• A Vermont school is replacing “man” and “woman” with “person who produces sperm” and “person who produces eggs.” It is also replacing “teacher” with “person who produces confusion.”
• Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit provoked by the network’s repeated promotion of the view that Dominion had rigged its voting machines against Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election. Shortly thereafter, it fired star host Tucker Carlson. (The exact reasons are the subject of immense speculation, but no one sees the timing as coincidental.) It is hard to win a libel suit against the press in the United States, and because the case never went to trial we will never know whether Dominion would have prevailed absent Fox’s decision to settle. Nevertheless, Dominion’s brief did seem to be unusually strong. That Fox made, and enabled, claims of fact that were untrue seems indisputable. That it did so with knowledge that those claims were untrue — or, at least, with reckless disregard as to whether they were true — seems extremely likely. Once again, election denialism performed in the service of Donald Trump’s ego has proven to be a costly mistake.
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