She testified that death threats against her increased after an editorial with an error said her PAC had contributed to political rhetoric that enabled an atmosphere of violence.
  • aramis87@fedia.io
    9·
    10 hours ago

    She testified that death threats against her increased after an editorial with an error said her PAC had contributed to political rhetoric that enabled an atmosphere of violence.The jury deliberated a little over two hours before reaching its verdict. A judge and a different jury had reached the same conclusion about Palin’s defamation claims in 2022

    Sounds like a pretty open-and-shut case, if it only took a couple hours to decide.

    Her lawsuit stemmed from an editorial about gun control published after U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise […] was wounded in 2017 when a man […] opened fire on a Congressional baseball team practice. […] In the editorial, the Times wrote that before the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona […] Palin’s political action committee had contributed to an atmosphere of violence by circulating a map of electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

    Yeah, I remember those ads. They claimed they weren’t rifle sighting cross hairs but some other thing instead. That denial had about as much plausibility as all the other Republican denials.

    The Times corrected the article less than 14 hours after it was published, saying it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting” and that it had “incorrectly described” the map.

    A) that sounds like a pretty quick retraction, and B) that sounds like they stated there was a proven link when there wasn’t. However the Republicans and their enablers have been pumping up stochastic terrorism for decades, so while there may not have been a proven link between their rhetoric and that specific incident, it falls very directly under the definition of stochastic terrorism.

    Palin testified Monday that death threats against her increased and her spirits fell after the editorial was published.

    Good.