Dept. of Left-Leaning Sanctions (DOLLS) convenes

 

[links added] 

Leaked Minutes from the Nov. 3, 2025 meeting of the Dept. of Left-Leaning Sanctions (DOLLS) 

Chair: As we convene the first meeting of this task force one year before the 2026 elections, it is critical that we clarify publicly the purposes of the task force. It is clear that the radical left is preparing to undermine America’s sacred election process. They already have in place cities filled with dangerous illegal immigrants who are being recruited to vote by mail and to keep lawful citizens from going to the polls. They have conspired to blanket late night television with the support of rich celebrities and Hollywood. Studies show that 97% of the guests and hosts are left wing radicals who are intent on polluting the airwaves with Marxist, trans, gay and anti-family propaganda that mirror decades of attempts to distort public school and college curricula. 

Our agenda today is to flesh out strategies that neutralize the radical left and that are road tested to succeed by building on the ground tactics that are in place. Democracy is at stake. 

We have only one person to thank for the vision to take on this awe inspiring mission and that is our fearless leader, the gilded Donald Trump. He is with us this morning to weave the charge for our task force and the nation. 

 Member 1: You are our great and noble warrior. / Member 2: We honor you as you prepare to contest the Nobel Peace and Pretense Award that will not be presented until Dec. 10. / Member 3: You are a man who has never lost a golf game. Not even close. / Member 4: You are a hunk, I dare say, who gets my juices flowing. / Member 5: On a personal level, you are a thoughtful leader who donated your own money to buy my cat her pajamas. / Member 6: You are a strong, strongman who could have invaded Greenland had he wanted to. / Member 7: You are the only president to have ever had all the nation’s generals in rapt attention. / Member 8: You are a man who can smell a stolen election when it’s cooked up. / Member 9: You are a paragon whose face will finally adorn both the one dollar coin, emblazoned with Fight, Fight, Fight and the $100,000 H1B note, under the motto: In Sanity We Trust / Member 10: You are a humble leader who prefers Generalissimo to the Fuhrer. 

[A collective Amen rings out] 

Click here to go to Politico story 

Trump: Please stand and take your seats. I came up with the idea for the Dept. of Left-Leaning Sanctions out of holy cloth. No one had ever thought of it. I made sure that the acronyism, the abbrevization is something memorable, not like DOGE, your predecessor task force, which was an unqualified success in that almost no one remembers that Elon Musk pledged to reduce federal spending by $2 trillion, and just as few have followed up to check on the 20 million people who’ve received Social Security past age 100 or the $2.7 trillion in improper Medicaid and Medicare payments to people overseas. Data that doesn’t exist shows that more unneeded federal employees were eliminated to save costs than necessary employees were eliminated and then rehired by a ratio of 20:∞. It is also not the case that Musk made more in personal investments from his government work than I did. On the other side of the ledger, I improved on the name to avoid clever comebacks like calling the task force Doggy. To counter that shortfall, this task force shall be named DOLLS for the Dept. of Left-Leaning Sanctions. All those in favor say “Dolls.” 

Chair: Motion carried. 

Trump: I want you to be the first to know that Congressional leaders and sycophants have agreed that attempts to open up the so-called Epstein files have terminated. As the good contributors at Lays Potato Chips once wisely said, “They tried, but they couldn’t do. Nobody can have just one.” They included me in their commercials back in the late ‘60s. 

To commemorate the occasion, I named this task force DOLLS. The sick Democrats will no longer be able to claim that I once surrounded myself with underage girls. Just look at the DOLLS I surround myself with now. I call them the MAGA cougars. They are the finest cougars. You don’t find cougars like them on late night TV. We have Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, Kristie Noem, Kari Lake, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Katie Britt, Asley Moody, Anna Paulina Luna, Pam Bondi, Jeanine Pirro, Karoline Leavitt, Kimberly Gilfoyle, Vanessa Trump, Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump. We’re so close, some are like family. I added Marjorie Taylor Greene when she agreed to drop the Epstein nonsense. You can call it a harem. I call it a woke-proof catalog. The left can’t touch them. They wouldn’t dare gang up on them. Imply that a woman isn’t qualified because of her looks? Three-D checkmate. Silence is golden. The best part is they fly below the polling radar. Why do you think we won the male youth vote so convincingly? Biden stole the election in 2020, claiming 56% of young men voted for him. In 2024, when the election wasn’t rigged, 56% voted for me. Young white men are horny, as they should be. I was. Fake pollsters are clueless. At least Newsweek is paying attention. 

Just look at the polling on our big beautiful government shutdown. Democrats blame the Republicans. The Republicans blame back. The pollsters made up that the public blamed me. My favorability is sky high. With the government closed, we’re emptying offices, firing dead weight, more of the worst of the worst. We get sued. We lose in one court, lose in another, the court actions are stayed, the cases get up to the Supreme Court. We win. Open and shut cases. Shadow dockets are like ICE in masks. See no evil. Hard to speak evil. 

If evil is spoken, we shut it up quickly. That’s why I love big business. The bigger, the better to leverage what’s needed. To them, millions is chump change and they’re the chumps. Corporate chumps, law firm chumps, university chumps. Media chumps, I love them. 

We’ve done our homework 20-25 times over. 

The Jews love us. Anti-Semitism is MAGA’s gold-plated issue. And we get to replace college curriculums. fund the Presidential library, gild the White House lillies in its name. Bibi does what he wants. I scold him. I sound tough. I am tough. We’re two peas in a knish. He won’t let Palestinians speak in the Middle East, I won’t let them speak here. 

I called in the military to Quantico to feel them out. Can we trust them like we can trust ICE and the Homeland Security Task Forces (HESTAFO) reinforcements? ICE agents make $50,000-$90,000 a year, not counting overtime, benefits and bonuses. Recently hired HESTAFO agents are entitled to hiring bonuses of $50,000 to go with the overtime, benefits and a chance to meet Kristi. No costs or college needed, and we fast track background investigations. 

I trust each and every one of them. They know that because of the government shutdown, they won’t get any of that money unless I know they’ve done the job we ask them to do. That’s why I trust Tom Homan. He knows if he doesn’t do the job we ask him to do, there’s that $50,000 in a cash bag he’ll need to account for. I love employees like Tom. 

But the military - the collection of dudes in dresses, or females who can’t keep up, or the fat generals and admirals. We called them in to prepare them for the war from within, the radical left in the cities. The cities are the training grounds for wars around the world, particularly for now in and around Venezuela. Hear that, Greenland. Sanctuary cities have a bullseye on their churches and schools. I call it the grand Trump invasion. Unprecedented. For the generals and the military too, if they don’t agree with the program, they can resign and give up their rank and security. We are taking over the cities to bring the violence rates down to keep pace with the reductions in violence already happening, to deport animals and to give this department the boost it needs to break out more left-leaning sanctions. 

The fake polls don’t matter. They claim to show problems with the economy when the stock markets are going through the roof. Boo hoo for Americans when 62% of the people own stocks. You don’t have to believe me. Even Gallup says so. You don’t read that in the fake media. 

All fake news reports on is Medicare this and Medicaid that. People don’t know the difference and they don’t care. No matter how much the media calls our policies setbacks, it’s child’s play to paper over it. What Americans care about is gas, food, and money in their pockets. We’re even covered on Social Security. The government shutdown doesn’t stop those checks from rolling in. 

We can ride the tail of AI and hold out for months. Smart families can rake in billions in plain sight. Let the primaries play out, watch the dominoes fall, let the radical left and the Democrats claw at each other and spend money, they have no issues. They’ll keep calling me names and put all their eggs in an economy basket. 

Click here for more Trump gifs

Then around Easter egg time, as Americans are thinking about their income taxes, and we ratchet up America 250, we’ll drop a big beautiful rebate on people, carefully selected for optimal election return. If that doesn’t move the numbers and silence any remaining critics, you at DOLLS can dig in and go into voter integrity mode. Have a good meeting. 

Chair: Thank you, Mr. President. We know you have your work cut out for you over the next month to contest The Noble Prize elections. You know the drill. 

                                                                             #####

My revelation about ICE and their masks: Is ICE Today’s Klan?

I have been associating ICE and their growing posse of Homeland Security Task Forces (HESTAFO) reinforcements with the GESTAPO in Nazi Germany and Poland, where my grandparents and two of their children were rounded up, transported and executed. They were considered animals, dangerous and illegal by Nazi law. 

Yesterday I had a revelation that at first made me deeply embarrassed that my understandable association apparently blinded me to a parallel, more obvious and closer to my American home. The epiphany came when I heard the powerful dirge Is ICE Today’s Klan? sung by Louise, whom I don’t know, as part of the regular podcast Thom Hartmann’s Daily Take. 

The parallel to the Klan was even more chilling in that the Gestapo didn’t wear masks when they did their armed roundups with governmental impunity and societal acquiescence. ICE and the Hestafo do. So did the Klan. Why? As Republicans have maintained and Fox News drives home, because their identities need to be concealed and their personal safety needs to be protected, especially in this era of social media and doxxing. But how are those arrested, harassed and rounded up supposed to know if the masked, armed, unidentified folk are authorized federal agents or marauders? After all, as Trump keeps saying and Fox News reinforces, the cities are violent, lawless, “burning hell holes,” plagued by non-stop violent crime and homelessness. Odd. Have gang bangers and drug dealers turned to using tear gas, kidnapping and disappearing community people. Maybe they get even surlier when the community chants USA, USA. At this point in Trump’s invasions, communities no longer confuse federal agents with violent gang members or drug dealers. The fear of violence in the cities is of the agents. 

It is tricky, though. How are communities and their locally elected officials to document when masked or unidentified federal agents act beyond their authorization to physically abuse people or spew profanities and racist barkings? Trump and federal agents are disinclined to welcome protesting to get points across. Cameras and videos help, even in an era of deepfakes and fabricated images. Hard to tell who the domestic terrorists are. Kristi Noem has even said: “Violence is anything that threatens [agents] and their safety, so it is doxxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles.” No wonder there’s violence in America’s cities with masked, armed agents skulking about. 

This is not the first time Chicago has been invaded by federal troops following orders. In 1850, in the aftermath of congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling cities to help capture and return Black people fleeing slavery, the federal government deputized local officials to enforce slavery. The City Council denounced the law as “cruel and unjust,” ordering police not to assist in its enforcement, as noted by Claudia Fegan and Linda Rae Murray in the Oct. 13 Chicago Sun-Times. As they put it, “Chicago made a choice. It chose justice over compliance. It chose to defend the humanity of those the federal government deemed ‘fugitives.’ Today, that moral tradition is being called upon again.” And the Trump administration is treating it as violence. 

The Hartmann report is eye opening and includes historical analogs to the Ku Klu Klan. “Both [ICE and the KKK] used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.” To this day, the masked anonymity of the KKK has kept the identities of all but a few KKK leaders hidden, with no accountability. The masks are perpetual care shields. 

The societal result was that almost 20 states made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear disguised and armed. Many of the laws are still on the books. Interestingly, in 1999, the Indiana law was overturned by a federal court which found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.” 

In California, Gov. Newsom signed a bill into law recently that bans state and federal law enforcement from wearing masks on the job. Trump’s response? “We don’t need to abide by this garbage,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said on social media, according to Fox News. Seems consistent with the administration party line and attitude. In her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the committee that she was hearing for the first time about reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups. 

All this registered with me, and was reinforced when I listened to the haunting dirge that the report included at the end. Can’t get it out of my head. 

Click here to go to Louise’s substack site 

“They knock on the doors where the weary hearts hide and the wind carries whispers of those who have cried”… 

 “The say it’s the law but whose law is it now? The same law that once wore a hood and a vow. 

'Is ICE today’s Klan? Beneath a new command. They hide behind badges, they hide behind claims. If justice is blind, then who leads her hand?”… 

'They say it’s protection they say it’s the law. But mercy’s the first thing they ever withdraw”… 

 

'They say you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but the masked men are coming and they’re already here”… 

'The mask never lifts, it just learned how to plan.” 

                                                                            ######

Yiddish dictionary redefines chutzpah: Nobel Peace Prize goes to Venezuelan

The most authoritative source on Yiddish has revised its classic definition of chutzpah. 

For years, Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish defined chutzpah as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.” In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. 

The definition now simply says Donald Trump, followed by the fuller definition, a photo, and the following examples: 

• People, usually male, who assume they deserve an award for showing up, no matter what they do when they do. 
• People who campaign for awards as if they’re a movie studio hawking for an Oscar, boasting repeatedly of settling 5, 6, 7, 8 wars, in case a prize committee has lost count. “Nobody in history has solved eight wars in a period of nine months. And I’ve stopped eight wars. That’s never happened before.” 

• People who fill the airwaves with sycophantic pretty boys who do their bidding for them. 

• People who’ve mastered self-serving hyperbole. In its opinion piece, The Daily Beast wrote: “His biblical comparison for the Middle East peace deal proves he can’t quiet his own Trump-et blast. Nearly 3,000 years ago, the Old Testament predicted the coming of the ‘Prince of Peace.’ (Isaiah 9:6). And on the 9th day of October 2025, President Donald J. Trump came close to suggesting he might have been who Isaiah had in mind. The whole world has come together, but the Middle East has come together for the first time in 3,000 years…. “When he says to anybody who will listen that he is bringing peace to the Middle East after 3,000 years, he is more histrionic than historical.” 
• People who put their face on a coin in violation of federal law that prohibits the image on both sides of the coin and provides that only the deceased can appear on U.S. currency. No such provision exists for Nobel Prize commemorative coins.

Doctored photo of a mythical Nobel Prize commemorative coin
with Maria Corina Machado on it 

• A person who orders the “lethal kinetic strikes” of presumed drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing multiple people on board, according to Fox News, demonstrating that there are apparent alternative paths to a peace prize rather than one for “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” 
• People who order invasions of cities, like Portland and Chicago, in their own country. 
• A person who changes the name of a cabinet department from the Defense Department to the War Department and stakes out a claim for a peace prize. 
• The 1992 book by Alan Dershowitz that had the chutzpah to be named Chutzpah opens with “American Jews need more chutzpah.” American Jews know where they can find it; in the author, his confidant and client Joseph Epstein, and Trump, all who share the secrets of a sex pedophile scandal. 
• One of chutzpah’s most ardent practitioners, Texas Senator Ted Cruz who knows whereof he speaks and at whom to point the finger, uses the term frequently. 
• A person who is touted for a Nobel Peace Prize by a leader who is accused by the International Criminal Court of the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, and of the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. 
• A man whose advisers complain of not winning an award because the awards committee “placed politics over peace,” using those very words, as if scripted. Roll call - White House communications director Steven Cheung; Katie Miller, the former White House staffer and wife of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller; Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump; and Vladimir Putin. “No one deserves it more than President Trump. But we know these people who establish who wins the Nobel Peace Prize hate Donald Trump. They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. And in our hearts, he will be winning the Nobel Peace Prize. We know that for sure,” Lara Trump said. 

To go to the story, click here 

Someone taught GOP Congressman Richard Hudson’s staff how to use AI and they went to town and placed bootlicking over both politics and peace. 

In public, Trump, flashing the characteristic humility of a self-proclaimed runner up, did not complain about not getting the prize. He said that the person who received the award called him to thank him and tell him she’s accepting the award in honor of him because he really deserved it. “I didn’t say ‘then give it to me,’” he joked, adding that he’s been helping her along the way. Forever the jokester. 

Postscript: In response to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, the recipient, Maria Corina Machado, in hiding from the Venezuelan government, tweeted her appreciation to the Venezuelan people and to Trump:

In response to the White House’s complaints that Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize Committee stated, “The Venezuelan regime’s rigid hold on power and its repression of the population are not unique in the world…We see the same trends globally: rule of law abused by those in control, free media silenced, critics imprisoned, and societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation.” 

On its official website, the Nobel Prize wrote, “It was a choice of ballots over bullets”. 

And as I wrote in another post the other day, the award won’t be presented until Dec. 10. Trump has plenty of time to mobilize his people to contest the award in ways only he knows how. 

Click here to go to the story 

                                                                                    ######

I’m confused about child sex trafficking: Happy birthday, Jeffrey

[The original version of this blog can be found here.]

ICE and the Hestafo seem intent on going after child sex traffickers and their kind. Sensible. 

I check out the ICE twitter site regularly and receive updates from Homeland Security’s Office of Public Affairs. Child sex traffickers are at the core of the “Worst of the Worst,” just the types of immigrants whose arrests are ballyhooed, sometimes with Kristi Noem on horseback, to take attention off the wholesale roundups of immigrants, lawful permanent residents and visa overstayers. 

Last week, for instance, the headline for one of Homeland Security’s updates read: “Pedophiles, Abusers, Rapists, and Other Violent Thugs Arrested in Operation Midway Blitz.” I paid particular attention because Operation Midway Blitz is the code name for the infiltration of the sanctuary city of Chicago, my hometown. 

Among the worst of the worst who were arrested are Carlos a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, arrested for aggravated sexual assault of a child family member; Hector, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, arrested for domestic battery; Bernardino, a criminal illegal alien and registered sex offender from Mexico, convicted of aggravated sexual assault victim 13-17, and a sex offender registration violation; Bolotbek, a criminal illegal alien from Kyrgyzstan, previously charged with domestic battery/bodily harm; Juan, a 41-year-old sexual predator from Mexico, convicted of criminal sexual abuse of a child; and Jose, a 39-year-old criminal alien from Guatemala, who has pending charges for domestic violence. Again sensible. 

Still, I’m confused. In a speech last week at the Religious Liberty Commission’s meeting at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., President Trump downplayed the severity of domestic violence crimes, saying that were it not for “things that take place in the home they call crime,” the deployment of National Guard troop in DC would have resulted in a bigger statistical reduction in crime. 

“They said, ‘Crime’s down 87 percent.’ I said, no, no, no — it’s more than 87 percent, virtually nothing. And much lesser things, things that take place in the home they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime. See? So now I can’t claim 100 percent, but we are. We are a safe city,” Trump said. 

 Click here to go to story 

I can’t tell if I should take child sex trafficking, sex with minors, and domestic violence seriously or not. 

Most of us recall the Access Hollywood video, with transcript, of Trump bragging to TV host Billy Bush about trying to have sex with a woman, whom he moved on “like a bitch.” It was leaked right before the 2016 election. 

“I couldn't get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look. 

“When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything." 

That was different. The woman wasn’t an underage girl and he apologized for what he and others, including his wife Melania, called “locker room talk" or boy talk. 

“No one has more respect for women than I do,” said Trump. 

Jeffrey Epstein is a sex-trafficker of a different color. 

In July 2019, he was arrested in New York and charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. That was more than 10 years after he pleaded guilty and was convicted in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution. His plea deal allowed him to be released after 13 months in custody, with extensive work release. He never went to trial in NY. He died in his jail cell a month after his arrest. Medical examiner’s conclusion: suicide by hanging. Almost three minutes of cell block footage of the time of death is missing. 

On the other hand, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, his long-time associate, who recruited young girls for him, did go to trial. She was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping him procure girls, for child sexual abuse and prostitution. She’s served about three years of a 20-year federal prison sentence and is counting on Trump to do something about it. 

In 2003, before Epstein served any time, when he was living the high life, with a net worth at about $300 million, he turned 50. He celebrated. Many luminaries celebrated with him and conveyed their wishes. The wishes were compiled by Maxwell in a 238-page birthday book that is now in the possession of Epstein’s estate. The book is replete with photos, poems and doodles. Much has been redacted, in particular, but not only, to protect the identities of underage girls. 

Epstein's birthday book, pages 94, 96, 112, 208, 216 & 217

 

 

Page 165 is Trump’s page. It is not redacted. It comes right after some guy named Stuey’s page of limericks: “Jeffrey at half a century, with credentials plenipotentiary, Though up to no good whenever he could has avoided the penitentiary.” Locker room humor. 

Trump’s page, signed at the bottom of a creative doodle of a woman’s body, frames a pretend transcribed exchange between Epstein and Trump. It is more locker room humor, with a wink: 

They agree there’s more to life than having everything. Trump offers that “enigmas never age,” that a pal is a wonderful thing, and “may every day be another wonderful secret.” 

Epstein’s dead, so your secret’s safe with him. 

Trump has protested that it’s not his signature. Handwriting experts beg to differ. So too does a recent Fox News panel. Trump’s also said he doesn’t doodle. That’s odd. In one of his books, he’s quoted as saying: “It takes me a few minutes to draw something. In my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then I sign my name.” 

Old pal, you sell yourself short. Before you spent your loose time on social media post ranting, you doodled. 

Click here to go to website 

In the face of the many photos of Epstein and Trump together, Trump has conceded they once were friends but that Trump broke off the relationship. The reasons for and timing of the fallout are somewhat fluid, according to Poynter’s Politifact in July 2025: 

• He barred Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club for poaching spa staffers. 
• In 2020, Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal reporters reported that the rift dated to late 2007, when Trump told reporters he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after Epstein behaved inappropriately toward a club member’s teenage daughter. 
• A 2019 Washington Post article cites a 2004 bidding war between Trump and Epstein over a Palm Beach oceanfront mansion as driving a wedge in their relationship. 

It is understandable that any mention of Epstein in relation to Trump angers Trump. His MAGA base has never turned on him before. He characterized the Epstein hubbub as a hoax started by Democrats and called the MAGA base that falls for it “stupid people” and “weaklings” whose support he doesn’t want anymore. 

 Trump's July 16 post on Social Truth 

Stalwarts in the MAGA base and Democrats have zeroed in on Epstein and the release of the Epstein files as the holy grail, presumably to access the scourge of child sex trafficking in high places. The almost singular obsession with the documents, though, has allowed Trump and Senate Republicans to thwart disclosure and buy time. With time, Trump can claim through his Attorney General that almost everything’s been released, Ghislaine Maxwell can cleanse her testimony and erase her memory in exchange for lenient treatment and a pardon (which she’s already done), the sex trafficking victims can be intimidated, Trump can come up with endless distractions, like blowing up one or two Venezuelan ships, to divert attention from the annoyances of the women and girls he respects so much, and the documents can be converted into redactive art pieces. 

 Redactive art-Epstein's birthday book-p. 96 

In dismissing Britain's ambassador to the U.S. the other day, The Brits seem to have enough information to turn their indignation into action. 

In a blockbuster series last week, the New York Times documented how JPMorgan enabled Epstein’s crimes by “supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned executives.” 

At Epstein’s behest, JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. In his 50th birthday year, “Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JPMorgan accounts — a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year,” the story reported. Epstein’s huge cash withdrawals continued — a total of more than $1.7 million in 2004 and 2005, much of which, according to the NYT, were used to procure girls and young women. 

A spokesman for JPMorgan told the NYT in a statement that the bank’s relationship with Epstein “was a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous crimes.” He added: “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking operation.” Of course not. Who would? 

To my knowledge, no one at JPMorgan has suffered a similar indignity to Britain’s US ambassador. 

Also the other day, an appeals court decision affirmed an $83 million award to writer E. Jean Carroll that reinforced court findings that Trump in fact sexually abused her during a brief encounter with him in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and that he lied by saying he’d never met her, according to Fox News. To date, Carroll has not received any payment. No doubt, Trump is appealing to his Supreme Court. 

So, in some ways, the specter of sexual abuse and sex trafficking in high places is very much alive. In other ways, the consequences of sex trafficking are dormant except for the sustained commitment against immigrants by ICE, the Hestafo, and now Republican South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace who’s introducing legislation - “No More Missing Children Act,” which she says is designed to protect underage minors from trafficking, kidnapping and exploitation. 

She blames the Biden Administration for reckless negligence that left minors “to roam a lawless system, preyed upon by traffickers, predators, and cartels,” Mace said in a statement. She adds that the bill builds on Trump’s mission to rescue missing children and “takes the fight to the criminals exploiting our immigration system,” according to the Daily Caller, the right-wing news and opinion site founded by Tucker Carlson. 

For her part, Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an unflinching Trump defender and open supporter of QAnon, is having none of it (make that some of it). As reported in The Hill, she recently complained to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the GOP’s old boys club. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys. 

Along with others in the MAGA base, she’s found herself in Trump’s crosshairs for supporting a discharge petition to release more of the Epstein files. Hedging her bets, she said she doesn’t think Trump is personally involved in the pushback. She’s suggested she's willing to take advantage of the constitutional speech or debate clause to reveal on the House floor sex offenders from Epstein's trafficking ring. 

For Trump’s part, he was deep into the underage girl racket long before Epstein’s 50th birthday. By Trump’s accounts, he got to know Epstein in the late 1980s. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” 

In 2020, the British daily, The Guardian, published a revealing story with plenty of unredacted photos: Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year. It recalled Trump’s life in the 1990s when he judged the world’s biggest modelling competition. 

The story includes an account by a young reporter for a magazine in Tel Aviv, who covered Elite’s Look of the Year competition and its after-parties in 1991 and 1992. He remembered seeing girls drinking alcohol, and at one particularly debauched party: “I saw girls sitting on guys’ laps, and I remember one guy putting his hand down a girl’s top. I remember thinking they were younger than me, and I was 17 going on 18.” 

In 1991, as detailed in The Guardian, Trump was a headline sponsor for Look of the Year, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. 

One of the girls on one of the chartered boats was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalled how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump and others. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalled. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing” in front of the men has anything to do with me becoming a model. The agency woman said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.” 

 Donald Trump with contestants in
1991’s Elite Look of the Year 

A still photo from previously unseen footage
of the 1991 Look of the Year finale 

To take ICE’s p-r campaign at its words, as I’ve written before, instead of using government resources to round up immigrants, lawful permanent residents and visa overstayers, and paying outsized bonuses to attract Hestafo forces, why not zero in on THE WORST OF THE WORST? 

Not hard to find or round up. The evidence of child sex trafficking is in plain sight. Don’t even need more Epstein files. 

Or they can return to reeling in the big fish like Lucino, a 44-year-old sexual predator from Mexico, who’s been convicted of assault with intent to sexually abuse a child in Franklin County, Iowa. 

 ##### 

Looking out for my self-interest: How you too can appreciate Trump

[The original version of this blog can be found here.]

I am Jewish, so I support Donald Trump’s still existing Department of Education for its investigations of 60 universities for antisemitic discrimination and harassment. In the meantime, in a show of fierce determination, the Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern as the investigations proceed. 

I am over 65 years old, so I’m relieved that Trump decided to not restrict Medicare reimbursement for skin-substitute bandages. He made the decision decisively after meeting at Mar-a-Lago with the head of the biotech company that produces the bandages donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. 

I live outside Chicago, our kids live in the city, we visit often, hear music, go to plays, eat out and the other day we walked along the 606 trail in the middle of town, so I’m comforted that Trump is intent on summoning the National Guard to take Chicago out of its hell hole while he continues to defund hundreds of organizations across the country haplessly directed at reducing crime and promoting public safety. 

“Chicago is a hell hole right now” - NBC News 

I am the son of an immigrant who entered the U.S. on a false Polish passport after living in hiding during the Holocaust and preserved the lie for the rest of her life because she feared being deported, so I am impressed at how effective instilling fear in immigrants can be. 

I studied history in college, where exposure to slavery, reconstruction, segregation, and redlining left me feeling that American exceptionalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so I’m looking forward to Trump making sure that museums like the Smithsonian eliminate exhibits that have me feeling inferior. 

I was a college professor who taught diverse students from all over the world, so I rally behind Trump’s efforts to limit student visas so we can return to classrooms with more recognizable cultural homogeneity. 

I am male, and I realize I’m behind the curve. By last count, 149 of the 155 mass (and school) shootings since 1982 have been perpetrated by men; 43% of men and only 22% of women report owning guns, so I have ground to make up. I don’t own a gun. In the aftermath of the recent Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, an attack that police say was carried out by a 23-year-old transgender woman, I’m relieved that the Trump Justice Department is looking into ways to get to the root of the mayhem by banning transgender Americans from owning weapons. 

I can get tongue tied. I lose track. I forget words. I am encouraged that when Trump speaks, prepared or not, his “very good brain” seeps out in erratic, incomprehensible bursts. And millions of people lap it up. Oh, to have that secret sauce. 

I am a writer. Brevity matters. I am inspired by the terse ways he expresses essence: “Washington DC is a totally safe zone; it’s called a safe zone…What they’re doing with the Epstein hoax, I think it’s enough….“I ended seven wars.” All separate thoughts spoken to leave a lasting impression. 

I finally have family money, thanks to 35+ years of employee-based savings, so I’m counting on that One, Big, Beautiful Bill giveaway to cut my taxes and reduce my estate taxes so I can be rich, wealthy, yahoo!!

I never served in the military or fought in a war. In I971, I had a draft lottery number of 335. Now that I’m too old to serve, I’m relieved that a president who avoided the draft by having a doctor attest he had bone spurs, and who called soldiers losers and suckers, in particular GOP Arizona Senator John McCain, still has enough warrior in him to change the name of the Defense Dept to the Department of War in time to get people to fear he’s going to invade Chicago with napalm before it was pulled from social media under a cover of darkness: 

The kidder. 

I love music, feature a music trivia site, Lines n’ Lyrix, so I’m atwitter that Trump is taking such an active interest in the Kennedy Center that he’s chosen his headlining cultural alterego to host the Kennedy Center Music Awards, which is likely to attract the largest combined viewing and boycotting audience in its history. 

My family has taken many trips to national parks. My anticipation is mounting that there will a be a new park and monument as soon as the Trump selection committee chooses from among the finalists in an illustrious list- Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, Bashar al Assad, Nicolás Maduro, Jair Bolsonaro, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Whom to honor in stone just lower than Trump? Construction on Mount Dictators can begin any time. Those nominated need not be deceased no matter how many people wish it were so.

                                                                            #####

Update: Sarah Palin and The New York Times is gone but not forgotten

Update: The two posts I've published on Sarah Palin and The New York Times need another update. The first was on Feb. 8, 2023  - "The New York Times has a way out of its lawsuit with Sarah Palin. Throw the case." With the other, an Aug. 2024 update -"Sarah Palin and The New York Times to go at it again" - they are history; the kind of history that the Supreme Court has the itch to repeat, so keep reading.

In April of this year, a jury in Manhattan did what an earlier jury also did, and concluded that the NYT did not libel Palin in a 2017 editorial. The first verdict didn't stop Palin from appealing so the case stayed alive. About all she said this past April was on a social post: She planned to "keep asking the press to quit making things up." With the Supreme Court's 2025-26 term less than a month away, and the Court digging deep into its summer shadow docket cases for Trump presidency cases, neither the Court nor Palin has hinted that libel is on the horizon, though libel cases pepper other court dockets here and there.

---

Aug. 29, 2024 update: "Sarah Palin and The New York Times to go at it again"

Neither we nor the New York Times has seen the public passing of Sarah Palin. We may have thought we had in Nov. 2022 when she lost an election bid for Congress in Alaska under a pathfinding ranked choice voting system, depicted in the new documentary, Majority Rules. Not so fast. Her potential blockbuster libel suit, that I wrote about 1-1/2 years ago before it was dismissed, is back. A federal appeals court, in a 56-page decision, remanded the case for re-trial. 

Click here to read the NYT story

Its significance rests on it being a vessel for the U.S. Supreme Court to get the case and overturn the landmark 1st Amendment decision in NY Times v. Sullivan. That 1964 ruling has made it much harder for public figures like Palin to win libel lawsuits. The Court's conservative justices have signalled an urge to overturn it, as they've done with Roe v. Wade, and Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail in 2016, “We’re going to open up those libel laws...So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” 

----

To appreciate the stakes involved, read my original story below that concerned me so deeply that I recommended that the Times throw the case.     

The New York Times has a way out of its lawsuit with Sarah Palin. Throw the case.

Originally published on Feb. 8, 2023 

The New York Times is locked in courtroom battle with Sarah Palin. It might be framed as the titanic clash between the newspaper of record and the Alaskan Russia watchdog. At stake is a bedrock foundation for the First Amendment, through the landmark 1964 case of NYT v. Sullivan. 

The Times appears to be caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It can lose the case, with Palin conceivably being awarded millions in punitive damages. It can win, in which case Palin will appeal all the way to a salivating Supreme Court, risking the rarified preferred position the press has held since 1964. 

I offer an unorthodox third option. From where I sit in the city of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, I’m rooting for the New York Times to throw the case. Unheard of, so hear me out. 

I can find no mention in the press or public record of an attempt to settle the case as the customary way out for both sides. Maybe it’s out there, but if not, it’s not unusual. Settlement negotiations tend to be closely held secrets from the public and from the jury. 

It’s possible Palin has offered to settle. I doubt it. She’s crusading for the political right that understandably knows a windfall when it drops not far from the fake news tree. The Times may have, and certainly should have, tried to settle. Possibly blocking the way, though, are the paper’s hubristic century-old memory that its publisher chided the paper’s lawyer “to never settle a libel lawsuit to save a little money” entrenched by the paper’s claim to an uninterrupted 50-year-old streak of libel wins. In any event, had the Times tried to settle, there isn’t a chance in this hellish case that Palin would have agreed. 

What’s left? Throw the case. That’s not easy. As the Wicked Witch of the West said in planning how to dispense with Dorothy to capture the ruby slippers: “These things must be done delicately.” Here’s why. 

On a good day, if there were such a thing with this Trump-infused Supreme Court, I’d worry about the Court’s impartiality in a case featuring an iconic GOP standard bearer vs. the paragon of the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!, as Donald Trump has referred to America’s media. 

And libel is its own kettle of fish. There are two distinct and overlapping strains of vocal Supreme Court logic on libel that have been floated uncharacteristically from the Court as trial balloons. 

In a case from 2019 in which a rape victim had accused Bill Cosby’s attorney of defaming her, Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with the Court’s decision to not take the case. He chose to elaborate. Classifying the rape victim as a “limited purpose public figure” needing to prove by clear and convincing evidence, like public officials must, that Cosby’s lawyer had acted with reckless disregard was not, according to Thomas, grounded in the original meaning of the 1st Amendment. 

Thomas, who has become the Court’s most unrepentant cherry picker of strict construction obstructionism, sees the seminal 1964 case of NYT v. Sullivan and the Court’s decisions extending it as “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” In his concurrence, Thomas listed a carefully selected catalogue of the nation’s years of historical antecedents. They left him unconvinced that the 1st and 14th Amendments should be interpreted to mean that Congress and the states shall make no laws abridging freedom of the press even if those laws allow public officials to financially shut down the press so the officials can continue to use their badges of honored service to beat the dickens out of protesters in the South. As Thomas wrote, “We did not begin meddling in this area until 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified.” 

Justice Neil Gorsuch released his own libel trial balloon last July in a case in which the son of a former Albanian prime minister was implicated in a U.S. defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghan military by procuring weapons from stockpiles in Albania. The case was dismissed because the lower courts concluded that such a public figure couldn’t possibly prove that the book publisher had acted with reckless disregard by contriving to manufacture the truth. 

Gorsuch’s reservations about NYT v. Sullivan differ from Thomas’. Gorsuch’s stem from the out of control evolution of media in a digital age. "Not only has the doctrine evolved into a subsidy for published falsehoods on a scale no one could have foreseen, it has come to leave far more people without redress than anyone could have predicted," Gorsuch wrote. Now, "virtually anyone in this country can publish virtually anything for immediate consumption virtually anywhere in the world." The Supreme Court didn’t take that libel case either. 

Thomas and Gorsuch have thrown down the gauntlet. The Court is primed to take on the New York Times and to drag down with it the all too often overlooked role of an indispensable free press in a country teetering on the brink of a frayed democracy if not autocracy. A recent empirical study of “The U.S. Supreme Court's Characterizations of the Press” by a University of Utah professor found “a substantial correlation between ideology and the Justices’ attitudes toward the press” that “reveal troubling trends at the Court, with widespread implications for any discussion of contemporary press freedom.” 

Here’s why Palin v. NYT is just the right trojan horse at the right’s time. 

NYT v. Sullivan cannot be appreciated without some recall of the Civil Rights movement in the South in the ‘60s. In taking laws into their own hands, lawmakers from legislators to sheriffs imposed their will on blacks and on protesters. The whole world was watching thanks to the free press, local and national, that is until lawmakers filed smothering libel suits. To win, the lawmakers needed to prove to a local jury only that something reported was false even in the most negligible way, like reporting that protesters marching to the state capitol were singing My Country Tis of Thee, not the Star Spangled Banner, and that the stories referring to the lawmakers put them in a worse light to some people after reading the stories. That’s it. Not even financial damages were needed. That’s what state laws could and did allow until the Supreme Court began “meddling in this area” in 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified,” as Justice Thomas wrote. 

In contrast to Thomas’ predetermined reading of history, the Court’s unanimous opinion in Sullivan, which was issued when Thomas was 16 years old, addressed posterity in framing the case “against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. 

In concurring, Justice William O’ Douglas, often the ornery conscience of the Court in such matters, combined with Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, in writing: “This Nation, I suspect, can live in peace without libel suits based on public discussions of public affairs and public officials. But I doubt that a country can live in freedom where its people can be made to suffer physically or financially for criticizing their government, its actions, or its officials.” 

”It was a majestic opinion,’ summarized Floyd Abrams, a prominent 1st Amendment lawyer who’s represented the Times. “It had a command of American history that is rare in a judicial opinion. It reminded us of how young we are as a country.” 

NYT v. Sullivan has often been regarded as one of the most enduring exports of American democracy. 

Or you can value Thomas’ veneration for justice and American history. 

A critical and at the time heralded historical misdirection came later in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s when a series of Supreme Court decisions extended NYT v. Sullivan’s carefully circumscribed applicability of the protective 1st Amendment freedom that liberated breathing room to cover the actions and misdeeds of “public officials. The opinions applied the same rigorous “reckless disregard for truth or falsity” standard to the bottomless public arena that tracks in “public figures” whose special sauce is that they can commandeer microphones and sound systems that resemble the social media influencers of today. Trouble is that has allowed all breeds of media, often as crude as the self-serving celebs they cover, to have a preferred, almost exalted, position when they cover the territory with bravado and one-upmanship that relegates truth to a commodity indistinguishable from clickbait or promotional loss leaders. That is more to Judge Gorsuch’s point and it’s a nettlesome one at that.

Once the province of vigilant watchdogs of governments, public officials and democracy devolved into the hobnobbers with public figures and into the makers and breakers of celebrities, it’s a slithery slope to get to Donald Trump, the real estate mogul, but not yet ignominious public official. No wonder that the pre-public official Trump emerged from his real estate-TV Apprenticeship period into the political arena already committed publicly to eviscerating the 1st Amendment. At about that time, public figure and Trump’s wife Melania pursued a lucratively successful series of libel suits that stemmed from stories brazenly reporting of rumors of her involvement in a high end escort service. She reaped a huge, though undisclosed, settlement, because the lead case targeted the British press, which is unprotected by NYT v. Sullivan and the 1st Amendment. 

Just as Trump has set the table for the public to distrust election results and fake news, he descended the escalator into electoral politics in June 2015 toting a resolute agenda to undermine NYT v. Sullivan, the 1st Amendment and libel. “We’re going to open up those libel laws,” Trump pledged on the campaign trail. “So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” 

******

So here we are now back in Manhattan in week 2 of Palin v. NYT. If you were to follow the American press and its naïve, complacent, even blind, over-reliance on the onerous reckless disregard standard appended to the 1st Amendment, you might think, I believe potentially disastrously, that Palin and her lawyers’ admission to an “uphill fight,” as the Politico headline read last week, means that the Times has the upper hand as is typical in libel cases. Or as the Times’ own coverage reported Jan. 23, “Though defenders of broad First Amendment protections for the media have said Ms. Palin’s evidence is weak, they also acknowledged that a jury could decide otherwise.” 

The basis for the complacency has been pierced. More than five years ago, in Aug. 2017, the trial judge in the case dismissed Palin’s suit, ruling that under no set of facts could Palin meet the high burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that the Times had published the facts in the editorial with reckless disregard for their truth. Palin appealed. It took two years for the appeals court in 2019 to reverse and send the case back to the trial court where it is now. 

In issuing its opinion, the unanimous appeals panel provided an unusual sneak peek at some of the evidence. 

The dispute is over an editorial published by the Times on June 14, 2017, the same day that a gunman opened fire at a baseball field in Virginia where Republican congressmen were practicing. GOP Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana was among those injured. The editorial, headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” asked whether the Virginia shooting was evidence of how vicious American politics had become. It recounted another incident from six years earlier when in 2011 Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Gifford of Arizona suffered severe brain damage and partial paralysis during an attempted assassination in which six others were killed by the gunman. 

The editorial page editor assigned the editorial to an established editorial page writer. After the draft was written, it went back to the editorial page editor who inserted a reference dating back to the 2011 massacre that added the context that the earlier shooting occurred after Palin’s fundraising political action committee had circulated a map putting Gifford and 19 other Democrats under “stylized cross hairs.” 

The revised editorial made a distinction between the two shootings. In the earlier shooting, “the link to political incitement was clear.” No one reviewed the editorial after the revisions and it was published. 

Almost immediately that day it became apparent that the gunman in 2011 had no access to the Palin committee map putting Gifford and 19 other Democrats under “stylized cross hairs.” Therefore there was no “link to political incitement.” Moreover, the claim of a link to political incitement had been debunked years earlier. 

The Times changed the editorial text online by deleting “the link to political incitement was clear” and toning it down to: “But no connection” to the shooting and Palin’s PAC’s map “was ever established.” 

By morning with a firestorm gathering even within the paper, The Times published two separate corrections. 

From basically those facts, the trial judge had concluded that no matter what other facts might be introduced at trial, the actions of the Times and its staffers would at most amount to an unintentional screw up of a severity rising merely to negligence, as the law calls it, insufficient for the higher threshold of “reckless disregard” for arriving at the truth. 

The appeals court must have used a more refined lens than the trial judge. Among the facts the panel summoned in sending the case back for trial, it noted that a jury might see “reckless disregard,” knowing that: 

1. The editorial page editor who single-handedly inserted the revisions that brought Palin into the story and linked her committee to political incitement, was James Bennet. 

2. Bennet had previously been editor-in-chief at The Atlantic during which time the magazine had published a number of stories about the Gabby Gifford shooting, including one entitled, “Ten Days That Defined 2011,” which read in part, “the bad thing to come out of this already terrible story was a round of blame hurling, with people rushing to point at Sarah Palin’s infamous target map.” That story clarified that the gunman was clinically insane and the atrocity was “not really about politics at all.” 

3. Bennet has staked out the position under oath that he has no recollection of the content of the story in The Atlantic. The appeals panel considered two options a jury might conclude from that; either he was reckless when he published the editorial without reacquainting himself with the contrary articles published in The Atlantic six years earlier, or he’s lying. 

4. Bennet resigned from the Times in June 2020 under a cloud because of “a significant breakdown in our editing processes” relating to the publication of an op-ed entitled “Send In the Troops” by a GOP senator from Arkansas who was advocating for a military response to civic unrest. 

 

5. Bennet’s brother, Michael, has served as a Democratic Senator from Colorado since 2009 and is a strong proponent of gun reform legislation. The appeals panel wrote that the Bennet brothers are both “outspoken advocate[s] for gun control” and raised the possibility that a jury might find that Bennet had “reason to be personally hostile toward Palin, her political party, and her pro-gun stance. 

6. The appeals panel gave weight to the Times’ argument that the paper couldn’t have acted with reckless disregard for the story’s truth in that it published corrections the day after the editorial ran. Yet the panel concluded that it’s also “plausible that the correction was issued after a calculus that standing by the editorial was not worth the cost of the public backlash.” 

 

7. Part of the backlash came from The Times itself. One of the paper’s opinion columnists, Ross Douthat, emailed Bennet at about 10:30 the night story posted: “I would be remiss if I didn’t express my bafflement at the editorial we just ran…There was not, and continues to be so far as I can tell, no evidence that (the gunman) was incited by Sarah Palin or anyone else, given his extreme mental illness and lack of any tangential connection to that crosshair map.” Bennet responded about a half-hour later that he’d look into it in the morning. 

In case you’re curious as I was, the three-judge panel was composed of two judges who were appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan and one by Barack Obama. The trial judge was appointed by Bill Clinton. 

*****

 

The trial is in New York City. The New York Times has home field advantage over Palin. If you are of the left, as New York culture is, you may regard Palin as a joke, the butt of spot-on Saturday Night Live skits by Tina Fey, the albatross running mate around the neck of John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, and as having finally gone away as Paul Waldman wrote recently in The American Prospect. 

Palin’s legal team are no one’s fools. To get the multi-million dollar jury verdict they covet, they need to neutralize the home field advantage. The “uphill fight” they cop to publicly and in front of the jury is scripted in bold letters suitable for a Times Square marquee: Super soaker celeb vs. big bad media. 

Some of you may recall a similar headliner event, Hulk Hogan (or should I say alter ego Terry Bollea) v. Gawker, that resulted in a 2016 jury verdict against the media for $115 million in compensatory damages and $25 million more in punitive damages, all for the unauthorized release of a sex tape. 

The implicit question for the Palin juror is to whom do they want to teach a lesson? A much maligned, media-bashed celeb or the big bad media, keeping in mind that since the 2016 Hogan verdict, Trump and the right wing have fumigated the landscape with toxic fake news mantras so repellent that millions of people won’t touch the stuff or their information, vaccines, masks, or climate changes. 

The jury is obliged to color within the lines. It must conclude by clear and convincing evidence that the Times and its employees acted with “reckless disregard” for whether the facts included in the editorial were true when they were published. The states of mind of the players matter. 

When I teach libel law, I tend to deploy a gutteral device to get the point across to avoid, for instance, the diametrical interpretations used in this case by the trial judge and the ones enumerated by the three-judge appeals panel. 

Being Jack, I use the “Jack spit test.” If in publishing a story, you don’t really "give Jack spit" if the facts are true or false, then you’re acting with reckless disregard for their truth. Then for effect, I turn to the right (my favored direction) and let out a spitless chock-tooey. 

That will be the jury’s charge. Under the facts as I fear them now, with Bennet now testifying, I think the odds for journalism are painfully prohibitive. If the jury were to side with the Times, Palin will appeal and appeal again until the Supreme Court gets its crack at deciding that such jury instructions on reckless disregard should no longer be given involving public figures, maybe even public officials. The Court would then likely return the case to be retried, using a jury instruction more favorable to Palin and in the future, less favorable to well-meaning and industrious new outlets. 

With the facts as treacherous for the Times as they are in this case anyway, I counsel: Throw the case, if your liability insurance company lets you. You still have time to protect your flanks as you play out your trial strategy. Keep Palin from being portrayed either so sympathetically that she emerges as a victim indefensible to the rapacious powers of the big, bad media or villainously that you make her out to be a gold digger who needs this to revive her political career. As for how to present the Times, of course be remorseful but don’t go so far as to dig in your editorial heels that it was obviously an honest mistake because The New York Times never has libeled anyone and never will. 

If in the process, with James Bennet’s almost singular culpability for the edits in the Palin piece, it may appear that you’re throwing a fellow journalist under the bus. That’s always unseemly. If it comes to pass in throwing the case, I suggest a modest re-calibration of the saying that will reveal an ethical imperative. It’s revoking the license of a runaway bus driver. Ralph Cramden would approve. 

#####

Jack Doppelt is an emeritus professor of journalism at Northwestern University, who regularly taught Media Law & Ethics in which he characterized NYT v. Sullivan as one of the two most seminal cases for journalists to learn. Many of his writings are available on Substack at https://substack.com/@jackcdoppelt. He is a perennial subscriber to, and trusting reader of, the New York Times.