Finally, Someone Notices

In recent years, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has deliberately and dramatically expanded the power of corporations.  But even more alarming is how the Roberts Court has advanced this agenda—by contorting and perverting the First Amendment. Under this Court, free speech has been equated with spending, advertising, and even data grabs for marketing purposes, expansive liberties that apply not only to human beings but to corporations, because the Court says they’re people, too. 

Originally—and up until fairly recently—the First Amendment was understood to be a shield protecting individual liberty. But the Roberts Court seems increasingly intent on turning the First Amendment into a weapon against the American people, not to mention basic fairness and common sense. 

Actually, it's been going on since at least 1976, the infamous Buckley v Valeo ruling, over three different Chief "Justices".   This is a long-standing plan by the Republican-fascists, hatched in the genteel environs of stink tanks and in well cushioned sitting rooms of law school faculty at the Ivy level universities.  They used the language of liberals against The People and the suckers bought the dodge.   Of course, lots of "liberals" had a stake in the con job, working in the media with a financial interest in "free press" only it was not free press but press able to sell itself to the highest bidders.  Just as the "free speech" of Buckley v Valeo was a lie because that ruling and those which followed gave speech a monetary value, some of it far more pricey because it was the loudest and most ubiquitous and most repeated.  Any speech which was free was, generally, worth as much as it cost, nothing.  Especially true now that corporations have "free speech rights" because no mere free speech can compete in the media market with the power to lie granted by the sleaziest courts in our history.  Yes, even sleazier than those 19th century courts that gave us Dred Scott and "Separate and equal", they have those precedents and their results to inform their ultra-sleaze.