If Ahmed Mohammed could sue Maher, Dawkins, Palin, and the media companies which have spread lies about him for slander the story of his false arrest would have died a long time ago. Since lies and and the lying liars who lie them have been given First Amendment protection by a series of some of the stupidest and most destructive Supreme Court rulings, I'd guess that's a lot less likely to succeed.
To which the idiotic answer given by the free speech industry is "more speech" but a 14-year-old kid should not and could not compete with the combined forces of adult liars from Sarah Palin to Richard Dawkins-Bill Maher. No reasonable person would claim to believe that he had the star power and the media and other connections to prevail in such a fight of speechifying. The "more speech" slogan is a fraud invented by the media which has always had an interest in having their false statements protected from legal action by those they harm with their speech. The libertarian spin put on the First Amendment in the past half-century and longer was always guaranteed to enhance the power of those with the most resources and influence.
The first blog post I ever wrote took a swipe at Nat Hentoff, one of the most annoying and creepy of the professional "free speech" and Code of Liberal Ethics scolds. The kind who were forever worried that some liberal, somewhere was being unfair to a Nazi. That was in 2006, before the Village Voice dumped him and he did what any one who had read between his lines might have foreseen, he went to the Koch bros. funded Cato Institute and, I hear, he then wrote for the far-right World Net Daily, or as a few of us know them as, World Nuts Daily. Some on the left lamented that he had switched sides, just like they did when Christopher Hitchens went full neo-con. I didn't really understand the issue fully in 2006 but looking more closely at the phenomenon of pseudo-liberalism, pseudo-leftism has led me to understand that they were never really liberals, they were always enablers of the right, they were always enablers of those with control of the media they worked in or, in the case of Hitchens, would work for. I recall some of those at The Nation pined after him like jilted high-school lovers when they should have said, "good riddance" and learned something from the experience about why they got suckered in by him in the first place. The left should scrap its support for guys like them.
Making the United States safe for broadcast lies, protecting the liars from those they hurt with their lies was always a really stupid thing that was always bound to be most useful to those who had an interest in lying, in duping people into believing a lie. That is the nature of lying in a political and commercial context. It was always guaranteed to harm people without money and power and it was always guaranteed to destroy self-government and democracy. The great irony in this is that "free speech" was held to be an absolute value when its only value comes from SPEAKING THE TRUTH. Freedom to lie is not a value, it is an evil and an evil which, if not stopped, will destroy us. Power can be amassed with lies, the history of dictators, especially those like Hitler who gained power through an election are all the proof anyone needs to see that truth. It is that potential that makes the simplistic, non-judgemental pose taken by the "free speech" industry so insidious. Lies permitted and given the protection of judicial decisions are at the bottom of most of the public evil that we experience. There was never anything about this that wasn't obvious, none of it was a mystery. It's stunning that some of the great minds of the past century have been so duped by such an obvious lie. But, whatever else can be said, the experiment was run and the results include that democracy is on its deathbed.
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