Don't be surprised if it turns out that Trump and McConnell and Republican-fascists are going to win much of the time even as they lost the presidency, even as a majority of Americans don't want their rule over them because they are able to lie and dupe the susceptible and they do so with the full power of the free press and free speech in the moderny form of that in which lies are as good as the truth if they get you what you want. Trump is trying to overturn the will of a 5 million majority of Voters with the most baseless of lies, either by reinstalling himself in the presidency as the Bush v Gore 5 put Bush II in or through doing as much damage to President Biden as he did to the legacy of Barack Obama. McConnell will not hesitate to nullify the election, a one-man majority in that anti-democratic abomination, the Senate. And he and his fellow Republican-fascists and the media they rely on will do it through lying and hypocrisy, which is a post-facto lie made such by act.
The lie that there is a right to lie is the lie that was successfully sold to a majority of college-credentialed, perhaps smart lefties even as it does not get them what they want as it gets their ideological opponents what they want over and over and over again. As I have pointed out the "civil liberties" industry, largely associated with the left in previous decades played a major part in the selling of that meta-lie.
It never fails to astound me how the American secular left can watch day after day, year after year, decade after decade how lies enable the billionaire-millionaire gangsters yet if someone suggests that lies should not be able to be spread freely in the mass media that they fall on the First Amendment fainting couch. Those in the self-interested media no less than those in the lawyering-liaring professions and among scholars, such as those are. It's astonishing how evidence proof, how experience-proof the modern mindset is, especially among those with college credentials and tenured faculty positions.
In pondering that bizarre fact, in trying to discern something like a theory of why lies should have a "right" to be told and spread in the mass media, I have come up with several ideas as to how that stupidest of all articles of faith on the secular left took hold and swamped egalitarian democracy WITH THE HELP OF THE ALLEGED CHAMPIONS OF EGALITARIANDEMOCRACY.
I look at the early champions of it and see on one hand the secular-atheist left associated with Marxism and, to a lesser extent anarchism (anarchism is incapable of being more than a lesser sort of such stupidity) and it used to puzzle me until I realized that the Marxists are not that much different in result from the fascists, there has never been a lasting attempt at a Marxist democracy, Marxism uniformly persisted as red fascism, an oppressive, evil regime which created a gangster ruling class interspersed with Stalinist style terror states in which even the gangster ruling class was managed through murders, violence and terror, not really different from Nazism though with a somewhat different style and emphasis on who got killed.
It is no wonder that the American Marxist left, realizing from the time of Victor Berger that there was no prospect of Marxism gaining power through the vote would either take his road of producing public good - and being derided as a "sewer socialist" who improved the lives of people in Milwaukee as the "real" Marxist produced nothing - or they would take the more typical communist road of trying to lie their way to power. Which is where I think a lot of the lefty free speech absolutism got a good deal of its encouragement.
The other was based in the thinking of the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes whose free speech writing, one finds, if they look hard and critically at his thinking, was in general service to his elitist cynicism, his disdain for The People and democracy, and his enormous enthusiasm for Darwinist amorality, a struggle in which nothing but power mattered, something as quaint as the truth over opportunistic lies. Of course he didn't put it in those terms in his legal writing, they teach you how to lie in law school, that was true of Harvard then as it is now as so many of Trump's hired liars learned how to do it there.
Nothing good comes from lying except in the most rare and artificial of instances. It is, of course, a good thing to lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are hiding, it's good to lie to anyone if the lie stands a good chance of preventing of righting against evil. If the lies hadn't enabled the Nazis rise to power, there would not have been any reason to tell the lie. It is interesting to me that it is the force of evil that presents the conundrum in which lies can not only be permissible but are good. The regime that forces that is the opposite of good.
That truth makes the morality of telling such lies fraught with difficulty and requires that the person be honest about the rare conditions in which such a lie is good instead of self-serving. It is one of the things I'm sure the legal liars, those in journalism and academia are schooled in doing, convincing themselves that their lies are those kinds of lies when they are nothing like that or that they are innocuous. I've become more aware of how either outright lying or cutting the corners of the truth are within academia, just like in most areas of life.
But it is when the lies are spread by the mass media, radio and television, network, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube that they are not only endangering democracy they are a clear and present and likely fatal danger to American democracy.
I see that ever more clearly, ever more demonstrated in our horrific reality as well as an honest appraisal of our history and am ever less confident that we will overcome the truncated view of that as given in the second-rate 18th century poetry of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.
I was reminded of just how badly written and what an invitation to dishonesty that was while watching the phony hallelujah peddler Paula White recently ranting out a curse in King Jamesian rhetoric in which she called out spirits to keep Trump in power. As if any but the most evil spirits would do that. Any First Amendment that insists that such fraudulent religion is not a con job to be treated as one is a First Amendment that was badly written and stupidly promulgated. The parts dealing with speech and press are similarly inadequate as the Second Amendment is dangerous in an even more deadly way. The stupidity of it tacitly asserts that a. we are not to trust the most obvious of truths right in front of us, b. that we are to never learn anything about even the greatest dangers that have been allowed to come to pass under that evil enabling assertion of "rights" and "freedom" by the enemies of the rights and freedoms of pretty much anyone else.
We have come to the point where the opponents of equality, of democracy, of decency have brought their use of the Constitution to such perfection to serve their ends that we cannot safely keep things as they are. We can either have the United States Constitution as it is written and certainly just about impossible to amend or we can have a decent life in an egalitarian democracy in a sustainable environment. We can't have both. If the Senate stays in Republican hands and if they successfully, in concert with the Supreme Court and the mass media thwart the aspirations for egalitarian democracy and the survival of the biosphere, the United States is finished or it is an ever increasingly terrible terror state. The Roberts and Rehnquist courts did their best to arm the fascists with automatic weapons. Think about that as Trump calls his thugs out with their guns the the Supreme Court under Republican-fascist majorities have armed them with using the words of the friggin' Founders.
We either change things to prevent FOX, Sinclair, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc from endangering equality, election of a real representatives on the basis of accurate information, the right we all have to moral treatment by our fellow humans, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD EVEN ENDANGERING THE PUBLIC SAFETY FROM ARMED GOONS AND LOONS or those parts of the country who are no longer willing to tolerate the rule by the minority who elect the most Senators and who pack the Supreme Court and lower courts with goons and loons should leave and form our own egalitarian democracies. I think the only means of preventing an eventual break up of the thing as it is now will be the abolition of the electoral college, the democratization of the Senate and the reigning in of the non-democratically constituted Supreme Court and, frankly, as long as the country is at the mercy of the most benighted of small states with people of greatly enhanced power under the Constitution, I don't see much prospect of that happening. I may miss my dear cousins in Florida, my relatives and friends in other parts of the country but not as much as I miss living in even the intolerable approximation of democracy we had beginning with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. We're on the verge of that being totally obliterated by the Court and the McConnell-Trump regime of "justice".
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