Litigating against the Big Lie

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Press critic A.J. Liebling famously pronounced that the media was “the weak slat under the bed of democracy,” and in our post-truth, propaganda-ravaged infosphere, it’s becoming clear that Liebling, who wrote pretty much at the peak influence of modern print journalism, didn’t know the half of it. As we continue reeling from the shock of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, a good deal of the urgent reclamation work before us involves the fraught question of how to render our badly damaged mediasphere more responsive to simple truth claims—and more accountable for the democratic harms wrought by the unchecked flow of malicious disinformation throughout its channels.

Because of the robust, and invaluable, protections of the First Amendment, this challenge cannot, and should not, involve any top-down legislative abridgments of speech. But an unexpected, and powerful, remedy is now surfacing in the civil courts, thanks to the defamation lawsuits mounted by Dominion Voting Systems and other companies against right-wing grifters peddling the unfounded, incendiary claim that these firms rigged the outcome of the 2020 presidential election to ensure Joe Biden’s victory. And as TNR staff writer Matt Ford notes, Dominion’s complaint against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the Big Lie of election theft, distills many of the tactical advantages of seeking to shut down the Trumpist disinformation matrix—the quest to mint raw ideological delusion into cold, hard cash—at its source:

Dominion devotes ample space in its complaint to documenting how Lindell’s claims were not just wrong, but recklessly and intentionally wrong, in its view. The company had no choice if it wanted to meet the legal threshold for defamation. What’s even more interesting is how Dominion wove in the economic forces at play. Lindell, in its telling, is not just some random guy with an unusually large platform. He’s a key advertising sponsor on the networks that aired his sensational claims, creating a conflict of interest for the media outlets that hosted him—and a profit opportunity for himself.

To that end, Dominion also charged him with engaging in deceptive trade practices. Lindell, Dominion argued in its complaint, “willfully made them in the course of his business as the CEO of MyPillow because he and his company could derive—and did in fact derive—financial benefits from making those false statements, namely, sales of MyPillow products that occurred because Lindell was exploiting and disseminating defamatory falsehoods about Dominion.”

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This claim supplies a “jarring glimpse into how the right-wing media grift operates,” Ford observes—a deranged feedback loop of groundless conspiracy-mongering supplemented by crass pitches aimed to move greater product volume in the direction of the credulous mass audience Lindell has commanded at obliging media platforms such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News. And of course, Lindell is just one among scores of high-profile propagandists of the Big Election Lie who’ve faced subpoenas from Dominion and other voting operations as they pursue big returns on the back end of the right-wing media matrix. Rudy Giuliani is presently going all out to dodge process servers in the Dominion suit, even as his pockets are stuffed with proceeds from far-flung sales pitches for “gold coins, supplements, cigars and protection from ‘cyberthieves,’” as Dominion’s $1 billion complaint against the erstwhile “America’s mayor” alleges.

Against the backdrop of all this insatiable grifting, the Dominion legal strategy possesses a kind of elegant symmetry that it’s hard not to admire, as Ford writes:

Litigation … is a uniquely potent threat to right-wing purveyors of falsehoods. It imposes an outer bound of conduct where basic ethics, civic values, and common sense will not. Lou Dobbs, who spent months disputing the election results without evidence, lost his Fox Business Network show one day after Smartmatic, another voting-machine company, filed a lawsuit against him and his network. Other right-wing outlets have scrambled to retract or rewrite articles that fed into the “Big Lie” before January 6. Some conservative networks have even run special segments disavowing their previous coverage under the threat of legal action.

One key moral of the present wave of voting-machine suits would thus appear to be something we’ve long known about the conservative movement in America: Appeals to the ostensibly core American verities of citizenship and truth-telling count for far less in its sanctums of power than the lure of cashing in on democratic decline. And the other main takeaway here is equally obvious: If you’re going to shore up a failing bed slat, pretty much the worst tool you could choose is a mail-order pillow.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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