Outcry after New York mayor dismisses separation of church and state | Eric Adams | The Guardian

Outcry after New York mayor dismisses separation of church and state

"Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

How stupid can Eric Adams be.  That's right he is a former cop's IQ is only 104.  Average IQ is 100-110

Eric Adams says ‘Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state’ at an interfaith breakfast

Martin Pengelly

Eric Adams delivers remarks at his annual interfaith breakfast at the New York Public Library on Tuesday in New York City. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Rex/Shutterstock

Civil rights groups blasted the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, after he said he believed God had made him mayor, appeared to support compulsory prayer in public schools and said: “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state.”

The head of the New York Civil Liberties Union led the condemnation.

“We are a nation and a city of many faiths and no faith,” Donna Lieberman said. “In order for our government to truly represent us, it must not favor any belief over another, including non-belief.”

The mayor made the controversial remarks at an interfaith breakfast at the New York Public Library on Tuesday.

Discussing his rise to power, the former police officer said he “strongly believe[d] in all my heart” that “God said, ‘I’m going to take the most broken person and I’m going to elevate him to the place of being the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe.’ He could have made me the mayor of Topeka, Kansas.”

The voters of New York City elected Adams as mayor in 2021, by a comfortable margin over the Republican Curtis Sliwa and after winning a crowded primary in the solidly Democratic city.

Adams’s time in office has proved controversial, from his approach to tackling crime, homelessness and sanitation, to allegations of nepotism, inconsistent veganism and bizarre remarks about how cheese is addictive.

At the prayer breakfast, Adams also said “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools” and “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state”.

He added: “State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies. I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.”

Lieberman pointed to the US constitution.

“The very opening passage of the Bill of Rights makes clear that church and state must be separate,” she said.

“On matters of faith, the mayor is entitled to his own beliefs. On the constitution, he must uphold his oath.”

An Adams spokesperson said the mayor “personally believes all of our faiths would ensure we are humane to one another.

“While everyone in the room immediately understood what the mayor meant, it’s unfortunate that some have attempted to hijack the narrative in an effort to misrepresent the mayor’s comments.”

Rachel Laser, president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said: “It’s especially disheartening to hear the mayor of New York city promoting rightwing, Christian Nationalist talking points about prayer solving gun violence.

“Not only is it simply untrue that prayer alone will end school shootings, but his words ignore the fact that students are free to voluntarily pray in public schools because of the separation of church and state.”

"To Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others

A Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the State of Connecticut

January 1, 1802

Gentlemen,

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.

Thomas Jefferson
President of the United States"

Too Smart To Be A Cop?

September 10, 1999 / 11:47 AM

Forty-five-year-old Corrections Officer Robert Jordan believes he has been discriminated against after the city of New London, Conn., deemed him too smart to be an enforcement officer and denied him employment.

After he filed a lawsuit, the federal judge dismissed it, ruling that the police department's rejection of Jordan did not violate his rights. Jordan strongly disagrees and tells CBS This Morning's Thalia Assuras why. 

---

"I was just taken aback," Jordan says.  "Philosophically, I found it offensive to the entire profession of law enforcement. We all know talented, intelligent people that pursue successful careers in law enforcement."

In May 1997 Jordan filed a lawsuit against the New London Police Department for denying him the opportunity of becoming a law enforcement officer in the city where he was born and raised and which he still lives nearby.

"I just couldn't accept it. And I found out there is absolutely no evidence.Â…There is no connection between your basic intelligence and job satisfaction or longevity on the job," he says.

Jordan was deemed too smart for the police force because he received a high score on an intelligence test. Jordan, then 45, scored a 33, the equivalent of having an IQ of 125. 

The average score nationally for police officers as well as for office workers, bank tellers and salespeople is 21 or 22, the equivalent of having an IQ of 104.

The city's rationale for the long-standing practice is that candidates who score too high could get bored with police work and quit after undergoing costly academy training.

Recently U.S. District Judge Peter C. Dorsey ruled the New London Police Department's rejection of Jordan, because of his high IQ test score, was not in violation of his rights. 

The court dismissed his lawsuit Aug. 31 and his attorney informed him on Wednesday.

Jordan feels the New London policy is ludicrous primarily because the city, through President Clinton's Fast Cop Program, received federal money to hire new recruits for the police academy, he says.

"I don't think it's setting really good seeds for the future of [its] public employees in the town, " he adds.

Jordan is not new to law enforcement. He had served as a part-time officer in Groton Long Point, Conn., in 1989. 

In 1993 he became a seasonal officer for the Department of Environmental Protection, which takes care of law enforcement in state parks. He never took off a single shift, he says. 

Jordan was never late and he felt he really did his job well. So when he decided to try for his local police force, he thought it could turn into something good, he says.

He is currently a corrections officer for the state of Connecticut, on the line, in direct contact with prisoners. 

Jordan would love to appeal but the cost of litigation may be too much for him, although he has not ruled out the option, he says."

Outcry after New York mayor dismisses separation of church and state | Eric Adams | The Guardian

Opinion | The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot and the Politics of Race and Crime - The New York Times

The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot and the Politics of Race and Crime

March 1, 2023, 12:24 p.m. ET

Akilah Townsend for The New York Times 

"It was a stunning rebuke. On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, the first Black woman and first openly L.G.B.T.Q.+ person to lead the city, failed to advance to a runoff, earning just 17 percent of the vote and becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose a re-election bid.

Four days before the election, I interviewed Lightfoot in her Chicago office. The space, with its soaring ceiling, was a clash of aesthetics, like many government buildings, displaying a kind of prudent grandeur, evoking the gravitas of the office without signaling excess, much like Lightfoot herself, who settled her small frame, dressed in a smart gray suit, into a large chair.

During our nearly hourlong interview, she choked up and fought back tears when discussing the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her siblings. A smile lit her face when talked about all the memes that had made her a folk hero in the early days of her term, and she puffed with pride when discussing her proudest moments as mayor, including how she and her team had dealt with the Covid-19 crisis.

But those weren’t the reasons I’d trekked to the frigid city on the lake. I’d come because Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major American cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.

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In those cities, Black people are outnumbered by other nonwhite groups, and in New York City and Chicago their ranks are dwindling.

Each of these four mayors was elected or re-elected around the height of two seismic cultural phenomena — Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Of the four, Lightfoot would be one of the first to face voters and test the fallout. (Turner is term-limited and can’t run again.)

It clearly did not go well.

On one level, the results of Tuesday’s election speak to how potent the issue of crime can be and how it can be used as a scare tactic. Lightfoot said that it was absolutely used as a political tool in her race: “You’ve got people who are using it as a cudgel against me every single day. You’ve got the only white candidate in the race who’s acting like he’s going to be a great white savior on public safety.”

That white candidate is Paul Vallas, who finished at the top of the crowded field on Tuesday with 34 percent of the vote. Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”

Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.”

In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.” She is also surprisingly candid about how race operates in the city itself: “Chicago is a deeply divided and segregated city.”

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It is that division, in her view, fomented by candidates who see politics in the city as a zero-sum game, that provided Vallas with an opening to win over the city’s white citizens. As she put it, “People who are not used to feeling the touch of violence, particularly people on the North Side of our city, they are buying what he’s selling.”

Indeed, Vallas won many of the wards in the northern part of the city, while Lightfoot won most of the wards on the largely Black South Side of town.

But two things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue, particularly against elected officials of color, which has happened often.

In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.

In 2021, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta chose not to seek re-election, becoming the city’s first Black mayor to serve only a single term, after wrestling with what she called the “Covid crime wave.” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans is facing a possible recall, largely over the issue of crime in her city, and organizers said this week that they have gathered enough signatures to force a recall vote.

Even in cities where Black mayors aren’t likely to be removed from office, their opponents are searching for ways to limit their power, using criminal justice as justification.

The Mississippi House recently passed a bill that would create a separate court system and an expanded police force in the city of Jackson, one of the blackest cities in America. The new district “would incorporate all of the city’s significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods,” as an analysis by The Guardian pointed out. Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, said the plan reminded him of apartheid.

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Crime often comes in waves, but a question lingers about how people, even liberals, respond when a crest arrives under Black leadership: Are Black mayors too quickly and easily blamed for rising crime, and if so, why? Because of an unwillingness to crack down on criminals, or because of a more insidious, latent belief in ineffectual Black leadership in times of crisis?

Lightfoot told me she understood that as a woman and as a person of color, “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens, that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive, that I’m the mean mayor, that I can’t collaborate with anyone.”

Even so, she conceded, “If you feel like your life has been challenged because of the public safety issues coming to your doorstep, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are, you need to feel safe.”

But feelings on issues of politics, crime and race also tap into our biases, both conscious and subconscious. In that vein, Lightfoot may be a harbinger, or at least a warning, for the other big-city Black mayors: As the Covid crime wave wears on, will their mostly non-Black citizens feel that their safety is being prioritized and secured under Black leadership?

Charles M. Blow joined The Times in 1994 and became an Opinion columnist in 2008. He is also a television commentator and writes often about politics, social justice and vulnerable communities. @CharlesMBlow • Facebook"

Opinion | The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot and the Politics of Race and Crime - The New York Times

Some Republicans Want to Ban ‘Latinx.’ These Latino Democrats Agree. - The New York Times

Some Republicans Want to Ban ‘Latinx.’ These Latino Democrats Agree.

"In Connecticut, some Democratic lawmakers want to prohibit the use of the gender-neutral term in official government documents. The Republican governor of Arkansas does too.

March 1, 2023Updated 6:45 a.m. ET

State Representative Geraldo Reyes Jr., a Democrat from Waterbury, Conn., introduced legislation barring the use of the word “Latinx” in government documents.Jessica Hill/Associated Press

When Democrats in Connecticut introduced legislation to ban the word “Latinx” from government documents, they found themselves with unlikely allies: Republicans including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who barred “Latinx” from state documents as her first official act.

Their reasons differ: Conservatives argue that the word, coined about 20 years ago as an inclusive, gender-neutral term to describe people of Latino descent, is a trope of liberal “wokeism.” But the bill making its way through Hartford was introduced by several Democratic members of the Black and Puerto Rican caucus. They argue, among other things, that the Americanized word disfigures the Spanish language and in doing so, is an act of cultural appropriation.

The situation has made for some of the oddest bedfellows in the culture wars. Ms. Sanders, who initiated her state’s ban in January, said the term “Latinx” was “ethnically insensitive and pejorative language.” Around the same time, she also forbade the teaching of “critical race theory” in Arkansas schools and the use of TikTok on state-issued devices — statements that have set the tone for her conservative administration.

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“One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels and verbs from English,” she said.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas signs an order banning the use of the term “Latinx” in government documents. Al Drago for The New York Times

In Connecticut, where the bill would bar the use of “Latinx” from government and state education documents, State Representative Geraldo Reyes Jr., who introduced the measure, called the term “offensive and unnecessary” in a statement. “The Spanish language has been around for 1,500 years, and it identifies male, female and neutral gender,” he said.

Representative Reyes, who represents Waterbury, cited the limited use of the word in Latin American countries and the lack of widespread discussion around its initial adoption.

His staff said the term has been used in state government documents, but infrequently.

He said that he did not intend his proposed legislation to be divisive, but the use of the word has stirred a passionate debate from Connecticut to Arkansas and beyond about “Latinx,” the value of inclusive language and the very idea of banning individual words.

The term “Latinx” emerged in the early 2000s. Its precise origins are unclear, springing from academia or activists or perhaps both.

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It was created to address a characteristic of Spanish that doesn’t exist in English: Spanish is among the many languages where words are gendered, and the male ending — here, “Latino” — is typically used to refer to a group broadly, even if it’s mixed-gender.

The x in “Latinx” serves a similar function as it does in Mx., the gender-neutral version of the honorifics Mr. or Ms.; it creates an alternative to “Latino” and “Latina.” The word was first added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2018. Alternative terms exist, including “Latine” and even “Latin@.”

“The origin was specifically referring to people who didn’t want to be pigeonholed in the traditional gender binaries, but now it is about Hispanic culture in general,” said Orin Hargraves, a lecturer in semantics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It is in line with everything that has been going on since the turn of this century of equalizing gender, the #MeToo movement, all of that together is one big bucket that you can put ‘Latinx’ into.”

Meilene Belmont, the transgender services manager at Translatinx Network, a New York City-based advocacy and support group for transgender people, embraces the term for its sense of inclusion. She said “Latina” is her preferred term as a transgender woman, though she values “Latinx” for peers who feel differently.

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“I believe that ‘Latinx’ is for anyone, for anyone who identifies as trans, gay, bisexual, cis gender — anyone,” Ms. Belmont said. “The X at the end stands for everybody.”

Some critics, like United States Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who represents Arizona and has spoken out about his distaste for the term, reject “Latinx” not because of its attempt at inclusivity, but because, he says, it has been imposed by outsiders on a community. In an interview, Representative Gallego said he has asked his staff not to use it.

Others take issue with the “x” itself: It is not a plural ending original to the language, and they argue that the letter’s inclusion whitewashes a Spanish word. The Royal Spanish Academy, which oversees the most authoritative dictionary in the language, has not approved it.

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But attempts to restrict the language via government decree have also drawn criticism.

“Hispanic, Chicano, Latino, Latinx, Latine, Latino American — none of those terms encompass everyone in our community,” John Lugo, the director of Unidad Latina en Acción, a Connecticut-based workers advocacy organization, said in a statement. He has called Connecticut’s effort to bar the term “an attack on our diversity.”

“We should not be policing the language that people are using to describe their identity,” Mr. Lugo said.

The word “Latino” was first added to the U.S. census in 2000; before that, starting in 1980, the survey’s questions about ethnicity used the word “Hispanic.”

“At the time, similar conversations arose about the appropriateness of that term," said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center. Critics then argued that “Hispanic” was a label foisted upon people, not one they selected for themselves. Today, respondents to Pew’s polls regarding how they define themselves prefer country of origin, like Mexican American, or Cuban American, Mr. Lopez said.

Some concerns about “Latinx” echo that 1980s debate: “It’s a very white term, and a white term shouldn’t represent a nonwhite population,” said Victoria Almazan, 20, a psychology student at the University of Connecticut, who supports the Connecticut legislation. (There is also a movement in Spanish-speaking countries to create gender neutral alternatives.) The Republicans in Arkansas, Ms. Almazan added, were right too — but for the wrong reasons.

“I think inclusivity is important, but it’s better to find a different word to use,” she said.

“I think inclusivity is important, but it’s better to find a different word to use,” said Victoria Almazan, 20, a psychology student at the University of Connecticut.Luis Diaz for The New York Times

In December, Progreso Latino Fund, part of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, a philanthropic organization, voted on a change to its mission statement. Instead of “Latinx,” Progreso chose “Latine” as a gender-neutral term, said Liana Garcia, the fund’s staff liaison, because of its familiar Spanish word terminus — like the endings of “leche” and “carne,” Spanish for milk and meat.

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“We decided that ‘Latine’ would be more in tune with the Spanish language,” Ms. Garcia said. “It was the way of equitably valuing everyone’s dignity.”

For all the political and academic debate, “Latinx” seems of little concern to many people who describe themselves as Latino or Hispanic. That’s mostly because it’s largely unknown: According to a 2019 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, just about a quarter of Hispanic Americans were familiar with the term, and only 3 percent used it to refer to themselves.

About two years later, an Axios-Ipsos Latino Poll taken in partnership with Noticias Telemundo showed about half of the respondents of Spanish-speaking origins had no objection to being referred to as Latinx.

“If it’s more inclusive, that’s a good thing, I don’t see anything wrong with that,” Marvin Estrada, 34, a cook at a local restaurant, said on a recent afternoon in Stamford. “But honestly, I hadn’t heard the word until today.”

Marvin Estrada, a cook in Stamford, Conn., had not heard the term “Latinx” but said he didn’t object to it.Luis Diaz for The New York Times

As debate over the bill continued at the Capitol in Hartford, Natalie Betancur, a nurse in Stamford, said she had heard the word, but only in the news and not among her peers. “If someone wanted to be referred to as Latinx, I would have no problem with that,” said Ms. Betancur, 39. “I would just ask that they have patience with me and not get mad as I get used to it.”

Trying the term’s unfamiliar syllables out for the first time, Briggit Barzola, 29, a restaurant worker in Stamford who grew up in Lima, Peru, said it might grow on her.

“We would just have to get accustomed to it, but we had to come to the United States and get accustomed to the culture here,” Ms. Barzola said. “We can get accustomed to new things — it just takes time.”

Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.

Sarah Maslin Nir covers breaking news for the Metro section. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her series “Unvarnished,” an investigation into New York City’s nail salon industry that documented the exploitative labor practices and health issues manicurists face. @SarahMaslinNir"

Some Republicans Want to Ban ‘Latinx.’ These Latino Democrats Agree. - The New York Times

Republicans PANIC over McCarthy’s DANGEROUS deal with Tucker

Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods - The New York Times

Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods

"Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, spoke under oath last month in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems.

Feb. 27, 2023

“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Rupert Murdoch said of the election fraud narrative.Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documentsreleased on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.

The filings also revealed that top executives and on-air hosts had reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to various fictitious allegations about Dominion. These included unsubstantiated rumors — repeatedly uttered by guests and hosts of Fox programs — that its voting machines could run a secret algorithm that switched votes from one candidate to another, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.

Despite those misgivings, little changed about the content on shows like Mr. Dobbs’s and Ms. Bartiromo’s. For weeks after the election, viewers of Fox News and Fox Business heard a far different story from the one that Fox executives privately conceded was real.

Lawyers for Fox News, which filed a response to Dominion in court on Monday, argued that its commentary and reporting after the election did not amount to defamation because its hosts had not endorsed the falsehoods about Dominion, even if Mr. Murdoch stated otherwise in his deposition. As such, the network’s lawyers argued, Fox’s coverage was protected under the First Amendment.

“Far from reporting the allegations as true, hosts informed their audiences at every turn that the allegations were just allegations that would need to be proven in court in short order if they were going to impact the outcome of the election,” Fox lawyers said in their filing. “And to the extent some hosts commented on the allegations, that commentary is independently protected opinion.”

A Fox News spokeswoman said on Monday in response to the filing that Dominion’s case “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal scrutiny.” She added that the company had taken “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”

In certain instances, Fox hosts did present the allegations as unproven and offered their opinions. And Fox lawyers have pointed to exchanges on the air when hosts challenged these claims and pressed Mr. Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani to present evidence that never materialized.

But the case is also likely to revolve around questions about what people with the power to shape Fox’s on-air content knew about the validity of the fraud allegations as they gave pro-Trump election deniers a platform — often in front of hosts who mustered no pushback.

“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended major media organizations in defamation cases. He added that Fox’s arguments were stronger against some of Dominion’s claims than others. But based on what he has seen of the case so far, Mr. Levine said, “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”

Dominion’s filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”

The document also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had implored Mr. Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested instead that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”

There was some discussion at the highest levels of the company about how to make that pivot, Dominion said.

On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, talked about whether Mr. Hannity and his fellow prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, should make it clear to viewers that Mr. Biden had won the election. Mr. Murdoch said in his deposition that he had hoped such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”

According to the filing, Ms. Scott said of the hosts, “Privately they are all there,” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” No statement of that kind was made on the air.

Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”

Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.

At one point, Dominion’s lawyers accuse Ms. Pirro, who hosted a Saturday evening talk show, of “laundering her own conspiracy theories through Powell.” The filing goes on to say Ms. Pirro bragged to her friends “that she was the source for Powell’s claims.” Dominion notes that this was “something she never shared with her audience.”

The filing on Monday included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, who was one of the many senior executive cautioning about the content of Fox’s coverage. After Mr. Hannity told his audience on Nov. 5, 2020, that it would be “impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results,” Mr. Dinh told a group of senior executives including Lachlan Murdoch and Ms. Scott: “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.”

When asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Mr. Dinh said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”

In their filing on Monday, Fox’s lawyers accused Dominion of cherry-picking evidence that some at Fox News knew the allegations against Dominion were not true and, therefore, acted out of actual malice, the legal standard required to prove defamation. 

“The vast majority of Dominion’s evidence comes from individuals who had zero responsibility for the statements Dominion challenges,” the lawyers said."

Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods - The New York Times

Opinion | Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary - The New York Times (DeSantis, America's newdevil!)

Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary

Feb. 27, 2023

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

"In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.

That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.

Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”

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Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’”

This would give DeSantis’s cronies enormous power over who can teach in Florida’s colleges and universities. Last month, I wrote about the governor’s campaign to transform the New College of Florida, a progressive public institution, into a bastion of conservatism. At the time, some faculty members suspected that DeSantis’s new trustees might find their grandiose plans stymied by bureaucratic obstacles. Young believes that House Bill 999 would sweep many of those obstacles away.

The bill, of course, is only one part of DeSantis’s culture war. His administration has already limited what can be taught to K-12 students about race, sex and gender. (Some teachers removed all books from their classroom shelves while they waited for them to be reviewed for forbidden content.) When Disney spoke out against one of DeSantis’s education measures, the governor punished the corporation. And he is pushing legislation taking aim at the news media by making it easier for people — especially those accused of racial or gender discrimination — to sue for defamation.

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Last year, a court blocked parts of DeSantis’s “Stop W.O.K.E” act, a ban on critical race theory that a federal judge called “positively dystopian.” In the likely event that House Bill 999 passes, the courts may block it as well. But the governor, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has made his political program very clear.

“DeSantis seems to be putting into practice some of the political lessons Orban has to teach the American Right,” Rod Dreher, an American conservative living in Budapest, recently wrote with admiration. If you want to see where this leads, Hungary has a lot to teach us."

Opinion | Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary - The New York Times