Charles Pierce who is fast becoming an icon of journalistic response to Trumpzi fascism had two related posts yesterday, though I'm not sure he appreciates how closely they are related.
The first was a bell tolling on the impending fatal results of the obscure provision in the Constitution wherein state legislatures - in all of their corrupt stupidity - can ignite a Constitutional Convention to revise or throw out or totally fuck up the current Constitutional government on behalf or the billionaire oligarchs and plutocrats and fascists who have conceived and bankrolled this effort, at our expense and to their own benefit and enrichment.
He noted that the Republicanfascist Wisconsin billionaire fascist controlled legislature has become the 28th to call for such a likely disaster and that only six more of them idiotically doing so would almost certainly cause something bad to happen. I share Pierce's worry that such a thing could end up with the total destruction of anything like egalitarian democracy - which is among the goals of the billionaire traitor class and the imposition of a nightmare of inequality and injustice, which is their ultimate goal and the obvious goal of the Republican Party which serves whatever their purpose is.
That said I think one of the most effective counters to that is a movement to destroy the obscene imposition of past oligarchic insertion into the Constitution of such things as corporate personhood, the doctrine that money equals speech and that lies by the mass media have constitutional protection. Those three provisions, insisted on as conditions of the adoption of any proposed Constitutional change by a billionaire boys club bought Con-Con would be enough to take the ginger out of the boys clubers. And they are three changes which are, anyway, vital if we are to keep anything like egalitarian democracy and equal justice under the law AND SUPREME COURTS GOING BACK A CENTURY AND A HALF HAVE ALREADY BEEN AMENDING THE CONSTITUTION TO PROVIDE THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, CURRENT BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND THEIR PROPAGANDISTS THAT WITHOUT BENEFIT OF A CON-CON.
The second piece that Pierce posted yesterday is directly related to that, a piece decrying how successfully propagandized a dangerously large fraction of the country is in that it is impossible to argue them out of their Trumpzi delusions with facts and reason and even an appeal to their better natures. Though I have enormous affection and respect for Charles Pierce and many other journalists, their profession is what brought us to Trump through the ability of newspapers like the august whore, the New York Times and, far more so, cabloid TV and hate talk radio through exactly that distortion of the First Amendment by the "liberal" Warren Court in 1964. I have noted before that in 1960 the padrone of our current Republican-fascism, Richard Nixon narrowly lost to John Kennedy, then, in 1964, in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, the Warren Court in its ACLU pleasing mode permitted the media to lie about political and public figures with impunity and the very next election after that saw Nixon lie his way into office with the support of the electronic and much of the print media the installation of some of the most malignant members in the history of the Supreme Court, the adoption of the racist, neo-Confederate attracting Southern Strategy and so much else that finds its apotheosis (or whatever its Satanic equivalent of one is) in Donald Trump and de-facto billionaire oligarchic rule.
It was the free press freed to lie which created the Trump electorate, it was the august oligarchic whores of the New York Times who, through regionalist, class and personal animus lied about Hillary Clinton for the past quarter century and during the election. Trump, himself, is a total creation of the media class, you can't blame him, his phony lie of a legend and his rise to the presidency on the political class. He is a media creation, the very media which informs the Trump voters, those who deifies him as a fully propagandized Nazi did Hitler or a dutifully propagandized Japanese subject regarded the Emperor in the rise to World War II.
When a lie is regarded as a trivial matter, when telling the truth is an inconvenient option is a personal matter, it might become a matter of legal correction, when the media under the idiotic interpretation of the First Amendment which holds the media is to be free to lie with impunity does that and when the resulting lies are broadcast, it is as big a danger to democracy as anything Charles Pierce rightly worries about in a billionaire instigated Con Con. I will remind him that the original Constitutional Convention was a result of the rich, once revolutionaries, confronted with the possibility that the common rabble might want those liberties, freedoms and goods they were promised, decided they had to prevent that happening. The resultant Constitutional Convention was dominated by the slave class to whom the Northern commercial class, such as Alexander Hamilton really was, were all too willing to allow them to insert even the most putrid and immoral substance into the thing which was successfully sold and adopted and which resulted, among other things, in the Civil War, the carnage of conquest and imperialism, the evils of Jim Crow and lynch law, the anti-democratic structure of the Senate and even the Electoral College which, as well, produced Trump just as it produced Rutherford Hayes and George W. Bush.
Get rid of those three hateful ideas in the Constitution, get rid of the Electoral College and make the Senate proportionally representative of the country - do so by popular movement and an effective legislative veto of any results of a constitutional convention - by whatever means are necessary, including insurrection if made necessary, and I can guarantee you the billionaire oligarchs won't like the results.
Update: If they are successful in conning the United States into a Constitutional Convention I say all bets are off and any state which chooses not to adopt their provisions should be considered free to leave the resulting disaster without any liabilities. If they choose to dissolve the union which exists then the results should have to depend on 100% consent by The People of the various states. If they break the contract then they should have to have the full consent of all parties. This would be uncharted waters and it should be appreciated that it is uncharted. It would make all the difference in the world from the last time the Confederates tried to do that because this time it would be done within the existing Constitution. A new contract would have to be contingent on the agreement of the parties to that contract agreeing to the results or no deal. I would certainly agitate for my state and region to leave anything that wasn't along the lines mentioned above, taking up arms if necessary. This would be deadly dangerous and the idiot legislators who set it off should realize that now before it's too late.
I disagree. It's not the press's interest in publishing nonsense so much as the public's eagerness to uncritically accept it that is the problem. Trump won because of myriad reasons, and one I would argue that contributed greatly is their slavish devotion to virtue signaling and satiating the reading public's desire for gossip and sensationalism at the expense of nuance, balanced reporting (see: Caitlyn Jenner, Michael Brown, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, etc.) that encourages a deep distrust of the media. It isn't just lies, it is their pretension, their biases (we all have them) and their desire to scoop. It's likely always been (Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop' is an hilarious take on the power of the press) but that doesn't make it any more correct.
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