What do you call sustained baseless prejudice against someone?

The Democratic Party attack on the Supreme Court and its conservative members is in full swing.  Some speculate that it is battlefield preparation for certain decisions likely to come down soon.  Some suggest it is a campaign in preparation for a tense 2024 election campaign.  Some suggest that is simply a strategic effort to selectively disempower one of the three branches of government that is now institutionally less dominated by Democrats than in the past.  

All reasonable arguments though the actions have been pretty horrifying.  There was the mentally ill terrorist seeking to kill Justices last year when security was not raised for Supreme Court Justices.  There is talk now about reducing the funding for Supreme Court security.  There are baseless attacks on the integrity of Justices such as Alito and Thomas.  Big headline accusations that disappear within 48 hours as it becomes apparent that there was not there there to support the accusation.

Pretty dismaying.

But also no different than in the past really.

I am archiving all my Thingfinder posts of the past fifteen years.  I am exporting them to Word, cleaning them up, refreshing and independently listing the links, etc.  You want higher odds of epistemic longevity?  Go with paper.

In that process, I come across this post from Ann Althouse on September 2, The NYT’s embarrassing attack on Clarence Thomas for writing in words that are “not his own” 

My own post that day, alluding to Althouse's is Dotted with pigeon droppings of extreme bias.  

One of the more senior and respected reporters of the New York Times, Adam Liptak, effectively accuses Justice Thomas of plagiarism saying that his "opinions contain language from briefs submitted to the court at unusually high rates."

Deep towards the bottom of Liptak's piece is the data supporting this claim.

Over the years, the average rate of nearly identical language between a party's brief and the majority opinion was 9.6 percent. Justice Thomas's rate was 11.3 percent. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's was 11 percent, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 10.5 percent.

In other words, all Justices appear to quote language from plaintiff briefs at about the same 9-11% rate.  

The New York Times, whatever their motivation, has been seeking to disparage and undermine Justice Clarence Thomas for more than a decade.  It is comfortable lying to its readers in order to achieve political or ideological goals.