.5B was excessive.
On point #2. Your main point is that both sides act in bad faith equally, and I disagree. Dems have been eating up CNN/MSM left-wing propaganda and brainwashing for over a decade and so now there's just no common ground between the two sides any longer.
One of the trials Jones faced in Texas was an appeal on whether the fine levied in Texas was excessive (worth noting: the $1.5 billion is a running tally, not a single ruling; his harm spread across multiple people in multiple jurisdictions, and his actions keep convincing separate courts with separate trials that punitive damages are warranted. Legal Eagle has more details on the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSm7sRx-0hA&list=PLzBQ6LRv47...).
There was a law passed in 1995 by a Democratic majority to cap damages at $750k in Texas; the judge on appeal to Jones's Texas ruling found that the law was unconstitutional.
On point 2, we will probably agree to disagree. If anything, I believe the GOP has taken the most steps to disrupt and destroy norms of legal practice and has opened the door to using the law as a tool for shaping society. The Trump administration, for example, tried to rig the census in 2020 (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-trumps-census-s...), an initiative that fell apart primarily because the daughter of a GOP political operative attained a hard drive of her father's that revealed that a citizenship question would bias the results, under-counting the population of areas with more (legal and non-legal) immigrants.
It's actually quite hard to get the Executive's authority on the topic of census questions put under scrutiny, and the evidence in the email correspondence on the drive was so damning that it caused the census change to fail to pass a judicial challenge (essentially the only way for the Executive to fail to pass that bar is if they were lying about the justification, and... They were).
What you may be observing is that both sides practice lawfare but one side seems consistently bad at it...
Back on Jones: I don't know if $1.5 billion is fair. I do note that the Information Age gives people much larger megaphones to spread information much further than ever before. I don't think we fully comprehend the effect that has on society. In the short run, I don't consider the fact that if you say something so egregiously wrong that you hurt people in multiple jurisdictions, you could be on the hook for damages in multiple jurisdictions and that could result in a sum-total civil penalty larger than any individual jurisdiction would levy to be obviously wrong? Criminal law doesn't generally work that way (federal authority would subsume), but civil law is a different beast.
On the plus side, this fate is eminently avoidable: don't maliciously push lies that hurt people in multiple states. I'm not sure you've recognized how egregious the lying was, how unapologetic he was about it, and how much that impacts a final court decision on one's fate (in general, not just if someone has an [R] after their name in a political census).
I disagree that Conservatives treat Democrats this badly. Democrats are the ones who literally invented `Cancel Culture`. Never in history have the two parties been more different.
(Wikipedia suggests the term itself originates from black communities, which is not synonymous with Democrats. I think it's fair to assert the practice without the name is much older).
My point is I don't know how we differentiate between "Cancel culture" and "shunning" or "boycotts."
The Dixie Chicks had their career derailed with only a nascent Internet in existence. It was never necessary for people to organize and decide collectively something needed to be shunned.
Then lawfare is the most effective tool 99% have to keep your otherwise-relatively-unbridled power (and mine, actually, if you're calling top 1% "wealthy") in check. The alternatives are much messier and make our lives much shorter.
And to be clear: you're right. None of the things Jones did were crimes. If they were, he'd have been in criminal court. Civil court is for restitution of wrongs between individual parties and resolution of disputes. When the strictures of law are broken, criminal court is involved; when someone is wronged, civil court is involved. And make no mistake: you can wrong someone with words. It is not a violation of one's freedom of speech that if a party goes around telling everyone you cheated someone out of a million dollars and you didn't, you can sue that person to (a) compel them to cease to lie and (b) make restitution for the damage those lies did to your reputation and opportunities. This is an old feature of the American judiciary, at least a thousand years old and inherited from England... And it's there because the alternative is more crime (because if you can't be made whole when someone's wronged you, you must logically take steps to prevent further harm by doing ill to the threat).
The legal system handles more than crime. Nobody's "been bad" in every divorce or an estate settlement. And when someone is harmed by another individual in a way that doesn't have a specific stricture against it, we have civil courts to make the harmed person whole.
(I'm a lot more interested in talking about Jones than Trump. Trump is a separate case entirely... For example, he was in criminal court, he was charged with falsifying business records, a crime because it strikes at the process of truth that the law depends on to regulate business, and he was convicted of doing so. Trump's circumstances are different enough to Jones's that there isn't any productive discourse to have in lumping them together. If you disagree with the criminal process of the courts of the State of New York, you are welcome to your opinion but you can discuss it with someone else. I hope the first question they ask you is what makes his case special as opposed to the other people in New York who were found guilty of NY Penal Law § 170.10).
Wow, I didn't expect you to openly admit you're in favor of lawfare, especially based on wealth discrimination; but after reading that stark confession in the first sentence it saved me some time, because I didn't keep reading past that.
I mean, I chose to use your terminology for your convenience. Lawfare is also called "People exercising their rights under the law," And it shouldn't carry any negative connotation. But apparently some people have decided that it isn't good when individuals protect their rights legally.
This is a weird post-legal era we live in, where it appears people hold the law itself in contempt. I'm not super excited to see what happens next, because we've tried alternatives to rule of law and they haven't generally worked great...
> because I didn't keep reading past that.
As, of course, is your right. I don't generally make these posts for individuals; I share these thoughts for the larger discourse on Hacker News. If, as an individual, you don't wish to use your time to consider this alternate viewpoint, it is your time.
The Sandy Hook families were private individuals; the only thing they had in common is a man killed their kids and then another man told his hundreds of thousands of listeners, over and over again, that those kids didn't exist. They had no platform to shout down his lies. They had no corporation to fund an antidote to his lying. They had no resources to stop the harassing phone calls and death threats from the people Jones convinced they were monsters.
What they had was a right, under common law in the United States, to not have their names dragged through the mud. And they took the man who did that to court and they won. In a country where, we should note, truth is an affirmative defense (and not one that Jones proffered, because truth was not on his side).
This is the story of victory of the marginalized and powerless over a media mogul who hurt strangers for a buck. It is good that they live in a country where such people can hold the powerful to account.
And hey. If injustice was done he can counter-sue to rectify it. Perhaps we should take note that he won't because the law is not on his side... They didn't wrong him.
They (CNN, etc.) brand a large group (roughly half the electorate) as Nazis / fascists or Nazi-and-fascist-adjacent without any real scrutiny. Generally, this doesn't target any specific person except maybe Trump.
The consequence to society is that a lot of normal people start believing that someone who votes Republican is definitely some form of a Nazi or sympathetic to Nazism, which I imagine you don't really care about.
An obvious example of this was comparing the fact that Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden to the fact that Nazis also had a rally there in 1939 (basically this meme: https://preview.redd.it/7nyn7zkmi3351.png?auto=webp&s=c8ab8a...). For the most part, this was a talking point from the Harris campaign, but CNN's coverage of it put very little scrutiny over whether this was a fair comparison, rather just covering the premise of the comparison (i.e., repeating it ad nauseam with some level of deniability that 'they' believe it to be true). You can dig around for yourself and find some of their on-air personalities--who they pay money to--openly agreeing with the comparison.
> HOLMES: All right, let's bring in Ron Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at the Atlantic. Good to see you, Ron. I mean, the Donald Trump rally was quite something. I mean, I watched it. I mean, a quote unquote comedian calling Puerto Rico a pile of garbage. Another speaker spoke about what said he spoke at what he called a Nazi rally. Kamala Harris being called the anti-Christ. And that was before Trump spoke. And we know what he said.
> Who is the Trump campaign trying to appeal to literally days out from the election?
> RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, you know, the two precedents of this kind of rally was George Wallace in 1968, which is what going in, I imagined it might be like. But of course, the darker, more distant precedent was the 1939 Nazi rally, pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, which it may have had more overlap with.
Do you take this stuff seriously? Or is it all a joke to you, a competition to dunk on people on the internet by asking questions not in earnest? Will your response be to have some sort of backwards reasoning to suggest it is valid to compare a political party responsible for systematically killing millions of human beings to Republican voters or Trump supporters?
Of course, you can also dig around and find actual footage of the Madison square garden rally held by the Trump campaign... Which looked pretty Nazi-adjacent at least.
There was a time before the Nazi party was orchestrating a genocide. The party didn't start obviously evil. It found its way there through a series of circumstances and a need to maintain control in the face of global opposition and no policy within the party itself to actually address successfully the problems Germany was facing, leading to blind trust of a leader and his his inner circle over sense, reason, and morality.
There is a real and tangible risk that the modern American GOP is following the same path.
And hey, the German people who supported the Nazis didn't want to hear what they were turning into either. Their descendants got to live with that on their consciences.
... but back on topic: none of this explains why, if the accusation isn't true, nobody is suing CNN for defamation over these accusations.
>CNN has called all conservatives Nazis for years, and they are liars.
This is a very disingenuous take. There's a litany of footage of Alex Jones saying everything he said about Sandy Hook being fake and speaking ill of those impacted family members - do you have a litany of footage of CNN anchors/staff calling all conservatives Nazis?
Despite that MOST of the country voted #MAGA, the Democrat MSM has been calling MAGA every kind of slander they could think of including Nazi and Fascist.
They really ramped it up during the election, but most Americans saw thru it and knew it was lies.
Sadly you're not alone. Around 47% of Americans (especially older folks) still believe CNN (MSM in general) tells mostly the truth, and should be believed, because they'd never dare to be politically motivated rather than objective.
Third request for proof that CNN badgered conservatives by calling them Nazis to the same degree that Alex Jones badgered Sandy Hook families under the auspices of "it's a hoax".
You just moved the goal post. That's why I never send people like you links. No matter what links you get you'll tap dance right out of it, and pretend it's proven nothing, dispute everything, adjusting goal posts as necessary along the way. lol.
No goal posts were moved - my first comment asked for the same level of proof regarding CNN's actions that we have for Jones' actions here. Perhaps it wasn't crystal clear or perfectly spelled out, but I did say, "There's a litany of footage" of Jones and asked for "a litany of footage" of CNN doing what you claimed. That was me essentially asking for the same level of proof. "To the same degree" is just a different way of saying that same thing.
All you have provided is conjecture - "They're doing it!".
I certainly see a couple of videos with CNN reporting on someone calling GOP fascists, but... that's it. I don't see any CNN reporters or anchors explicitly, and repeatedly, calling them fascists. No montages, either. Oh well.
>... even despite that youtube rigs their search results against conservatives.
So, I'm supposed to go to YouTube to find "countless, easy to find" (your words!) proof that I'm looking for, but once I've started searching and finding little of any of that, your response is, "YouTube rigs their search results against conservatives". What was that you'd said about shifting goalposts? :)
>Glad you admit you found the videos from a simple YT search. There's a thing called Search Engines too. TBH nobody even believed you when you said you couldn't find that stuff. That claim wasn't remotely credible.
This is a fascinatingly disingenuous interpretation of how I said I didn't see anything akin to what you claim. It's no wonder you've got such a hard-on for Jones.
>So yes the censorship and the "easy to find" claims are both true at the same time, but nice try in your attempt to parlay that into some sort of contradiction in terms.
Ahh, yes, they're so "easy to find" that they don't come up when I look for them and you can't even produce a link to one in spite of your continued insistence that they exist. Cool beans.
No one can even tell which of my claims you're currently trying to disprove at this point, since you admitted you found the videos, and my "claim" was that you would. So now you pivot to the definition of "easy to find", having ran out of other options.
Yet another interpretation that is so wildly disingenuous that I can't help but assume you're doing it intentionally just for the sake of trolling.
>... you admitted you found the videos...
At no point have I admitted that, and you know it. Your initial claim was that "CNN has called all conservatives Nazis for years". What I asked for was proof of CNN staff doing this, to which you said I would find it easily. What I explicitly said was, "I certainly see a couple of videos of CNN reporting on someone calling GOP fascists". That's all that I saw - a statement of fact that a popular public figure called someone in the GOP a fascist. It's called "reporting on something that happened", and is literally no different than FOX News reporting on a GOP rep calling Trump a fascist[1].
At no point in any of those clips does CNN itself - not anyone on their staff - directly call a conservative individual a fascist.
>... and my "claim" was that you would.
I'm still scrolling through YT results and not seeing these montages, nor CNN staff leaning in and repeatedly calling conservatives fascists. If you find them so easy to obtain, please feel free to hold my hand and pass one my way!
>So now you pivot to the definition of "easy to find", having ran out of other options.
No, what's happening is that you're intentionally twisting words around in an incredibly amateur attempt at putting some kind of "gotcha" together and, honestly, it's kinda sad. I'm starting to think that that joke someone else made about supplements impacting your critical thinking might not be too far off.
At any rate, it's clear to me that you can't have this discussion in good faith. Deuces, bud, enjoy the rest of your week.
CNN/MSM has called MAGA Nazis and Fascists for years, and every American has heard it countless times. For you to even question that at all was utterly hilarious and transparently disingenuous.
The Muller Report found 'Russiagate' to be based in fact. It was demonstrated that there were inappropriate contacts between Trump's campaign and Russia, which was shown to have interfered with the 2016 election. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, and more were all shown to have contacts with Russians?
The Mueller Report was such a joke that Mueller himself, when testifying about it, publicly to congress, said he had never heard of "Fusion GPS", which was the primary company involved in supposedly uncovering the key evidence. You couldn't put that into a comedy film, because people would say it's too ridiculous even for a comedy film. Straight out of Idiocracy.
You mean the conspiracy that everyone, CNN included, thought had teeth at first, but then realized it didn't and shifted their reporting accordingly? That one?
Unless you can show me where, this year, CNN repeatedly said Trump shouldn't be elected because he explicitly colluded with Russia in 2016, you're trying to compare apples and oranges.
The fact they gave up on the Russiagate conspiracy after a while doesn't obviate them pursuing it because they "thought it had teeth" (it didn't) or because the conspiracy theory was believed by "everyone" (it wasn't).
The one fact that showed the entire Russigate investigation was purely a hoax was when Mueller testified before Congress, and someone asked him a question about "Fusion GPS" and Mueller literally claimed he had never heard of that organization before. It proved Mueller to be either 100% completely senile or lying, because that was the KEY organization involved in the KEY document for the ENTIRE case. lol. Unbelievalble.
My gut instinct is that he'd sworn to the Clintons years before that he'd never publicly talk about that firm.
CNN, and countless other outlets, thought there could be teeth there at the beginning. They reported as it went along, and as we found out via Mueller's investigation, there wasn't much to the claims at all, save for a couple of minor tidbits. As it happens, CNN, and countless other outlets, have since reported on the fact that most of it turned out to not be true.
That's about standard for how most media organizations handle shit, right-wing outlets included.
