I listened to Rachel Maddow's interview with James Clapper on the internet this morning. One of the things that got left out in the discussion of how the Putin mafia regime swung the election to Trump is that they used Twitter and Facebook and planted stories in the American media through the entirely predictable behavior of the American media and under the theory of "freedom of the press" that has been built up over the past half century.
The American media was everything from a willing participant, in the official right-wing media, or a willing dupe, including the most august organs of the American media. The American media is as guilty of playing a part in Putin being able to install Trump and the complicit Republican Congress as any of the political operatives and goons who have either pled guilty or are under investigation for what a Constitution that was the product of the experience of the corporate, mass media and the ingenuity of the enemies of democracy would denote as treason.
Rachel Maddow, bless her, as every other professional journalist, has a direct interest in not calling attention to the part that that theory of the First Amendment has played in the treasonous collusion with a foreign despot, the foremost promoter of fascism and neo-Nazism, a massively wealthy mafia boss who became one of the richest men in the world by corrupting and manipulating the Russian people through the corrupt Russian media. It should be no shock that Putin did that so successfully, he is anything but stupid. He and his crime mod, no doubt studied what other billionaires, American and otherwise did with the legal regime that the Supreme Court, first liberals and then, as they saw the opportunities for the Republican oligarchs they served, conservative justices created at the behest of such groups as the ACLU and lawyers who worked for the corporate media.
Rachel Maddow may feel some understandable hesitation to tell you the horrible truth on that count, I won't hesitate to tell you that.
Putin saw what oligarchs here and imported, none more so than Rupert Murdoch, have done to sell lies and libel for the profit of American billionaire oligarchs and millionaire wannabees. He saw what a useful political tool lies told with total legal impunity have been for American fascists and right wingers and as the Supreme Court opened up more opportunities for even foreign despots to work the American legal system and media for their own profit and benefit, he took full advantage of it. Allowing anonymous and pseudonymous bots and proxies and spoofers through the corrupt media of Facebook and Twitter, directed by British and other companies that would do the work of anyone, no matter how evil or corrupt or anti-democratic for pay and all of the rest of it flows directly from the "civil liberties" industry theories of the 20th century and the lawyers and law theorists and judges and justices who adopted that.
The use of the First Amendment to destroy democracy is probably the greatest irony of the American Constitution after the all too temporary demise of Constitutionally sanctioned and encouraged slavery, indeed, Trump's installation as that of George W. Bush eighteen short years ago, was directly done through the Electoral College, one of those slave-power imposed aspects of the Constitution.
The idolatrous and pagan civic religion surrounding the cult of the Constitution is a direct danger to the later, authentic formula of democracy, government of, by and for THE PEOPLE. Organized crooks like Putin hate democracy because corrupt government is easier to work to steal from The People, so do American billionaire oligarchs, so do Republicans. The Constitution, especially as interpreted by the civil liberties industry in the past half century, is as dangerous to egalitarian democracy as Putin's billions and the industry of corrupt social media and mass media manipulators such as Breitbart and Cambridge Analyitica who work for them for pay.
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