His history with the criminal justice system is a fact, but the intention in the article is to discredit him for a debt to his community that has long been paid.
This is just libel.
It's not libel; it's just an opinionated argument that you dislike, so much so that you want to stop the other person from speaking.
It's intent on changing public policy by persuading voters with argumentation. This is the most protected class of speech. That it publishes ugly true facts about individuals (which is also protected!) is an incidental step towards the author trying to paint a persuasive political narrative.
(I can't help but want to break this down. You say it's misleading, but the case docket is hyperlinked inline with the text you say is misleading—that's far more than adequate in US jurisprudence. No "reasonable person" (a technical standard) is misled on a fact that's plainly disclosed, just one click away. You say the criminality is in the "distant past"—but the person's felon status is current, ongoing, and in fact relevant to the author's line of arguing, which is that these nonprofits are a form of "laundering" federal government grants to people the federal government otherwise disqualifies. You think (and I'm sympathetic to this) that crimes committed 20+ years ago are not strongly reflective of the current human. But, this is a subjective interpretation—not an objective truth beyond reasonable debate; and the fact that the US government itself disagrees, by permanently disqualifying felons shows how ludicrous it'd be to argue, in a US court, that "he's a convicted felon" is speech without social value).
Let’s revisit the original comment.
> 370 Falsely and maliciously accusing another. Sec. 370.
Falsely and maliciously accusing another of crime, etc.—Any person who shall falsely and maliciously, by word, writing, sign, or otherwise accuse, attribute, or impute to another the commission of any crime, felony or misdemeanor, or any infamous or degrading act, or impute or attribute to any female a want of chastity, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
It’s not like anyone can feasibly invade or anything, and we’re the world reserve currency so it’s not going to be financial collapse. Meanwhile you see Russia and china very successfully exploiting the infowars/foundations-of-geopolitics tactics etc.
Untrammeled free speech is quite likely to literally be the thing that kills the US.
You can't blindly extrapolate in a system made of agents that adapt to what happens around them. It's not like this is the first time the US has been in turmoil.
I recognize that this is a common, long standing idiom but it doesn’t make any sense.
Inasmuch as he had a debt, even abstractly, it was to his victim. And sitting in prison at large net cost to taxpayer isn’t paying anything to anyone.
That probably has more to do with Russian oligarchs being enabled to sue critical news organisations into bankruptcy.
If factual truth is not enough, you are in deep shit.