Either Suppress Lies Or Trade Egalitarian Democracy For Gangster Fascism., Those Are The Alternatives

Trump came to power on the power of lies told in and spread by the media, "social media" as famously hacked and manipulated by American and Russian billionaires and, as we are now finding, billionaires and millionaires from elsewhere.  He came to power on the wings of lies told on FOX and other overtly Republican-fascist media, cabloid, hate-talk radio and on those lies repeated and joined by others on allegedly less biased stations and networks.  He was aided by lies told in print from everything from the sewer level tabloids up to and including the allegedly great papers such as and definitely including the New York Times, some of those lies leaked from or rumored out of places such as the New York City offices of the FBI.  Those last ones were aided by the deeply ambiguous figure of James Comey whose inflated view of his own morality seems to me to likely spawn a nuanced archetype of the particular type of whited sepulcher he is.  When Comey is held to be a man of integrity, the age that does that is a deeply corrupted time.

Everyone's talking about "post-truth" and even sometimes calling it what it is, an age of lies.  The "L" word, something rarely used in the past in the media that was certainly not adverse to spreading what that letter stands for as "it's being said" has even become far more openly used to describe the lies that are drowning American democracy just as they have always drowned decency and equality and the kind of justice of which peace is the fruit.

Everyone's talking about lies as if they were some atavistic force which we are powerless to do anything about overtly giving up on this evil which is proving to be a proven killer of equality, justice, democracy and, in so many places, life.

We have a choice, either we find ways to suppress and stop this lying, to make it cost enough to liars when they lie in order to stop them from lying or modern egalitarian democracy is not going to survive.  I think as most other things in life, that is a matter of choice, we're going to have to give up some things in order to make other things possible. 

The choice is between allowing the media, social and commercial to continue to carry lies and, so, lose decency and democracy or we can choose to make the constant effort to stop the lies and to save some measure of those.  The fear that any attempt to inhibit lying will become oppressive is absurd, there are mechanisms to control speech when the speech is considered property, there are mechanisms to control speech when it is considered to be "in the national interest" or "a matter of security" when we know those inhibitions of speech are fraught with all kinds of dangers but that they are also necessary.   I think the difference between egalitarian democracy and the only other alternative of some form of government by gangsters, from the worst depravity to what is merely relatively milder, is as worth taking that chance on as whether or not some corporation or individual can keep other people from profiting off of their commercial speech.  It's as worth taking a chance of as the restrictions for "national security and national interest". 

This is something that is going to be a choice and if we choose to be too cowardly to protect egalitarian democracy from lies, the lives of minorities, the lives of women, the lives of even school children whose lives are taken on lies told on behalf of the gun industry, to take an especially vivid example, then we will lose all of those on behalf of the slogans of the "free speech -free press" industry, most of them lawyers and other liars in the employ of corporations and billionaires who are in the business of using that to lie for their own profit.

It's not as facile as those slogans such as "The First Amendment" which is exactly as facile as "The Second Amendment" and both of which are destroying us and certainly democracy.   In my darker moods I am afraid that that tiny margin of simplification will be what defeats and destroys egalitarian democracy. And much of that overly simplistic thinking has been a result of indoctrination in universities and colleges and in the lefty media, that's where I learned lots of that empty jargon.

This is inspired by my listening to Chris Hayes All In, something I don't generally get around to doing and someone, I think it was Hayes, pointing out that Australia, Britain and the United States, all countries in which Rupert Murdoch has had enormous success in his promotion of fascism, all of them were in the control of "revanchist" reactionary governments.  That's what going on fifty-five years of "free speech - free press" absolutism have resulted in in the real world laboratory of real life.  All of the theories that those slogans and legal rulings and laws were based in are as disproved to produce progress as any now laughably disproved scientific or cosmological theory of the dead past.  It is exactly as disproved as the Ptolemaic cosmology or medical care based on the theory of the humors.