One Thing In Our Politics Which Has Achieved A De Facto Level of Scientific Certainty

Chris Hayes' segment from last night with Julia Ioffe discussing the relationship of Russian oligarchs with covert ties to the Putin crime regime and the National Rifle Association and the possible illegal funneling of Putin mafia cash through American organizations to put Trump in office should have made your jaw drop.   It's a sign of just how common this kind of corruption has gotten in the United States that my jaw didn't drop when I heard it.   But that was largely because I was following what the Supreme Court and the "civil liberties" industry has done to American democracy through a line of rulings, one of the last and most damaging of which was the Citizens United case which Ioffe mentions as contributing to hidden money from even foreign organized crime regimes being funneled into our political system through "free speech-free press" orthodoxy. 

I don't know how much more explicit it can get, the ACLU joining with overt fascists in advocating an interpretation of the First Amendment which their opponents warned would lead to exactly this kind of thing yielding the results their opponents predicted would mean that the case that Citizens United and the theory of the First Amendment which is the doctrine and dogma of all right-thinking lefties and everything right down to our explicit domestic terrorist-Nazis is proven by a test given it in real reality instead of lawyerly theorizing and blather about precedents  in previous terrible decisions in that line of decisions.   I have no doubt that the next case like this the ACLU will brief in favor of the same line which has produced this disaster. 

If the NRA did, in fact, take Putin crime money - or any money from any foreign oligarchs - to influence the American election OR IF ANY OTHER UNITED STATES ENTITY DID that means that the ACLU-"civil liberties" industry line on that is incompatible with the only reason for the First Amendment to exist, to protect egalitarian democracy, the right to a government elected on the basis of informed consent of the governed by elected representatives who will protect and defend us from all enemies foreign and domestic.   

I am quite confident that the NRA isn't the only entity which had such Putin-Russian oligarch or other oligarch money given to it to help influence the election.  With the articles I read in them I strongly suspect some of that money was going to either some of the media organs of the alleged left and if not them directly, to fund the writings of their contributors.   I suspect that an investigation of the Green Party, of the sort which was reported to be one of the areas the Mueller investigation had taken up might be on to something there, too.  And if you can say that about the covert Republican-spoiler "left" it's even more likely to be true of the pro-Republican right. 

The fact is that the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry has been as much a tool of billionaire oligarchs foreign and domestic as we may find the NRA has been.   They certainly made it more likely that the Putin crime regime and their allies would succeed in using, as Ioffe pointed out, things invented in the United States for their own purposes.  It would certainly not have been a secret to them that Citizens United was a gift to them, given by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court with the help of the "civil liberties" industry because the American free press, not to mention opposing briefs filed with the Court pointed out what they were doing.   I'd go so far as to say that the members of the court who voted for Citizens United were guilty of treason, certainly of violating their oath of office in doing so.   They and the lawyers and groups who briefed them in favor of Citizens United can't claim ignorance because they were warned that this would result from what they did.   

These are days when you have to make such strong statements because our country has not been in this kind of self-made crisis before,  I don't think the Confederacy was as serious a challenge to American democracy because that treason was geographically isolated, that of today is made general by such things as Supreme Court rulings.   I don't know any other way to say it than this because I've paid attention to this for a long time now and I remember the warnings that have been given and ignored because "The First Amendment" .  Well, now it's obvious that's led to the same thing that is the desired result of those constantly yelling "The Second Amendment".   Fascism.