The lawsuit accuses Cohen of "improper, self-serving, and malicious statements" about Mr Trump.

Former President Donald Trump is suing Michael Cohen for $500 million in damages for allegedly breaching his contract as Trump's former personal attorney.

When the right-wing billionaire Elon Musk wanted a journalist to spread the word about supposed left-wing censorship under Twitter’s previous ownership, he went to Matt Taibbi. But last week, Twitter began to throttle traffic to the newsletter platform Substack, where Taibbi does most of his writing, and apparently began hiding Taibbi’s tweets in Twitter's search results. Musk’s chosen conduit for exposing what he described as past Twitter’s censorship was now being censored by Musk’s Twitter.

Although Musk has insisted the temporary throttling of Substack was a mistake, Taibbi claimed that it was in response to a “dispute” over the company’s new Twitter-like service.

Blocking access to a competitor may seem, well, at odds with the “free-speech absolutism” that Musk has proclaimed and that admirers like Taibbi have praised. As the reporter Mike Masnick writes, the above behavior clearly falls into what Musk fans described as censorship under Twitter’s previous ownership. But it’s consistent with what more perceptive observers noted about Musk as he was considering buying the network: The mogul’s treatment of union organizers and whistleblowers suggested that “free-speech absolutism” was mostly code for a high tolerance for bigotry toward particular groups, a smoke screen that obscured an obvious hostility toward any speech that threatened his ability to make money.

[Read: Elon Musk is spiraling]

Not since Donald Trump has liberal judgment about the focus of a right-wing cult of personality been so swiftly vindicated. During his tenure at Twitter, Musk has suspended reporters and left-wing accounts that drew his ire, retaliated against media organizations perceived as liberal, ordered engineers to boost his tweets after he was humiliated when a tweet from President Joe Biden about the Super Bowl did better than his own, secretly promoted a list of accounts of his choice, and turned the company’s verification process into a subscription service that promises increased visibility to Musk sycophants and users desperate enough to pay for engagement. At the request of the right-wing government in India, the social network has blocked particular tweets and accounts belonging to that government’s critics, a more straightforward example of traditional state censorship. But despite all of that, he has yet to face state legislation alleging that what he does with the website he owns is unconstitutional.

That’s notable because, until Musk bought Twitter late last year, conservatives were arguing that the company’s moderation decisions violated the First Amendment, even though Twitter is a private company and not part of the government. Now that Musk is using his editorial discretion as owner of the company to promote people and ideas he supports—primarily right-wing influencers—and diminish the reach of those he does not, the constitutional emergency has subsided. At least until his allies and defenders on Substack found themselves unable to promote their work on Twitter, free speech had been restored, because “free speech” here simply means that right-wing ideas and arguments are favored. This outcome—that Twitter under Musk would favor right-wing content—was predictable, and I’m saying that because I wrote last April that that’s what would happen.

The episode reveals something important about the way that many conservative jurists and legal scholars now approach the principle of free speech. Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social-media companies from moderating user-generated content, in retaliation for what they characterized as liberal “censorship.” A federal judge appointed by Trump, Andrew Oldham, then upheld the Texas law with a ruling that scoffed at the idea that “editorial discretion” constituted a “freestanding category of First-Amendment-protected expression” and insisted that the platforms’ moderation decisions did not qualify for that protection. Whether “editorial discretion” is a “freestanding” category of protected speech is irrelevant; engaging in protected speech is impossible absent the freedom to decide what to say, or for that matter what ideas are worthy of publication. Conservatives agree, as long as those platforms are conservative; right-wing platforms such as Parler and Truth Social have strict moderation policies that conservatives are not challenging as unconstitutional.

Like the newfound opposition to vaccine mandates, this blinkered view of free speech was met by conservative judges eager to validate right-wing cultural shifts, no matter how bizarre or contradictory, through their strained method of constitutional interpretation. The ghosts of the Framers may be summoned through the necromancy of undead constitutionalism, through which the authors of our founding document can be confirmed to have had the same concerns and priorities as extremely online conservatives. Now that Musk is utilizing his editorial discretion to move the social network in a right-wing direction, however, no one is insisting that his exercise of editorial discretion violates the Constitution—not even his liberal critics.  

[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]

Conservatives built an entire body of jurisprudence around the First Amendment’s protection of corporate speech when large corporations were reliably funding Republican causes and campaigns—the late Justice Antonin Scalia declared in the Citizens United decision that “to exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy.” But once some corporate actors decided it was in their financial interests to make decisions that the GOP disliked, conservative lawyers then turned around and argued that speech was no longer protected if it was used for purposes they opposed. If your freedom of speech is only protected when it aligns with the ruling party, then you do not have a right to freedom of speech.

Faced with right-wing outrage over the moderation decisions of social-media platforms, conservative judges turned the First Amendment upside down by upholding—or signaling their sympathy with—state laws designed to punish social-media platforms for being insufficiently conservative. They invented a “conservative right to post” in which the First Amendment restricted private platforms the way it does the government, but only if those platforms were perceived as liberal. Perhaps nowhere is this inversion of the First Amendment more clear than on the issue of abortion rights; the same lawmakers insisting that the content-moderation policies of private firms violate the First Amendment are feverishly attempting to criminalize online speech related to abortion.

The platforms targeted by anti-moderation laws were never liberal; they imposed moderation policies because it is difficult to maintain advertising revenue when your platform is overrun by teenage Nazis with anime avatars and aspiring far-right intellectuals desperate to impress them. Musk’s changes were far more ideologically driven and have reportedly, by his own evaluation, halved the value of his company.

Conservatives rapidly reversed their stance on corporate free-speech rights when they were angry at Twitter for being too left-wing, then changed their mind again once Musk bought Twitter and began amplifying right-wing voices at the expense of others. Musk owns the platform, and he can use it to magnify or ignore whatever ideas and sources he chooses. But it’s not a right that most of these conservative, self-styled defenders of free speech think you should have. For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.

The deadliest acts of mass murder in the United States since 9/11 all share one feature: The killer in every case used an assault-style weapon or a firearm equipped with a high-capacity magazine. This was again the case on Monday, at a shooting at a Kentucky bank that killed five, and in the recent shooting at the elementary school in Nashville that killed six, including three 9-year-old children.

And yet, the country has failed to adopt the policies needed to keep these weapons out of the hands of those who would abuse them. At the most obvious level, mass shootings are a serious and worsening problem that imposes substantial burdens on the public. But they are something else as well: a national disgrace that illuminates the inability of the American political system to adopt numerous popular public-policy strategies that together could substantially reduce the prevalence and destructiveness of these events. One of those measures—the federal assault-weapons ban—was in place for a decade, but it was allowed to lapse in 2004. The gun lobby is challenging every valuable gun-safety law throughout the United States, with the belief that Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will protect the right to sell lethal weaponry to as many Americans as possible.

I have been studying the links between guns and crime for the past quarter century, and have written numerous econometric studies examining both the extent to which permissive gun laws in America increase violent crime and the mechanisms through which these laws translate into significant social harm. In addition to publishing dozens of articles based on this research, I have also provided expert declarations, reports, and testimony in at least 20 cases in which the gun industry was trying to thwart gun-control efforts such as restrictions on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, gun carrying outside the home and in sensitive places, and requirements that guns be safely stored. Over and over, what I have seen is how the pernicious and pervasive influence of the gun lobby blocks or undermines any remotely sensible approach to dealing with America’s problem of gun violence, which is unique among affluent nations.

What is the gun lobby’s response to the horrific curse of mass shootings? Any hope that harsher punishment—the preferred alternative to gun control—would deter aspiring killers is nonsensical, given the already draconian penalty a mass shooter will face, not to mention the high rate at which they die on the scene, gunned downed by police or felled by suicide. The 18-year-old Buffalo shooter from last May, who killed 10 people using the same weapon as the Sandy Hook shooter—a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle—had written, “I am well aware that my actions will effectively ruin my life. If I’m not killed during the attack, I will go to prison for an inevitable life sentence.”

The gun lobby has a counterintuitive (and self-serving) suggestion for dealing with the proliferation of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines: more gun sales and more gun carrying, so that “a good guy with a gun” can kill a mass shooter. Unfortunately, the best empirical evidence suggests that this will be a self-defeating policy, because the proliferation of guns will lead to more gun violence, resulting from increased gun thefts, more road-rage violence, and diminished police effectiveness. The occasional episodes where a good guy with a gun thwarts a mass shooting will be offset by the growing parade of ills from what the then-president of the National Rifle Association—testifying in support of the 1938 federal gun-control act—called the inadvisable “promiscuous toting of guns.” Even Ronald Reagan once said that there’s “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons. [Guns are] a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

Of course, many Americans do believe in expansive rights to gun ownership. But it’s still the case that the political system is producing an outcome far more permissive than what the population wants. To begin with, repeated surveys show that while the NRA membership consistently supports reasonable measures such as universal background checks, NRA leaders stake out a much more extreme position. Following the February 2018 high-school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, then-President Donald Trump announced that we needed more gun control and that he was not afraid of the NRA. But when the NRA head, Wayne LaPierre, told Trump to stop the push for universal background checks—then supported by 90 percent of people who voted Republican in the 2018 midterm election—Trump stopped.

[From the September 2011 issue: The secret history of guns]

Other countries have shown what is possible with decisive federal action. Australia had a worse mass-shooting problem per capita than the United States before 1996, when a horrific mass shooting led the conservative government to act. It greatly curtailed the problem by enacting a stringent restriction on semiautomatic rifles, enforced with a mandated gun buyback. Australia did not have to contend with a domestic gun industry as corrosively powerful as America’s, which enabled it to adopt more potent legislation than President Bill Clinton was able to secure with the assault-weapons ban in 1994.

Any approach that doesn’t include a federal assault-weapons ban with accompanying restrictions on high-capacity magazines will be inadequate. State bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines have helped, but killers have circumvented them, buying their weapons in neighboring gun-friendly states.

Similarly, removing the huge loopholes in the federal background-check system would ameliorate things, but its minimal level of screening needs to be buttressed extensively. The FBI’s analysis of 55 active shooters over age 18 found that 65 percent had no adult convictions prior to the active-shooting event. In other words, most mass shooters who are old enough to buy an assault rifle are what the Supreme Court opinion in Bruen last summer referred to as “law-abiding, responsible citizens” when they acquire their weapons of mass murder. The characterization is, of course, absurd. Many mass murderers in America have had traits or behaviors that might have been the basis for removing their guns or prohibiting them from acquiring weapons in a stricter regulatory regime. Indeed, no European government, nor any sensible person, would have had difficulty realizing that the 19-year-old Parkland shooter should not have had access to any firearm, let alone an assault rifle. The same is true for the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, who killed 21 people, and the 20-year-old Sandy Hook shooter, who killed 26. The troubling aspects of their behaviors were so apparent that typical European-style screening would have blocked their gun acquisitions. But in the U.S., where roughly 90 percent of the public supports universal background checks (and supported by NRA members, in contrast with the NRA itself), the Republican Party will not stand up to the gun lobby’s fears that such a measure would impair its profits by reducing gun sales. Again, all of this indicates rot in American democracy, which is thwarting the will of the people who do support these sensible measures.

But beyond restrictions on weaponry and a more probing assessment of who is a “law abiding, responsible citizen” with a Second Amendment right to a firearm, more public education is required to inform the citizenry of the dangers of allowing deeply disturbed individuals to have access to such lethal weaponry. Nancy Lanza’s bizarre decision to keep assault rifles in the same home that her unstable son lived in was a deadly, avoidable error. The 21-year-old Highland Park killer from this past July 4 alarmed his family enough to alert police of his threats to “kill everyone,” but only months later, his father endorsed his application for a firearm—another failure of both gun policy and citizen responsibility.

[From the October 2021 issue: How to persuade Americans to give up their guns]

The Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church killer of 26 people was another disturbed and previously violent individual living on his parents’ estate, yet they took no efforts to restrict his access to assault weapons. According to the testimony of FBI agents at his trial, he used an AR-15 modified to include a laser scope and features that could allow large-capacity magazines to be more quickly reloaded to maintain a relentless barrage. He stood outside the church and fired straight through its walls as he strafed along just above the tops of the church pews, allowing him to shoot 254 times in a matter of minutes. No portable weapon in civilian hands at the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption could have possibly generated this degree of destruction so rapidly. The social harms will only grow as technology increases firearm lethality, so greater restrictions are needed, backed by a far more searching governmental screening process and concerted efforts by parents and the public, to keep such weaponry away from obviously dangerous individuals.

Remarkably, from today’s vantage point at least, Texas banned carrying guns outside the home for protection from 1871 to 1995. As of June 2022, this would now be deemed unconstitutional under Bruen—apparently no one in Texas noticed this ostensible Second Amendment violation for 125 years. When it started down its pro-gun path, Texas had almost a 20 percent lower murder rate than California and an only slightly higher murder rate than New York. After 25 years of increasing gun restrictions in California and New York, Texas has seen an astonishing change: In 2021, the state had a 27 percent higher murder rate than California and a 75 percent higher murder rate than New York. The Supreme Court seems to want to close those gaps—by making California and New York as deadly as Texas. Referencing unpublished work by a supportive researcher, an NRA lawyer told the Supreme Court in the Bruen oral argument that allowing more citizens to carry guns would have no impact on crime, ironically conceding that even the most pro-NRA assessment of the data found no benefit from more gun carrying. The best, peer-reviewed evidence, though, reaches a far more ominous conclusion concerning the march toward deregulation. Sadly, America’s lead as the most homicidal affluent nation will only grow unless more fundamental reform to its gun policies is undertaken, and the American people are allowed to have their say.

Tucker Carlson plays a straight-shooter on television.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump asked a judge to delay the start of a sexual assault and defamation trial for one month to allow a "cooling off" period following the historic indictment charging Trump with falsifying business records.

Trump casts doubt on whether Democrat Joe Biden would be in the 2024 race as he faces criminal charges.

Last Tuesday’s Wisconsin election might have been overshadowed by the news of Donald Trump’s arraignment, but Trump and his party were likely paying close attention to the race—and the dangers it portends for the GOP in 2024.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Cover story: American madness The real hero of Ted Lasso Please don’t ask me to play your board game.

An Iron Grip

Last Tuesday, the liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz won an election that gave Wisconsin liberals a 4–3 majority on the state’s supreme court after 15 years of conservative control. The results of the state’s judicial race are a likely barometer—and a possible determinant—of the GOP’s prospects in 2024.

As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted in the days leading up to the Wisconsin election, the contest would prove “a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.” A Protasiewicz win, he wrote, would also affirm that support for legal abortion has hastened college-educated suburban voters’ collective “recoil” from the Trump GOP. “Such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections,” Ron explained.

In an Atlantic article last week, the former Milwaukee talk-radio host and The Bulwark editor at large Charlie Sykes doubled down on Brownstein’s assertion. “‘As long as abortion is an issue,’ one Republican legislator told me, ‘we won’t ever win another statewide election,’” Sykes wrote.

With Protasiewicz’s victory, Wisconsin Republicans may have even more to worry about than voters’ attachment to reproductive rights. That’s because, as my colleague Adam Serwer noted last weekend, Wisconsin is a notoriously fickle swing state that Republicans have gerrymandered “with scientific precision” since 2010—driven, in no small part, by its conservative-majority supreme court.

Adam writes:

Thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not … And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

“Extreme” is no overstatement. Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me by email that although Democrats have won more of Wisconsin’s statewide elections in recent years than their Republican opponents have, “under the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature drew in 2011, Republicans maintained an iron grip on the legislature throughout the last decade—even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes statewide.”

Following the 2020 census, the Wisconsin Supreme Court went on to uphold revised electoral maps that further solidified Republicans’ advantage in the state. Although Wisconsin Democrats saw the reelection of Governor Tony Evers last November, Republicans claimed a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate following a special election to fill a suburban Milwaukee seat last Tuesday. Republicans are just short of a supermajority in the state assembly and hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats.

But Democrats still hope to turn the Badger State around. Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released its House Democrats’ Districts in Play plan for the 2024 election cycle, outlining which congressional districts the party will target in its efforts to retake control of the House. The DCCC’s plan listed Wisconsin’s first and third districts among the 31 Republican-held House seats Democrats deem particularly flippable next fall—an outlook that appears to hinge (at least in part) on the prospect of electoral redistricting. If Protasiewicz were to make good on a remark from earlier this year, in which she hinted at plans to review challenges to the state’s current electoral maps, the court could approve new maps that would improve Democrats’ odds of clawing back power in those districts.

“Having more balanced electoral maps could certainly make a difference in 2024,” Yablon told me. “There’s no guarantee that such maps would enable Democrats to win a legislative majority, but they could create meaningful competition for legislative control for the first time in more than a decade. At a minimum, Republicans would likely see their current legislative majorities shrink.”

Whether or not new electoral maps could make a difference in 2024 will, of course, depend on their being redrawn and approved in the first place—and fast.

Related:

Make Wisconsin a democracy again. The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

Today’s News

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in a move to block interference by congressional Republicans in the criminal case against Donald Trump. In a dramatic effort to conserve supplies from the drought-stricken Colorado River, the Biden administration proposed a plan that would reduce the amount of water allotted to California, Arizona, and Nevada. The shooter who killed five of his colleagues at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday morning legally bought the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack, the interim Louisville Metro Police chief said today.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Getty

The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant

By Sarah Zhang

While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth.

And so, after a 38-hour labor and emergency C-section, MacDonald’s wife could do what many mothers who just gave birth might desperately want to but cannot: rest, sleep, and recover from surgery. Meanwhile, MacDonald tried nursing their baby. She held him to her breast, and he latched right away. Over the next 15 months, the two mothers co-nursed their son, switching back and forth, trading feedings in the middle of the night. MacDonald had breastfed her older daughter the usual way—as in, by herself—a decade earlier, and she remembered the bone-deep exhaustion. She did not want that for her wife. Inducing lactation meant they could share in the ups and the downs of breastfeeding together.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why California can’t catch a break Five people died in the Kentucky shooting. The full toll is much higher. Pleather’s new name

Culture Break

Gilles Mingasson / ABC

Read. Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s new novel, a biting satire about the idealistic left.

Watch. Abbott Elementary (and pay special attention to Mr. Johnson, the janitor on the ABC comedy).

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I suppose this is where I out myself as a native Wisconsinite—a cheesehead, if you will—who has followed the electoral goings-on of my home state with varying degrees of attentiveness (and mounting bafflement) in the years since my departure. But if there’s any single resource that’s helped fill in the blanks of my political literacy, it’s The Fall of Wisconsin. The 2018 book by the journalist Dan Kaufman, also from Wisconsin, traces the “conservative conquest” of a state that was, until relatively recently, taken for granted as a progressive stronghold. In case the book’s title doesn’t make it incredibly obvious, Kaufman is not exactly an ideologically impartial observer. But his deep research provides useful background for understanding the past 15 years of Badger State politics and, by extension, broader rifts in the American electorate.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.