I can’t go around lying to police about how “my neighbor tried to kill me.” Ruining their life for fun or profit has consequences, and rightfully so. lemmy.blahaj.zone I mean, you can do that though. And it would cost your neighbor a significant amount of money to fight it.

And if you're white (and wealthy, and a republican politician), then you get away with it every time.

Slander is spoken, libel is written. Might be a little blurred in the age of video and podcasts though. Anyway, slander and libel cases are famously hard to win, because you have to prove the statement was made, the person who made it knew it was false, and that it damaged your reputation. It's also harder to win for public figures, as the increase in general media around them tends to dilute damaging statements.

I'm pretty sure if there's a country that invented Islamophobia it's either the Papal States or somewhere in central Europe and did it before people were aware that there were two clusters of continents on different hemispheres.

America absolutely got really in on it, but at our founding we were generally ok with Islam. But yes we were built on genocide and slavery.