Originally published at: Trump judge tosses Trump's defamation lawsuit against CNN | Boing Boing
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Trump’s enemy list gains one more member!
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There is no question that the statements made by CNN meet the publication requirement for defamation under Florida law.
It took me a little while to parse this statement. What the judge is saying is simply that for something to be defamatory under FL law, it has to have been published, and this was unquestionably published.
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More I think that publication is an element of defamation, necessary but not sufficient. He goes on to say that what’s said also has to be a “false statement of fact” and since this wasn’t the case, it’s not defamatory.
According the the BBC, “Trump had argued in the lawsuit that the use of the phrase had created a “false and incendiary association” between him and Hitler.”
I’d have quite liked to see this come up before a more progressive judge who might have said “Yeah, it creates an association between you and Hitler, but since you’re clearly a racist POS, that’s not false”.
Worth noting also that Politico reports the case was dismissed with prejudice, so Trump can’t try the same crap again.
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“The Big Lie” is a method to get people to believe any claim by counter-intuitively making it an implausible one. It is not exclusively associated with the Nazis, even though they used the technique.
In fact, in coining the term in Mein Kampf it was Hitler himself who falsely accused the Jews of using it to claim that his ally Ludendorff was to blame for Germany’s loss in the Great War. It was only later observed by historians that the Nazi regime turned around and used the method themselves, in a typical act of projection.
von Clownstick is just another right-wing grifter using that same method. Despite what Singhal said, there was nothing “repugnant” about CNN describing it as such, any more than if they’d described his grandiose pitches for his name-brand steaks, bottled water, “university”, etc. as over-the-top and ridiculous falsehoods.
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