None of those who has spouted that most proven empty of empty slogans "more speech" at me ever answered my point that their advocacy for the misnamed "rights" of Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, male supremacists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. to be free to promote their ideologies were actually telling the intended victims of all of those groups that those self-important, full of themselves "civil libertarians" were perfectly OK with giving those intending to oppress and kill them a sporting chance to succeed in winning power and putting their genocidal, oppressive intent into full practice.
"More speech" turns "Never Again" into, Oh, let's risk it happening again, it makes us feel all good and free speechy.
Is it any wonder that that ideology comes almost entirely out of the white-collar babbling and scribbling professions who don't really work, who are well paid to do the bidding of the owners of the media and on college faculties and who seldom belong to a group who is really in present danger of being shot by white supremacists or bad cops. Most of those I can think of, affluent or aspiring to be white males, though there are some women who have bought into that too.*
That those ideologies have had power in the past proves it is possible for them to gain and exercise power. For anyone who is stupid enough to say "it can't happen here in the good ol' US of A," they certainly must not belong to any of the racial or ethnic groups who were very successfully killed and oppressed and enslaved (both before and after the Civil War). It most certainly has and does and no doubt will continue to happen here for them and their families.
They are almost certainly white and rich and of a group who never had that very real history which never really ended. Those who figure we (by which they really mean "I") are not really in danger of having the brief moment in American history in which the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Title 9 etc. were law, law that is being overturned by the fascism that has been resurgent here since shortly after the Supreme Court said that that mass media have a right to lie with impunity. Nixon lost in 1960, he won the next election he ran in after the Sullivan Decision allowing the media to lie with impunity, it's been on a downward slope ever since. The fascists have won with that "more speech" squeaking from the mouths of liberals even as the fascists also had their "more speech" something the "more speechers" seem to have overlooked. And as the fascists' "more speech" was made all the more by the Buckley v. Valeo Decision which made money speech** in addition to the other "free speech" rulings that allowed the fascists their chance to use the mass media to sway an effective margin of victory, made all the easier through the Electoral College and the Supreme Court run amok in clear partisan interference in elections - remember Bush v Gore? Which led directly to the Republican-fascist dominance on the court continuing. If you don't think the Roberts Court will try to reinstall Republicans you are an an idiot incapable of learning from the hardest of experience. Much of our scribbling class are such idiots.
You can take your "more speech" and go to hell as far as I'm concerned. You're as certain enablers of American fascism as the Green Party and the play-lefties and hate talk radio have been.
* Women even as they are the focus of the most sustained and ongoing lynching campaign in human culture - still averaging three to four a day in the last statistics I recall reading.
** First posted at olvlzl, Sunday, June 11, 2006
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW: Lies over the door to the Supreme Court
Plessy v. Ferguson. What would your reaction to that phrase be if you didn't know the decision was a racist lie? If the pretext of the decision had been true, if it had maintained or established real equality would it be a stain across our history? It wouldn't come right after Dred Scott on the list of infamous Supreme Court injustices. Equality for black people in 1896 was a lie and the majority in Plessy knew it was a lie as they told it.
I second the nomination of Buckley v. Valeo to join that list of shame. That decision makes a pretext of upholding free speech rights while clearly endowing the rich with superior speech rights. It says that money equals speech.
If money equals speech then you can count it, you can figure out how much speech someone has. It only takes the simplest math. With p being a person and M being the money they have. P(M)= Speech owned by P. Or, more simply, 1xM=Speech. P is a person and always equals 1. M is a variable, it depends on the amount of money p owns. As M increases then the total speech owned by p increases. Buckley v. Valeo makes it possible for the first time in our history to calculate the amount of free speech someone has.
It might be lost on our brilliant Supreme Court and the scholars who support this monstrosity but if M=O the free speech owned by P is zero [Especially speech drowned out by the 24hr-7-365 corporate propaganda liars.] Maybe they are so busy rearranging legal Platonisms that they don't know what happens when you multiply one by zero. Or maybe they do understand and the outcome doesn't bother them. And that wouldn't surprise me anymore than that it is a Buckley who has his name attached to it.
The law being an ass, it is possible for someone to support this awful decision on theoretical principle while ignoring its horrible results. At least one of our greatest Justices, Marshall, did support it. I wonder if he would have if he knew what it would lead to. But that any of the self-proclaimed "originalists" could support it is stinking hypocrisy. The founders purportedly held that all people have equal speech rights under the law. Yet the plain result of Buckley v. Valeo not only distributes the right of free speech unequally, it also theoretically blots it out for the dispossessed. I say theoretically but can anyone looking at our politics since this decision honestly deny that this hasn't been the clear result?
I don't have much M but I'll be damned and in the fires of hell before I'm going to be silent about this.
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