Second Amendment Attacks On Free Speech Are An Ultimate Product of The Free Speech and Media Deregulation Industry

Ann Coulter is famous because she's a smart person without morals who will say anything to make money from those who market racism, sexism, hatred of LGBT folk, who trade in the promotion of paranoia, fear and ignorance for power and profit.  If she were good her moderate intelligence wouldn't have made her rich and famous, a fixture on cabloid TV and other venues of unregulated hate, ignorance and parnoia.   The only thing that is really interesting about her is as a specimen of what the foulest end of free speech absolutism and media deregulation produces, she is the hazardous waste product of those who market those ideas over the common good and The Peoples' right to the truth.   But, vile as she is,  she is just an insignificant side show of the larger, right-wing use of "The First Amendment", ultimately hardly the most dangerous

The seeds that the free speech industry sowed, nurtured by the ACLU and, upon seeing the opportunity it presented to demagogues and oligarchic crooks, Republican Supreme Court justices are coming to maturity, all round us.  And, irony is one of them.  In the recent case of feminists being threatened into silence, the Second Amendment absolutism, sold though First Amendment absolutism, now has the power to silence people, threatening to use what a million cabloid and hate talk radio voices promoted to kill them if they don't shut up. 

The situation in which open carry laws are insanely passed and permitted to stand by right-wing judges is a direct result of media deregulation and a permission for industries, such as the gun industry, to promote their products through saturating the public conversation with lies, paranoia and a false elevation of one right over all others.  Well, as we are finding with that "right" when you make one supreme, ignoring that they exist in human society in tension with other rights of equal if not greater importance, that is a problem.  That it was the power of the pen which led to the power of the semi-automatic proves that the simple, attractive and even elegant formulations of assertions of "The First Amendment" have real life consequences in which the power of the gun, ultimately, wins out. 

If you want to assign ultimate blame for the dangerous mess we're in, you can do worse than looking at the "free speech - free press" advocates of the past half-century, the corners they cut and the inconvenient truths they suppressed.