Devin Nunes Sues Twitter for $250 Million Over Objectively Hilarious Parody Accounts

Before this week, former House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes was famous for spending two years working diligently to convince Fox News viewers that the Real Scandal of the 2016 election was Deep State law enforcement agents secretly spying on the Trump campaign. Now that the most recent midterm elections have robbed him of this particular set of powers, however, the California lawmaker has graduated to a new and somehow even more inane pastime: suing Twitter for a quarter-billion dollars because people were mean to him on the Internet.

This incoherent mess of a lawsuit, which Nunes’ attorney filed in a Virginia court on Monday, reads more like a handwritten complaint alleging the existence of vast alien mind control conspiracies than it does a document filed by an honest-to-God United States congressman. As defendants, it names a trio of accounts whose tweets were particularly successful at hurting Nunes’ feelings: one belonging to Republican consultant Liz Mair, and two belonging to as-yet-unidentified persons who operated the parody accounts @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow. (The cow handle is a nod to the Nunes family business of dairy farming; the mom handle is a nod to the fact that Nunes, uh, has a mom.)

“In her endless barrage of tweets,” his lawyer begins, “Devin Nunes’ Mom maliciously attacked every aspect of Nunes’ character, honestly, integrity, ethics and fitness to perform his duties as a United States Congressman.” The laundry list of allegedly defamatory posts that follows is—and this is a legal term of art—fucking hilarious.

It wraps by noting that Devin Nunes’ Mom “even falsely stated that Devin Nunes has ‘herp-face,’” and includes a visual aid to assist the court with its task of evaluating the evidence.

The allegations against Devin Nunes’ Cow are even more entertaining, because they solemnly argue that in order to protect the spirit of the First Amendment and the integrity of public discourse, bovine-themed dad jokes should be actionable at law.

Next, Nunes arrives at his claims against Twitter, which gripes that the company should have stopped all the cruel cow puns earlier. He also accuses the company of “shadow-banning” him—a term that refers to Twitter’s practice of occasionally preventing tweets from certain accounts from showing up in feeds and searches; right-wing types have long suspected that they are unfairly subjected to it. As the company has explained, however, so-called “shadow-banning” affects accounts exhibiting spam-like behavior without regard to the account holder’s political beliefs. In other words, conservatives believe that insidious Silicon Valley technocrats discriminate against them as part of a vast liberal conspiracy, while the mundane reality is that they kind of suck at Twitter.

It is here that Nunes’s lawsuit moves from amusingly juvenile to legitimately insane:

The theory of his case is that because Nunes won his most recent re-election bid by a narrower margin than in previous years, the existence of insulting tweets must be responsible for this result. Strangely, the potential influence of the Democratic Party’s landslide midterm victories, even in traditionally red districts like his—to say nothing of his constituents’ growing awareness that Nunes is an embarrassing clown who makes them all look bad—seems not to have occurred to him.

Generally speaking, it is not “defamatory” to be mean to people on Twitter. If it were, the President of the United States would be sitting in debtors’ prison right now, instead of in the Oval Office.

Briefly, though: Courts have long ruled that the First Amendment includes broad protections for, among many other things, satire and parody, particularly when laced with obvious hyperbole. Unless Nunes thinks users sincerely believed that tweets from @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow were in fact authored by the biological mother of Devin Nunes and a farm animal owned by his family, it will be hard for him to argue that reasonable readers would interpret said tweets as objective statements of fact. Defamation is especially difficult to prove with respect to public figures, and a sitting congressman certainly qualifies as such.

Statements of “pure opinion” are also not defamatory. Tweets which, for example, refer to Nunes as a “treasonous shitbag,” a “feckless cunt,” or “the most despicably craven GOP public official” are rude, but they are merely subjective analyses of Nunes’s job performance and conduct. Similarly, tweets which “falsely stated that Nunes had brought ‘shame’ to his family” or “falsely suggested that Nunes might be willing to give the President a ‘blowjob’” are probably not actionable because Nunes—or anyone else, for that matter—cannot prove them to be objectively false.

Context and social conventions matter, too. An untrue statement that Devin Nunes is “way over his head in crime” might be defamatory if it were splashed across the front page of The New York Times, because observers would reasonably interpret it as backed by evidentiary support. But the assertion that Nunes is “whey over his head in crime”—coming from an unverified Twitter account which, again, ostensibly belongs to a fucking cow—is far less likely to lead anyone to conclude that literal cops will arrest a protein-shake-guzzling Devin Nunes at any moment.

In addition to the defenses described above, many jurisdictions allow defendants in defamation actions to show that the plaintiff is “libel-proof”: that is, that their reputation is already so low that it is beyond repair, and no statement, irrespective of its veracity, could cause it to meaningfully suffer any further. If this descriptor did not apply to Nunes before this week, I would argue his decision to humiliate himself with this vapid MAGA fanfiction nudges him a little bit closer.