Even by Donald Trump’s standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times—this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he’s not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be.
The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is suing over allegations that he’s not actually that successful… right after winning the presidency in a landslide and making absolute bank while doing it. Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? You’re the fucking President. Get over the fact that some people criticize you already.
Trump has a decently long history of suing media outlets over unflattering coverage, including multiple failed attempts against the Times. Just last year, he had to pay nearly $400k in legal fees after another bogus lawsuit against the Times failed. But why let past failures slow you down when you can file an even dumber one?
The lawsuit is against the NY Times and book publisher Penguin Random House, along with some reporters at the NY Times. The complaint is… well… it is not the most organized or professional of complaints. It is, as so many Donald Trump lawsuits seem to be, political documents designed to please Donald Trump and his legally ignorant MAGA base, rather than convincing judges.
The complaint reads more like a press release than a legal document, packed with ego-stroking passages that reveal just how pathetically thin-skinned Trump remains. Consider this actual paragraph from a federal lawsuit:
Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, “The Apprentice” generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. “The Apprentice” represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time.
And, yes, that picture is included.
The complaint starts out by claiming that the NY Times endorsing Kamala Harris was a form of “election interference” which is not how anything works.
President Trump trounced Harris with 312 electoral votes and a sweep of all seven “battleground” states. This victory was remarkable for many historic reasons, including because President Trump had to overcome persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.
That’s literally in the first paragraph of the complaint (though the claims themselves do not revolve around election interference, but even weaker claims of defamation). But, admitting that you won the election already undermines the idea that there was any damage done to Trump’s reputation from [checks notes] political reporting on him (historically some of the most protected of speech under the First Amendment.)
Indeed, Trump is going to have a pretty difficult time showing “damage” done to his reputation here. He claims that the NY Times tried to do three things:
Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference.
If that were true (and it isn’t) then they failed on all three counts. Trump won the election easily in 2024, he’s making absolute bank while being President (perhaps more than doubling his wealth) and all of the lawsuits against him have basically been shut down with Trump coming out on top.
Also, for anyone who has followed the NY Times’ repeated (and somewhat pathetic) attempts to bend over backwards to appease Trump and sanewash his attempt to bring fascism to America by pretending it’s politics-as-normal, this following sentence is ridiculous:
Today, the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.
There is no one who has followed the NY Times’ willingness to “both sides” every crazy thing Trump does who actually believes that.
Then, after nearly five pages of screaming about how liberal the NY Times is, the lawsuit finally says that this lawsuit is not really about the NY Times at all, but rather a book written by two of its reporters (hence the Penguin Random House inclusion on the defendants list).
The subject matter of this action—a malicious, defamatory, and disparaging book written by two of its reporters and three false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles, all carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history—represent a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished “Gray Lady.” Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference. With President Trump having won the Presidency, Defendants’ goals remain similar and unlawful: tarnish his legacy of achievement, destroy his reputation as a successful businessman, and subject him to humiliation and ridicule.
Specifically, on September 17, 2024, Penguin published a false, malicious, and defamatory book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” (the “Book”), authored by Craig and Buettner.
Dude. You won! Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? My goodness.
Before diving deeper into this mess, it’s crucial to understand what Trump actually needs to prove. As a public figure, he must show “actual malice”—and despite what Trump’s lawyers seem to think, that’s not about being mean to him.
Actual malice requires proving the defendants published something they knew was false or with reckless disregard for the truth (and reckless disregard also means something different than most people assume: it means you have to have ignored evidence that what you were publishing was false). It’s an extremely high bar, deliberately designed to protect robust debate about public figures. It has absolutely nothing to do with being angry or hostile—which is what Trump’s very bad lawyers seem to think it means.
Defendants each desire for President Trump fail politically and financially. Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense: that is, each—Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, as individuals, and the Times and Penguin’s relevant executives as corporations—subjectively wishes to harm President Trump, and each wish to manipulate public opinion to President Trump’s disadvantage to worsen his current and future political and economic prospects. Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.
That final sentence—”Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”—reads like it was written by a sixth grader having a tantrum, not a lawyer filing a federal lawsuit. More importantly, nowhere in this 85-page screed do Trump’s lawyers actually demonstrate the knowing falsity or reckless disregard that the law requires.
They describe completely typical best practices in reporting as if they’re nefarious, such as the following:
Likewise, the Times and its reporters, including Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, have a pattern and practice of contacting President Trump and his team regarding negative stories on a short timeline so as to be able to state that they sought comment—in order to preserve a scintilla of the pretense of neutrality—while making it functionally impossible for President Trump to comment on stories with factual errors, correct those errors, or provide a responsive quote before publication. This policy further enables the Times and its reporters to publish negative assertions about President Trump about which they subjectively harbor doubts as to their truthfulness by permitting them to claim that they sought factual confirmation or denial regarding their stories, even when they subjectively realize that they did not do so in good faith.
Again, that’s not how any of this works, and it’s certainly not how the NY Times’ reporting works. I have plenty of criticisms about the NY Times and its coverage, but the idea that they do this for the reasons stated is ludicrous.
The incredibly weak attempt to argue for reckless disregard… is to claim that because they didn’t interview producer Mark Burnett about Trump’s time on The Apprentice, that’s a form of ignoring counter evidence.
For non-exhaustive examples, and as detailed supra, Defendants published numerous statements regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” without first securing an interview from primary sources senior to the production of The Apprentice, such as Burnett. Defendants knew that Burnett would likely have contradicted numerous specific false, malicious, and defamatory purported statements of fact that they made regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” as well as their general narrative regarding President Trump’s role in the show’s success. Defendants therefore did not sufficiently pursue speaking with Burnett even after he did not grant an interview, did not sufficiently seek to obtain his original notes or records, and otherwise failed to engage with Burnett and other potential insiders with “The Apprentice” because they subjectively believed that these sources would have tended to contradict the defamatory lies that they wished to publish about President Trump.
Again, this is not how the NY Times works. If Burnett would have spoken to them (and historically he has refused to talk to the media about Trump beyond a single press statement he made before the 2016 election), the NY Times would have loved it and would have quoted him extensively, as that would be a huge scoop, given how often Burnett has refused to comment on Trump.
There’s also a whole tangent building off of Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculously misleading statements earlier this year, falsely claiming that the Obama administration tried to fake Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, even though multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans) have found that Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, even if it didn’t have much actual success.
The lawsuit then asks for… $15 billion dollars. How very Dr. Evil. The NY Times, for what it’s worth, is currently valued at less than $10 billion.
A lot of people discussing this lawsuit are claiming two things: that it’s really all about getting a settlement out of the NY Times like he’s been getting out of others, and second that it’s an attempt to get NYT v. Sullivan (the key case that established the actual malice standard) overturned.
While that may be the intent behind this lawsuit, I find both unlikely. Yes, in the lawsuit, Trump lists out a bunch of those corrupt settlements, as if they’re somehow relevant here. But plenty of people have observed that those settlements had nothing to do with the merits of the cases, but rather were entirely about capitulating to a bully and trying to get him off their backs. And, in the case of CBS, it seemed quite clear that the settlement was so that Shari Redstone could get her deal to sell Paramount/CBS to Larry Ellison’s son.
And, when it comes to the NY Times, they have a very good legal team that tends to relish taking on bad faith, bullshit SLAPP style lawsuits. They have a very good track record on those, and don’t often roll over. I would imagine that the legal team feels pretty strongly about defending this case rather than settling.
As for the attack on the actual malice standard, that’s the same thing people claimed about the last Trump lawsuit against the NY Times and it went up in smoke. It’s what people seem to want to claim about a bunch of frivolous defamation claims lately, and while it may be what the lawyers want, they seem like really bad cases to make these arguments. Because the underlying facts are so silly and so obviously bullshit, that the facts make for really bad cases to argue that the NYT v. Sullivan standard is somehow unfair.
Honestly, this just feels like so many of Trump’s lawsuits: engaging in pointless vexatious SLAPP lawfare just to punish media properties that publish negative stories about him. He has long admitted that he enjoys filing such lawsuits. Famously, he once said:
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
That’s the very definition of a SLAPP suit. And, if you’re wondering, Florida does have an anti-SLAPP law, though it’s a bit quirky compared to other states. Also (more importantly) the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida) has said that you can’t use anti-SLAPP laws in federal court.
But, really, if you want proof that this is just Trump trying to punish those who dare to report on him accurately, just witness how he responded to a question about how he felt about Pam Bondi’s unconstitutional claims of punishing people for hate speech, by immediately threatening to go after the journalist who asked the question.
JON KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she's gonna go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speechTRUMP: We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. You have a lot of hate in your hate. Maybe they'll have to go after you.
We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous lawsuits here at Techdirt, but the one that Donald Trump filed on Friday against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over the article about the birthday card he was alleged to have given Epstein is so legally incompetent that it reads like a masterclass in how not to file a defamation claim.
The complaint is such a train wreck of basic legal errors and factual misrepresentations that it can only be understood as a SLAPP suit designed to harass the WSJ and force them to reveal sources. The legal malpractice on display would be almost comical if it weren’t so transparent in its authoritarian intent.
Trump is using a Miami law firm that appears to specialize in franchise law—which might explain the amateurish quality of this defamation complaint. When you can’t get competent media lawyers, apparently you make do with whoever will take your money.
Let’s start with what the WSJ actually reported, because the lawyers filing this suit seem to have struggled with basic reading comprehension. It claims that Trump gave Epstein a card for his 50th Birthday that, well, here’s how they describe it:
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
The Journal also includes the type written faux dialogue between Trump and Epstein that was apparently included, which is so bizarre I’m not even going to bother repeating it here.
Here’s where the legal incompetence begins. Trump’s defenders, led by JD Vance, immediately seized on the fact that the WSJ didn’t publish a photo of the letter as somehow “proof” it doesn’t exist:
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how journalism works. Major publications don’t publish stories like this without solid sourcing—the WSJ’s legal team wouldn’t allow it. More importantly, there are often very good reasons for media organizations not to reveal images of documents that have been leaked to them. Just ask Reality Winner. And, of course, I’m sure the Trump regime would love to know who leaked this document, so seeing an image might help reveal that information.
But that doesn’t make it a good legal argument. Unless you’re just trying to flush out the leaker.
So it’s notable that the lawyers decide to lead with that as their key piece of “evidence” that the story is fabricated—a strategy that’s likely to backfire spectacularly when the WSJ produces the letter in discovery (or before).
On the one hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter. And on the other hand,Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proofthat President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists.Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.
That’s a bold claim. It seems like quite the gambit to open with a claim that the letter doesn’t even exist, when it seems quite likely that this argument will come back to haunt them.
Also, the lawyers can’t even accurately describe what the WSJ reported. The complaint claims the article states that “President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter.” But that’s not what the WSJ said. The article carefully states the letter bore Trump’s name and signature, and that the drawing “appears to be hand-drawn” without attributing the drawing to Trump.
This isn’t just sloppy—it’s the kind of basic factual error that suggests the lawyers either didn’t carefully read the article they’re suing over, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.
The complaint also has a weird argument about how the WSJ published this as an “exclusive” but then… disseminated it widely. As one does. With news. I don’t know why this paragraph is in here, other than to make it clear that the lawyer who wrote this is unfamiliar with how journalism works:
The Article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive.1 However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
They also double down on their claim that it’s impossible that this letter exists, which seems like a kind of lawsuit claim preceding an unfortunate event for them.
Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article. That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump.
But the most egregious nonsense comes in how they identify the allegedly defamatory statements.
In a defamation lawsuit, you have to state which statements made by the defendant were “false statements of fact” and that’s tough to do here, but these lawyers power on through.
They claim, among other things, that the phrase “the letter bearing Trump’s name” is false. They also claim that stating the letter “is bawdy” is false. Calling something “bawdy” would clearly be an opinion based on disclosed facts and literally can’t be defamatory.
But here’s where you know these lawyers didn’t actually read the article they’re suing over. They claim it’s defamatory that the WSJ described some contributors to Epstein’s birthday book as “childhood pals”—and they’re claiming this defames Trump. But look at the sentence:
The album had poems, photos and greetings from businesspeople, academics, Epstein’s former girlfriends andchildhood pals, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with them
The “childhood pals” reference clearly refers to other contributors to the birthday book—not Trump. This is such a basic reading comprehension failure that it raises questions about whether these lawyers actually practiced law before filing this complaint.
They separately claim it’s defamatory to claim that Epstein socialized with Trump, which is ridiculous as the evidence for that is widespread, including multiple images, videos, and Donald Trump’s own words
This is not a serious lawsuit that anyone expects to win.
This is a SLAPP lawsuit.
And it asks for $10 billion dollars.
I mean, it’s kinda like this:
The real question is whether this strategy will work. Given that CBS just paid Trump $16 million to settle a similarly frivolous lawsuit, that ABC paid him $15 million to settle another lawsuit, and that Meta paid him $25 million in what amounts to protection money, Trump has good reason to think that flinging enough legal garbage will eventually pay off. Indeed, he crowed about these payoffs on social media as evidence that Murdoch will pay him too.
But this case presents a fascinating test of media power dynamics. Trump is essentially betting that he can bully Rupert Murdoch the same way he’s successfully bullied other media companies. That’s a bold gamble, in part because of how important Rupert Murdoch has been to Trump’s success. Rupert has been a Trump ally for years, but he can be ruthless when his business interests are threatened.
More importantly, the WSJ has the legal resources to fight this, and, hopefully, the financial incentive to do so.
If the WSJ folds here, it would complete Trump’s transformation of SLAPP suits from a nuisance tactic into a reliable revenue stream. The man who famously complained about “fake news” has figured out that threatening to sue over real news is far more profitable.
But Murdoch isn’t exactly known for backing down when someone tries to shake him down. This could get very messy, very quickly—which might be the most entertaining thing to come out of this embarrassing legal filing.
When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask “why do so many people hate us?”
But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics.
The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth’s ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics through legal threats and takedown demands. The company has targeted journalists, filmmakers, doctors, and activists—all while invoking Brian Thompson’s murder as justification for why criticism of their practices amounts to inciting violence.
In early January, Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas, posteda self-made videoon TikTok and Instagram that described how she had interrupted breast-reconstruction surgery to respond to a phone call from UnitedHealth about whether the insurer would cover a patient’s stay at a hospital. The call had come to the operating room’s phone line, leading her to believe it was urgent.
“Insurance is out of control,” Dr. Potter said in the video. “I have no other words.”
The short video was viewed millions of times and attracted hundreds of thousands of “likes” on social media.
About a week later, Dr. Potter received a six-page letter from the law firmClare Locke, which UnitedHealth had retained as “defamation counsel.” The letter claimed that she had distorted the circumstances of the phone call and that her video was libelous. It noted that some commenters were responding to her posts by celebrating Mr. Thompson’s murder. The letter demanded that she retract her video and apologize.
Let’s review: UnitedHealth’s CEO gets murdered. The internet celebrates. A normal company might think, “Hmm, why do so many people hate us? Maybe we should examine our practices.” But UnitedHealth had a different idea: “The real problem isn’t that we interrupt surgeries of people already under anesthesia with phone calls about insurance coverage—it’s that people are allowed to talk about us interrupting surgeries with phone calls about insurance coverage.”
The weaponization of Thompson’s murder is particularly cynical. Rather than reflecting on why so many Americans felt schadenfreude when a health insurance executive was killed, UnitedHealth is turning the tragedy into a legal cudgel. They’re claiming that harsh criticism of their business practices—like denying coverage or making doctors interrupt surgery to get approval—somehow constitutes a “call to violence.”
But the Dr. Potter case gets even more instructive when you look at what happened next:
She had recently opened her own surgery center and had hired a consultant to help persuade UnitedHealth and other insurers to classify it as an in-network provider. Winning that designation was essential to Dr. Potter’s business plan.
Then Dr. Potter’s video went viral, and UnitedHealth stopped responding to inquiries from her representative, she said.
Blocking her surgery center from taking UnitedHealth patients because she made a video criticizing the way they handled a previous situation is extremely petty.
The fact that UnitedHealth hired Clare Locke should tell you all you need to know about this. We’ve written about them many times, including how they proudly promote how their threat letters get the media to kill stories.
This campaign to silence critics apparently predates the murder but ramped up significantly afterward. Before Thompson’s death, UnitedHealth was already threatening small local newspapers and demanding they destroy audio recordings. But post-murder, the company has gone scorched earth: suing The Guardian over investigative reporting, getting documentaries removed from Amazon Prime and Vimeo, and, as highlighted above, threatening a doctor for a viral video.
In one example the operators of a small chain of pharmacies in Wisconsin created a docuseries to call out the damaging practices of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), including Optum Rx, owned by UnitedHealth. And then:
On May 21, Clare Locke wrote again to Amazon’s lawyers. The 16-page letter claimed that the docuseries “spreads a vociferous and false screed in a thinly-veiled call to violence for anyone who is dissatisfied with the American health care system. Recent history and Brian Thompson’s murder demonstrates the devastating and irreversible consequences of ginning up such hatred with false claims designed to inspire violence.”
The letter said the video violated Amazon’s terms of service and should be removed, in part because it “doxxed our clients’ physical address” by showing a street sign for Optum Way in Minnesota.
Within days, the video — which had no more than a few hundred views — had been removed from Prime Video.
[….]
In early June, Ms. Strause received an email from Vimeo, where “Modern Medical Mafia” had also been available for streaming.
“This content wasremoveddue to a complaint Vimeo received concerning defamation,” the email said. “Vimeo is not able to evaluate the truth or falsity of such a claim, and it asks that you resolve the dispute directly with the complainants, Optum Rx and UnitedHealth Group.”
The chilling effect is real. The Guardian postponed publishing a second investigation into the company after UnitedHealth sued over their first piece—filed conveniently the day before the second article was scheduled to run, and right after The Guardian had informed UnitedHealth that it intended to run its new investigation.
Meanwhile, you know how “free speech” absolutists so frequently seem to love to silence their critics? Well, sometimes that appetite for censorship comes back to bite them.
Take Bill Ackman. Last year, he hired Clare Locke to send a ridiculously pathetic threat to Business Insider over reporting on his wife’s alleged plagiarism. He was so pleased with their work that he publicly called Clare Locke “the rock stars of defamation law” and said “they should be your first call” if you face similar criticism.
Clare Locke, it turns out, took that endorsement very seriously. When Ackman shared Dr. Potter’s viral video and suggested investors should bet against UnitedHealth’s stock, guess who came calling?
One of the many people who shared Dr. Potter’s video was the billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who has nearly two million followers on X and regularly wades into controversies. In a post accompanying the video, he suggested that investors should bet against UnitedHealth’s stock and that the Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate the company. The post brought even more attention to Dr. Potter’s video.
Mr. Ackman soon heard from Clare Locke. He already knew the firm. He and his wife, Neri Oxman, had hired Clare Locketo threaten Business Insiderafter it reported in 2024 that she had plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation. (They did not end up suing.)
Now, though, the roles were reversed. One of the firm’s co-founders called an aide to Mr. Ackman and told him that the video included falsehoods.And UnitedHealth contacted the S.E.C. to complain that Mr. Ackman was trying to drive down the company’s stock price.
Calling the SEC to claim that retweeting a video of a surgeon who posted a video about a ridiculous situation caused by UnitedHealth is an attempt to manipulate the stock price is… quite a choice.
Think about the logic here for a moment. UnitedHealth’s business model appears to involve taking people’s money for health insurance and then finding creative ways not to pay for their healthcare. When people point this out—sometimes rudely, granted—UnitedHealth responds by claiming that the real violence is not the denial of medical care to sick people, but rather the people being rude about it on the internet.
It’s true Trumpism: always play the victim.
In Enrich’s article, UnitedHealth spokesperson Eric Hausman defended the campaign by saying “the truth matters” and there’s a difference between criticism and “irresponsibly omitting facts.” But their targets aren’t making things up—they’re documenting real experiences with the company’s practices, often with receipts.
The company’s own annual report reveals the likely real motivation: “Negative publicity may adversely affect our stock price, damage our reputation and expose us to unexpected or unwarranted regulatory scrutiny.” Their stock is down 40% over the past year, and they face multiple federal investigations into potential Medicare fraud and antitrust violations. But rather than addressing the underlying issues that generate negative coverage, UnitedHealth has chosen to wage war on the coverage itself—a strategy that probably isn’t inspiring much investor confidence either.
Of course, the best way to avoid “negative publicity” is to… be better? To maybe take stock of your practices and look at why you’re getting so much bad press.
But that’s not UnitedHealth’s style apparently.
It reveals a deep-seated problem at the company. The management team appears to view the real problem not as their harmful practices, but as people talking about those practices. That’s not a sustainable approach to crisis management—it’s an admission that they can’t defend their actions on the merits.
David Enrich, who wrote the Times piece, explored these tactics extensively in his book Murder the Truth—about the growing industry of lawyers who specialize in using legal threats to silence criticism (including large portions of the book discussing Clare Locke). You may recall that we interviewed him about the book on the Techdirt podcast earlier this year. The title perfectly captures UnitedHealth’s approach: rather than confronting the truth about why their CEO’s murder was met with celebration, they’re trying to murder the truth through legal intimidation.
This approach might silence some critics in the short term, but it won’t change the underlying reality that they act as though their business model depends on denying care to people who need it. And every legal threat just reinforces the public perception that UnitedHealth would rather attack critics than fix the problems critics are highlighting.
If UnitedHealth really wanted to address the problem, they’d focus on being better, not on silencing the people pointing out how bad they are.
It’s not every day you watch a company faceplant so theatrically in public, but Cloud Innovation’s latest stunt deserves a slow clap. Cloud Innovation, which you’d probably never heard of unless you’re neck-deep in African IP registry battles (stay tuned), just managed to make a legal play whose end result should be calling a lot more attention on its own legal actions and threats.
The move? They sent a cease and desist letter to Joe Hall—demanding Hall delete a tweet. Not a tweet where he said anything defamatory. Not a tweet where he made false claims. Indeed, not a tweet where he said anything at all. Just… a tweet with a link. Literally, a URL to a Medium article discussing the AfriNIC saga, in which Cloud Innovation is a central player.
That’s the entire complaint: someone shared a link.
The letter, signed illegibly by someone calling themselves “Legal Counsel,” gives Hall 24 hours to remove his tweet sharing Emmanuel Vitus’s Medium article “AfriNIC: Hope, Hijack, and the Harsh Lessons of African Multistakeholderism” or face a lawsuit for “defamation, unlawful publication and dissemination of defamatory article.”
So, of course: you should go read that article. Cloud Innovation seems desperate for you not to. It’s also both a fascinating and depressing deep dive into what happened with AfriNIC—something I never would have learned about if Cloud Innovation hadn’t been so hellbent on making sure I never saw it.
Still let’s pause here to appreciate the legal theory being advanced by Cloud Innovation: that sharing a link to an article someone else wrote makes you liable for defamation. This is roughly equivalent to claiming that the person who hands you a newspaper is responsible for everything printed inside it.
The Backstory: AfriNIC’s Institutional Collapse
The article Hall shared tells a genuinely important story about AfriNIC, the African Network Information Centre responsible for distributing IP addresses across the continent. What was once a symbol of African digital sovereignty has been paralyzed by a number of issues, with much of it coming from an aggressive legal campaign from Cloud Innovation, which has filed dozens of lawsuits to block the registry’s governance and operations.
Among many other things, the piece details how Cloud Innovation obtained control of millions of IPv4 addresses—worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars—and those IP addresses appeared to be “redirected to data centers abroad,” rather than used in Africa. When AfriNIC tried to audit and potentially reclaim these resources, Cloud Innovation responded with a legal blitz that has effectively shut down the institution.
More than fifty legal cases were filed in rapid succession. Some were emergency applications. Others aimed to freeze bank accounts, block board meetings, suspend elections, or issue restraining orders against AfriNIC’s leadership. The goal was not just to defend a legal position. It was to paralyze the registry entirely.
And it worked. As AfriNIC tried to clean up its records and assert control, it faced a coordinated legal pushback. Every step taken by the registry was met with a countermeasure in court. Every attempt at reform was slowed by injunctions. The legal process became a tool of exhaustion.
It’s a story of institutional capture, regulatory failure, and the vulnerability of critical internet infrastructure. Oh, and abuses of the legal system. In other words, exactly the kind of story that deserves widespread attention and discussion.
And also, exactly the kind of thing Hall, who is a distinguished technologist at the Internet Society, would want to share with his followers.
Enter the Streisand Effect
Which brings us to… well… you know. By trying to suppress discussion of an article that documents their use of aggressive legal tactics to silence critics, they’ve… used aggressive legal tactics to try to silence a critic.
And they didn’t just go after Hall. According to the response letter, “substantially identical letters were sent to other people who posted links to the same article.” Multiple people have reported receiving similar threats just for sharing the link (and, tragically, it appears at least some removed their tweets).
Either way, the end result is that way more attention is likely to go to the underlying story than it would have received otherwise. Before the legal threats, this was a somewhat niche piece about African internet governance. Now it’s a case study in how not to handle public criticism.
And a reason to read the article.
How to Respond to a Censorial Legal Threat
Hall’s response, crafted by lawyer Kendra Albert of Albert Sellars LLP, is a masterclass in how to handle bullshit legal threats. The letter methodically demolishes Cloud Innovation’s claims on multiple grounds:
Section 230 immunity: Hall shared someone else’s content on a platform (ExTwitter). Section 230 explicitly protects users from being treated as publishers of third-party content. Game over.
Fair report privilege: The article reports on actual legal proceedings that Cloud Innovation filed. Accurate reporting on court cases is privileged from defamation claims.
No false statements identified: The cease and desist letter doesn’t point to any specific false statements, let alone prove they’re false.
Public figure standard: Even if the above didn’t apply, under US law, Cloud Innovation would need to prove “actual malice”—that Hall knew the statements were false or showed reckless disregard for their truth.
The SPEECH Act: Even if Cloud Innovation won a defamation judgment in another country, they couldn’t enforce it in the U.S. without meeting American free speech standards.
You can read through the analysis of all of those, but just to whet your appetite, here was the description of the third item in that list:
Even if Dr. Hall was the original author and thus not immunized by Section 230, and even if the fair report privilege did not apply, Cloud Innovation’s claim would fail for a third reason. Under the First Amendment, Cloud Innovation Ltd would need to show that a defamation defendant published an identifiable false statement of fact that harmed its reputation, and that the speaker did so with the requisite level of intent. Cloud Innovation has already admitted that the facts in Mr. Vitus’ article are true, and any statements of opinion cannot be defamatory under U.S. law. Cloud Innovation would also have to identify those statements with specificity. We note that your letter does not identify any particular false statements in Mr. Vitus’s article, let alone any such statements from Dr. Hall.
The response letter notes that “it would be inappropriate for legal counsel to send a demand letter without research, which should have turned up at least one of the five independent reasons why Cloud Innovation has no claim against Dr. Hall.”
It concludes:
We will refrain from providing a count of the reasons why a lawyer from any jurisdiction should know better than to use baseless threats to intimidate a perceived critic.
Ouch.
The Bigger Picture: Standing Up to Censorial Bullies
This case, once again, illustrates why we need more people willing to stand up to legal intimidation, as Hall has done here. The letter he received was clearly designed to shut down discussion through intimidation, not to address any legitimate legal grievance.
The 24-hour deadline. The vague threats. The failure to identify specific false statements. The targeting of multiple people for simply sharing a link. These are all classic signs of a SLAPP attempt—designed to chill speech through the threat of expensive litigation.
And it’s working on some people. As the letter notes, at least one person has already deleted their tweet in response to the threat. That’s exactly what these campaigns are designed to achieve: silence through intimidation.
Of course, now Cloud Innovation’s legal strategy about the story has become part of the story, perhaps the key part of the story. The original article documented how the company used aggressive litigation to paralyze AfriNIC’s governance. Now they’re using similar tactics to try to suppress discussion of that very behavior.
The crazy thing about the Streisand Effect is that it’s so predictable, yet people keep falling for it. It’s like watching someone step on the same rake over and over again, except the rake is “trying to suppress information in the internet age” and the person is “a company that should probably know better.”
While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster… for now. If you’re not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace harassment for inappropriate behavior on set by Baldoni, leading to an explosive public feud between the two. Eventually, Lively sued Baldoni over the claims, with Baldoni countersuing her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for defamation and other claims. He also sued the New York Times for its reporting on the dispute. Baldoni’s legal team engaged in some fairly silly behavior on top of all of that. We said at the time that the suit against the New York Times in particular appeared destined for the aforementioned dumpster when the judge paused discovery to consider the Times’ motion to dismiss.
Well, it seems I was more correct there than I had intended to be. The judge has not only dismissed the suit against the New York Times, but Baldoni’s suit against Lively and Reynolds as well. As to his claims of defamation and that Lively stole the movie out from under him and his company, the judge had this to say.
Baldoni’s lawsuit centred on two claims: that Lively “stole the film” from him and his company Wayfarer by threatening not to promote it, and that she and others promoted a false narrative that Baldoni sexually assaulted her and launched a smear campaign against her, Judge Liman explained in his opinion.
But Baldoni and his production company “have not adequately alleged that Lively’s threats were wrongful extortion rather than legally permissible hard bargaining or renegotiation of working conditions”, he wrote.
Additionally, the judge wrote, Baldoni and his company had not proved defamation because the “Wayfarer Parties have not alleged that Lively is responsible for any statements other than the statements” in her lawsuit, which are privileged.
Defamation is notoriously hard to prove in court in America — for good reason. Of course, it gets all the more difficult when you can’t be bothered to make such a claim about specific statements other than those in the actual lawsuit itself. The lack of valid claims against Reynolds and others likewise resulted those suits being dismissed as well.
And, really, attempting to sue over the time-honored Hollywood tradition of wrestling for creative control over a movie is more than a bit laughable.
As for the New York Times, the court essentially told Baldoni that he can’t sue the media just because he doesn’t like their good faith reporting.
The judge also determined that evidence did not show that the New York Times “acted with actual malice” in publishing their story, dismissing that $250m suit as well.
“The alleged facts indicate that the Times reviewed the available evidence and reported, perhaps in a dramatized manner, what it believed to have happened,” he wrote. “The Times had no obvious motive to favor Lively’s version of events.”
Now, you can read the entire judgment below for yourself, if you choose. It is quite long and, frankly, filled with content in the early pages that is not particularly flattering to Lively and Reynolds. That’s only important insofar as the court appears to have looked at the facts in a clear-eyed manner before pivoting to what the actual law says about the various claims Baldoni made, which ended up lacking merit.
Now, while the court did give Baldoni leave to refile some of his claims, but only those that revolve around contract interference. And here’s where I’d like to remind you that we started covering this whole celebrity fiasco as a Streisand Effect story. Baldoni could have attempted to manage what is admittedly a difficult situation for him, self-made or otherwise, in a quiet and respectful matter. Instead, he went legal and very, very public with this whole dispute and, as a result, the dismissal of his claims is equally public.
It’s not a good look. At this point, hard as it may be, the best course would probably be to not file some amended suit or appeal the decision. Given how Baldoni’s side has behaved thus far, however, I doubt they’ll take that course.
We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded into a Hollywood court case with competing lawsuits from both parties. While I tend to shy away from the idea of parties purposefully employing the Streisand Effect for wanted attention, as opposed to inadvertently generating unwanted visibility, that sure looks like this is a case of the former. Baldoni and his legal team have taken every step possible to make every bit of this as public as possible, while Lively has done the opposite.
Now, I want to make clear that I don’t really have much of a take as to the merits of the case on either side. I just don’t know enough to have an opinion on the legal drama itself. That is what trials are for, after all.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some silliness to talk about as an update here. And when it comes to the status of the trial and what’s happening within it, there are several things going on.
First, like the New York Times before him, Ryan Reynolds has been attempting to exit this whole thing. Lively’s husband was sued alongside his wife for defamation and for interfering in Baldoni’s business relationships. Unfortunately, it appears that Baldoni’s suit may not have met some pretty basic threshholds for making such claims.
“The entirety of Mr. Baldoni’s case appears to be based on Mr. Reynolds allegedly privately calling Mr. Baldoni a ‘predator,’ but here is the problem, that is not defamation unless they can show that Mr. Reynolds did not believe that statement to be true,” Reynolds’ attorneys Mike Gottlieb and Esra Hudson told Us in a statement. “The complaint doesn’t allege that, and just the opposite, the allegations in the complaint suggest that Mr. Reynolds genuinely believes Mr. Baldoni is a predator.”
The statement continued: “Mr. Reynolds’ wife has accused Mr. Baldoni — privately and in multiple complaints — of sexual harassment and retaliation, and as pointed out by Mr. Reynolds’ motion, Mr. Baldoni has also openly spoken about his past of mistreating women and pushing the boundaries of consent. Mr. Reynolds has a First Amendment right to express his opinion of Mr. Baldoni, which should be comforting to a group of people who have repeatedly called Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds ‘bullies’ and other names over the past year.”
This is the “actual malice” requirement for defamation at work. Baldoni’s lawyers would need to prove not that Reynolds made the statements they claim he made about Baldoni, but rather that he made them knowing they were false in order to prove defamation. And that is notoriously difficult to prove. Save any smoking gun evidence of Reynolds openly admitting he was spreading lies, it’s very unlikely the defamation claims are going anywhere.
“Earlier today we moved for sanctions against the lawyers and parties responsible for the utterly frivolous claims brought against Ryan Reynolds,” Reynolds’ legal team said in a statement to Us Weekly on Tuesday, May 20. “Justin Baldoni’s lawyer and his clients filed a preposterous lawsuit falsely claiming that Ryan Reynolds extorted people he had never met, that he allegedly interfered with business relationships that do not exist, and somehow defamed people he never said a word about based on unspecified statements that do not appear anywhere in their 391-paragraph complaint. These are not serious claims—they are a desperate ploy for clickbait headlines that have no place in federal court.”
“Mr. Reynolds provided the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel an opportunity to save face, explaining these claims’ glaring and fundamental defects and urging that they be withdrawn more than 21 days ago,” the docs read. “Unfortunately, the Rule 11 Plaintiffs and their counsel unequivocally refused to do so, offering no response on these defects except to argue that these issues are appropriately resolved by motion to dismiss and may later be supported by discovery. But these claims’ fundamental failings are not about the parties’ dispute as to the legal arguments relating to their claims, or the facts, or even that all of their claims are weak and meritless (which, they are).”
If Baldoni’s real aim in all of this was to make all of this as public and publicity-driven as possible, well, it all kind of tracks from there.
And that’s further backed up by some truly absurd claims that Baldoni’s legal team have made about how to conduct Lively’s deposition. One lawyer said, I suppose perhaps in jest, that Lively’s deposition should be an event the public can attend or see for a fee.
“Since Ms. Lively is open to testifying, let’s make it count,” Baldoni’s attorney Bryan Freedman tells PEOPLE. “Hold the deposition at MSG, sell tickets or stream it, and donate every dollar to organizations helping victims of domestic abuse.”
Here again we see the legal team from one side behaving in a serious way, while the other is not. Whatever the truth of their competing claims against the other, it is certainly not a good look for one side coming off as professional and the other, well, not.
And, frankly, recent news about how Baldoni is stressed over the public legal drama seems quite odd coming from the person who made this very, very public in a way it hadn’t been previously. As entertaining as this all might be, there must certainly be a better way this all could have been handled than whatever this fiasco has turned into.
We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history — but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into silence, asked the Supreme Court to gut NY Times v. Sullivan’s vital “actual malice” standard. But last month, the Court turned him down, quietly listing his cert petition among the denied without comment.
While a simple cert denial may seem unremarkable, in today’s environment where foundational speech protections face relentless attack, keeping Sullivan’s protections intact represents a crucial firewall against wealthy interests weaponizing defamation law to silence critics.
The Sullivan standard exists for a very specific and crucial reason: to prevent the wealthy and powerful from using defamation lawsuits to bully critics into silence. The Court rightly recognized that if every minor mistake or inaccuracy about a public figure could trigger ruinous litigation, meaningful public discourse would become impossible. The “actual malice” standard (a confusingly named term that has nothing to do with “malice,” actual or not) requires plaintiffs to prove that false statements were made with knowledge of their falsity, or at least a strong suspicion that the statements were false.
Without this protection, billionaires like Wynn could bankrupt media outlets and critics simply by threatening expensive litigation over any perceived slight or minor factual error. The chilling effect would be devastating — who would risk reporting on corruption or misconduct if a single mistake could lead to financial ruin?
The “actual malice” standard has been so key to American free speech for over half a century that stripping it away would be a disaster of epic proportions.
Over the past decade, we’ve watched a coordinated campaign emerge to dismantle this vital protection. It started with Donald Trump’s calls to “open up” libel laws, but quickly evolved into a sophisticated infrastructure of MAGA-crafted nonsense legal scholarship and judicial skepticism. Federalist Society lawyers who once defended Sullivan began portraying it, practically overnight, as constitutional overreach (giving you a clear suggestion of just how “principled” some of those lawyers really are).
Basically, once Donald Trump said “jump” regarding defamation law, the MAGA legal infrastructure quickly began figuring out just how they should jump.
Most worryingly, two Supreme Court justices have explicitly called for overturning Sullivan. Justice Thomas led the charge (conveniently forgetting his own support for the standard during his confirmation hearings), followed by Justice Gorsuch, who was so eager to attack the standard that he relied on a deeply flawed law review article and had to quietly revise his dissent after its errors were exposed. We covered this disturbing evolution in detail in our recent podcast with “Murder the Truth” author David Enrich.
This cert denial suggests that, at least for now, there aren’t four justices ready to revisit Sullivan. We know Thomas and Gorsuch want to overturn it, and Alito likely agrees (he rarely strays from Thomas on such matters). But they needed a fourth vote to grant cert, and apparently couldn’t find one.
While it’s somewhat reassuring that two-thirds of the Court seems unwilling to demolish this crucial First Amendment protection, the fact that three justices appear eager to do so remains deeply concerning. The coordinated campaign against Sullivan isn’t going away — if anything, it’s gaining momentum. This cert denial bought us some time, but the next wealthy plaintiff with a grudge is surely already preparing their petition.
For now though, this firewall against frivolous defamation suits by the powerful remains intact. And in an era where free speech faces unprecedented challenges from all directions, we’ll take what small, but important, victories we can get.
As we’ve been following along to some degree with the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni legal mess, the more recent stories have been about Baldoni’s attempt to go after protected creative speech in a Deadpool movie, the choice of waging a PR war before the trial even starts, and the Streisand Effect nature to his actions. While the salacious accusations from each side towards the other aren’t really something we cover here at Techdirt, the online shenanigans and speech implications absolutely are.
Which is why I am going to remind you that the first lawsuit Baldoni filed wasn’t against Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Marvel, or Disney. It was against the New York Times, which Baldoni’s suit argued was liable for defamation and fraud because the news organization reported on the news.
We said at the time that the suit against the paper would almost certainly not get very far. And now we have our first inclination that it might get dismissed in fairly short order, given the judge has put a pause on the discovery phase of the trial pending the Times’ motion to dismiss.
In an order issued Tuesday and obtained by USA TODAY Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Liman approved the Times’ motion for a stay of discovery — evidence-gathering among the case’s parties — pending his review of the company’s motion to be dismissed as a defendant in the case.
“The NY Times’s motion presents ‘substantial grounds for dismissal’ and the NY Times has made a strong showing that its motion to dismiss is likely to succeed on the merits,” Liman wrote.
The court might has well have put its intentions in big shining lights. This is a suit that never should have been filed and the idea that Baldoni’s team can go on a fishing expedition, potentially to find more personal communications to display to or leak to the public, is silly. The Times has robust First Amendment protections on its reporting. The bar for fraud and defamation is quite high.
In other words, Baldoni’s team probably would be better off cutting its losses and dropping the suit itself.
In its dismissal motion last week, the Times said it merely engaged in newsgathering with its publication of the viral article, adding that plaintiffs did not show the outlet acted with malice. The newspaper also said the sole alleged defamatory statement in the article — that the plaintiffs orchestrated a “smear campaign” in retaliation for Lively complaining about sexual harassment — was protected opinion.
“We appreciate the court’s decision today, which recognizes the important First Amendment values at stake,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to Reuters. “The court has stopped Mr. Baldoni from burdening The Times with discovery requests in a case that should never have been brought.”
At this point, the suit against the New York Times is probably most useful as a betting mechanism, in which we set an over/under on the date that the court will dismiss the case. Anything else would come as a complete surprise to this writer.
It is almost difficult to believe this is a real thing that happened with the President of the United States, but here’s what actually happened on Tuesday. In the morning, Donald Trump threatened to imprison protesters and defund any university that allows certain protests. Then, that same evening, he stood before Congress and declared — with apparently zero irony — that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”
You might think this whiplash-inducing contrast is just standard political hypocrisy. But it’s actually something much more terrifying: it’s part of a calculated strategy to redefine “free speech” as “speech I like” while using government power to punish speech I don’t like. The crazy part isn’t just that he’s doing it — it’s that he’s doing it so blatantly, while the very same backers who claimed they supported him for his views on “free speech” cheer this on.
Once again, we need to be explicit and direct here, because it’s all that matters. Donald Trump has not “stopped all government censorship,” because there really was no real government censorship. Instead, he has repeatedly engaged in and encouraged his administration to engage in one of the most aggressive and problematic campaigns of suppressing and chilling speech this country has ever seen.
While MAGA supporters had convinced themselves that the Biden administration was secretly ordering social media companies to censor conservative views, the Supreme Court took one look at the actual evidence and exposed it as pure fantasy.
Reading the ruling is like watching Justice Barrett swat down conspiracy theories like flies at a picnic. “No evidence” appears so frequently it could be the ruling’s catchphrase. No evidence of CDC-influenced censorship. No evidence of White House pressure. No evidence of FBI interference. No evidence that Facebook changed policies on government orders:
There istherefore no evidenceto support the States’ allegation that Facebook restricted the state representative pursuant to the CDC-influenced policy….
But neither the timing nor the platforms line up (nor, in Dr. Kheriarty’s case, does the content), so theplaintiffs cannot showthat these restrictions were traceable to the White House officials. In fact,there is no record evidencethat White House officials ever communicated at all…
This evidence does not supportthe conclusion that Hoft’s past injuries are likely traceable to the FBI or CISA….
There is no evidencethat the White House asked Facebook to censor every user who reposts a member of the disinformation dozen, nor did Facebook change its policies to do so.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
So Trump’s executive order “stopped” imaginary censorship while enabling very real suppression of speech. His FCC chief Brendan Carr now routinely threatens media organizations over their editorial choices.
But Trump’s real innovations in censorship are just getting started. His administration has launched a systematic campaign to eliminate discussions of diversity and inclusion, reaching far beyond government into private business. And last week, he announced plans to “create some NICE NEW LAW!!!” specifically designed to sue authors and publishers who dare to criticize him using anonymous sources.
If you can’t see that, it’s a Truth Social post saying:
As a President who is being given credit for having the Best Opening Month of any President in history, quite naturally, here come the Fake books and stories with the so-called “anonymous,” or “off the record,” quotes. At some point I am going to sue some of these dishonest authors and book publishers, or even media in general, to find out whether or not these “anonymous sources” even exist, which they largely do not. They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty. I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!
Let’s be clear about what this means: Trump wants to create legal tools that would let him force journalists to reveal their sources or face ruinous lawsuits. This isn’t just about suppressing critical books — it’s about making sure no insider ever dares speak to the press about his actions again. The chilling effect would be immediate and devastating — precisely what Trump and those in his orbit want.
The MAGA faithful love to pretend that “anonymous sources” means “made up quotes.” But any journalist knows that fabricating sources is a career-ending offense — just ask Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, whose names are now synonymous with journalistic fraud. The ability to protect legitimate anonymous sources isn’t just a nicety — it’s fundamental to investigative journalism and government accountability.
Trump knows this. His proposed law isn’t about preventing fake quotes — it’s about ensuring that anyone who might expose his actions faces not just legal harassment, but the very real threat of retaliation from his most rabid supporters. It’s a calculated attempt to ensure that the next Watergate-style revelation never sees daylight.
But Trump wasn’t done. Just hours before he claimed to Congress that he had “brought back free speech,” he had threatened to imprison and deport protestors while promising to strip federal funding from any university that allows protests:
If you can’t see that, it’s a post from Trump saying:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This threat manages to violate multiple constitutional principles at once. But the sheer levels of nonsense here require so much effort to peel back each layer of madness.
First, the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, control over federal spending. This isn’t obscure legal theory — it’s basic separation of powers that even high school civics students understand.
More fundamentally, this is a direct assault on core First Amendment rights of expression and assembly. When Trump says “illegal protests,” he means protests he doesn’t like — whether they’re pro-Palestine demonstrations or (more likely) the anti-Trump protests he knows are coming. The “illegal” framing is just cover for targeting specific viewpoints — exactly what the First Amendment prohibits.
Now here is where you might expect that all the people who were so concerned about “free speech on campus” to speak up. Remember all those self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” who spent the last few years writing endless think pieces about how a student protest against a conservative speaker represented The Death Of Campus Free Speech™?
Funny story: they seem absolutely delighted by actual government censorship of campus speech. Take Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which has built an entire media empire on breathless warnings about campus censorship. Their take on Trump’s threat to literally imprison protesters? An “exclusive” gleefully reporting that the GSA is already implementing Trump’s threats, preparing to strip Columbia of $5 billion in funding unless it shuts down protests they deem “antisemitic.”
It’s almost like they never actually cared about free speech on campus at all. They just cared about which speech was being challenged.
The strategy by Trump here is bone-chillingly clear: threaten universities’ survival through financial blackmail while simultaneously threatening students with life-altering punishments for exercising their constitutional rights. It’s a two-pronged attack designed to make universities preemptively shut down protests and make students too afraid to speak out.
This is what actual government censorship looks like. Not imaginary pressure on social media companies that even Trump’s own Supreme Court appointee dismissed, but real threats of imprisonment, deportation, and financial ruin for engaging in constitutionally protected political speech.
So when Trump stood before Congress mere hours after issuing these threats and claimed he “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech,” he wasn’t just lying — he was executing a deliberate strategy to destroy the very concept of truth itself. By boldly claiming the exact opposite of reality, he’s trying to make people give up on the idea that facts matter at all.
And that’s the real threat here. Not just the actual censorship (though that’s bad enough), but the attempt to make reality itself negotiable. Because once truth becomes whatever the person in power says it is, actual free speech becomes impossible.
The traditional ending here would be something like “we can’t let him get away with it.” But that’s not quite right. The point isn’t just to stop him — it’s to preserve our ability to recognize and speak truth at all. Even when — especially when — the most powerful people in the country are trying to convince us that up is down, black is white, and censorship is freedom.
