What might journo-hater Donald Trump be able to do to curtail freedom of the press, if he were to become president? Isaac Chotiner asked Geoffrey Stone, law professor at the University of Chicago, to explain. Stone said that even though the First Amendment protects many speech acts, if Congress and Supreme Court are compliant, extreme measures are not completely out of the question: “The key thing is you could have a Sedition Act, right? You could have a law that says it’s a crime to criticize the president. We’ve been there; we’ve done that, right?”
Trump as a serious candidate? Who knew? Leon Neyfakh has reviewed the receipts to figure out which pundits and commentators first took Trump seriously. Here’s the list.
Hear ye, hear ye! Slate’s Jacob Weisberg is now hosting a quasi-daily Trumpcast. (Here’s the iTunes link.) For the first episode, Weisberg interviews Jamelle Bouie about Trump and the anti-Obama backlash.
Isaac Chotiner spoke with David Milliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, about the situation in Syria, five years after the beginning of that country’s civil war. “These five years have been a slow—or in some cases fast—descent into living hell in Syria,” Milliband said. “The population was 23 million in 2011. Since then, 5 million people have left as refugees. … Inside the country, you have 7 million people who have been displaced from their homes by the conflict. I think the figure is 85 percent of the lights out in Syria.”
Hillary Clinton’s much-remarked-upon unfortunate comment of last week—the one giving the Reagans credit for “starting a national conversation” about HIV/AIDS—prompted historian Timothy Stewart-Winter to remember how the Reagans, and then the Clintons, actually dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Perhaps in the wake of this particular cycle of gaffe and apology, there’s an opportunity for revisiting the real history—a history that is too often oversimplified,” Stewart-Winter writes. “For one thing, while the Reagan administration’s slowness to respond to AIDS was criminal, it was also a major factor in the growth and radicalization of the gay movement in the second half of the 1980s.”
For fun: Key things to know about this year’s March Madness, courtesy of Justin Peters. Ways to watch March Madness without caving in to Big Cable, courtesy of Will Oremus.
Cord-cutters 4-eva,
Rebecca
