I don’t think Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl, but why won’t he deny it?

Arts Technica reports that 2 days after the site glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com Beck’s media company “had contacted the domain registrar demanding that the “‘highly defamatory domain name’ glennbeckrapedandmurdered- ayounggirlin1990.com be deleted, that the WhoisGuard privacy protection service be revoked, and that the owner’s contact information be turned over to the lawyers.”

This is a classic case of an effort to “chill” speech you don’t like. Parody and political speech are protected by the First Amendment, but who wants to take on the costs of litigating against a media giant? One of my students asked the other day if there were any way for an individual to get funding to litigate against a large corporation. I explained that there really isn’t. If you’re really, really poor, you might get legal aid, but not likely even if you’re really, really poor to defend against a lawsuit like Beck’s. We have a brilliant legal system, but it’s been entirely distorted by inequalities of wealth and the expense that has become accepted as part of litigation. Someone with little legal merit to their claims or defenses can prevail merely by wearing down and exhausting the resources of their adversary.

I myself wouldn’t begin to conclude from seeing the domain name that there was any real evidence Glenn Beck had raped and murdered a young girl, but one expert in the article thought Beck’s lawsuit had enough merit that it can’t merely be brushed off:

“I don’t think ‘Ha ha it’s a joke’ at the end gets you off,” he says; if the parodic information is defamatory, it’s risky for the defendant in such cases. That’s complicated by the fact that the original domain name made the allegedly defamatory claim against Beck—and of course no one stumbling across the site in a search engine or elsewhere would see any disclaimer. In such cases, the domain name itself is a standalone piece of content; the disclaimer may help regarding the website content, but it won’t necessarily transfer a cone of protection to the domain name as well.

This is what we get when we take seriously allegations like the one that Obama wants to euthanize my mom (would she be so lucky! — sorry, that’s an entirely different and very personal topic).

ADDENDUM: Beck does want to beat Rep. Charles Rangel to death with a shovel, and he wants to kill other people, right?

ADDENDUM 2: This guy Beck may or may not be a rapist and murderer (but why won’t he just prove his innocence?), but he is definitely a first-rate parodist, pointing out the Communist propaganda hidden in New York City. Who knew John D. Rockefeller was really a communist, and that Isaiah’s timeless call to beat swords into plowshares is really an ancient “progressive” plot? He’s hilarious. Everyone does just laugh at this stuff, right?