THAT THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST, RACIST BULLY RUDY GIULIANI and the rest of the ship of tools who are in danger of being soon indicted by Jack Smith are clinging to The First Amendment to protect their violent attack on the most basic and essential act of government in a democracy,a free and fair vote resulting in our government, proves only once again that there is something seriously wrong with The First Amendment.
I mean that literally, that there is something wrong with the words as drafted by in First Congress and and, even more, whimsically, certainly its current meaning in modern America.
The First Amendment is, most often these days, the last resort of those who would destroy equality and democracy, it's biggest fattest fanboys and gals in 2023 are overt fascists, neo-Nazis and promoters of the indigenous form of that here in the United States, white supremacy. And their allies on the Supreme and other Courts. They rightly see it as their most potent weapon against Black People, members of other targeted minorities, LGBTQ+ People, Women, democrats and Democrats. That is certainly the unadmitted but glaring reality of what the First Amendment is under real life, right now.
The fact is that, as written, The First Amendment is so stupidly drafted as to not distinguish between the moral virtue and, so, inherently held right OF PEOPLE, to tell the truth and the everything from slight wrong to mortally dangerous evil of lying and bearing false witness is its first and most stupid flaw. It is an irony that those who dishonestly and most loudly proclaim that "The 10 Commandments" are of some secular legal force are the foremost practitioners of the bearing of false witness, taking God's name in vain, advocating killing all for the practice of theft. They are no slouchers in the acts of coveting what belongs and appertains to theirs, too.
That flaw, under the elite lawyering of the Supreme Court since 1964, had been turned into the most potent weapon of the multi-millionaires and now billionaires and their owned media AGAINST EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, has been made steadily worse over the once elite lawyering during the courts of the 60s through early 2000s and now with the gang of grifter prostitutes in black robes who comprise the 6 vote majority on the Supreme Court. Its direct results got us Trump to start with. I think the corporate dishonesty allowed in the professional practice of lawyering and judging, concealed, hidden protected and practiced under professional standards and practice is even more dangerous than the conventional dishonesty that has become routine in the sciences because so many of the dangers that come from badly done science gains a reality in the world through lawyering, judging and "justicing." That dishonesty has flourished under the Constitutional system as was demonstrated in the hearings in the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees in which the diplomats and military men stood up for the truth and against Trump as the lawyers pretty uniformly covered their professional asses.
Through the lies of the free press about any Democrat with a chance to gain office and who might seriously endanger the filthy wealth of the ultra-rich, everything from the pox ridden scum of FOX Lies to the Sulzberger owned New York Times and almost all of the electronic media, that giddy and un-teathered Freedom of the Press has so seriously endangered the foundation of democracy, the minds of We The People.
Any time you hear someone in the media wondering at how so many people, even those who poll as believing he committed crimes while in office INTEND TO VOTE FOR HIM AGAIN, the answer is simple, it is the lies of the media which don't just go away and they aren't swamped by the truth - so notably less frequently told in the media. Lies accumulate in human minds like the worst of annoying pop music or the stupidest of TV based trivia and they swamp any bit of the truth or common notions of decency that might, as well, somehow seep in. When that big-fat First Amendment absolutist, Charles Pierce talks about "prion disease" as the cause of Republican-fascist insanity, the self-replicating prions he is talking about are First Amendment permitted lies.
As I came to appreciate in arguing with First Amendment absolutists over the past several decades, the truth is at a disadvantage in compared to lies in brawling over these issues with would be liberals and lefties, online. The truth has to be told in terms of reality, lies can be told in forms crafted to appeal to the worst in us, our moral flaws, our salacious curiosities and a hundred other weaknesses, lies are often a quicker sale that appeals to our weakness, the truth is often a hard sell because it can't be so constructed. That alone makes the legal permission of lying seriously dangerous for legitimate government, egalitarian democracy. If the voters are corrupted, the very foundation of even non-egalitarian "democracy" has been rotted out from under it. That is a hard truth which the slave-holding "founders" either didn't want to talk about or which they didn't want most voters considering.
The lies about Hillary Clinton, the lies about Hunter Biden used to tar his father, the lies about other prominent Democrats in the past and like the greatest Speaker of the House in the history of that body, Nancy Pelosi, are based on nothing but the innuendo and reporting of what "people are saying" on every media venue up to and including NPR and the NYT are the basis of the success of the criminal Trump, the now overtly fascist Republican-fascist Party and the criminals who comprise the majority of the Supreme Court and which control so many governments in the various states.
Anyone who pretends that last claimed avenue of the corruption, through the media, especially the electronic media are not stupid enough to think that Trump and the previous holder of the title of President of the most objectively criminal administration in American history, Ronald Reagan came from the entertainment division of the media, the movies, TV, hate talk radio. It is beyond question the media gave those to us and it is no wonder it happened after the Warren Court said the media was free to lie with impunity against politicians, idiotically believing they were protecting a part of the Civil Rights movement in doing that thing which was always guaranteed to be turned against the politicians who adopted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and which would help put into place the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts which have been dismantling those.
The First Amendment was hastily written by the callow amateurs of the First Congress, under the unenthusiastic leadership of James Madison who had to push it because he'd made a promise to his fellow slave holders in the Virginia Legislature as a way of getting them to approve the Constitution. It was written in the second-rate style of poetry of the made-to-tarnish Silver Age of English poetics to be vague and general. That that vaguery and generality has been used by lawyers and "justices" on the make to push wildly foolish to entirely insane notions of liberty as well as obvious protection of truths that wouldn't risk the wealth of the wealthiest only proves how badly considered and written the language is. That it compounds the confusion by mashing personal freedom of speech with corporate license given to the artificial entities of the media - corporations cannot have rights, only natural beings can - makes it ever more dangerous as lawyers and "justices" on the make manipulate it on behalf of their sleazy clients and criminal corporations.
That Rudy Giuliani is whining and bawling about The First Amendment on behalf of the criminal conspiracy to put Trump back in office so the crime spree could continue proves that the thing is as dangerously drafted as the Second Amendment was. That both of those were either explicitly intended to protect and has craftily been put to use to enhance America's indigenous and highly powerful form of fascism, white supremacy, destroying yet another great attempt to correct the dangerous aspects of the Constitution under Supreme Court interpretation, overturning the Civil Rights reforms of 1964 and after, proves that protecting real rights of speech and all of us from automatic weapons is not something that can be deferred by pretending the drafters of the so-called Bill of Rights were human gods of infinite wisdom as the clap trap of Broadway and cinematic romance and cheap ersatz history has it.
The worst problems of America stem in no small part from the highly unequal and dishonest notions of "freedom," even more so "liberty" and "rights" which reside in the imaginations of too many Americans and within the lore of Constitutional and civil law. There is no legitimate freedom without those being equally held, there is no meaningful right of speech when those are swamped with mass media and social-disease media lies. There is no legitimate safety or domestic tranquility when violence through automatic weapons is a Supreme Court, Republican-fascist created reality around the country. The belief that we have any of those or that that has been the history of the country under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is a mass delusion, primarily under the white middle and upper classes. I have found that those who are in minorities are far less likely to be deluded about that as was the Black Civil War soldier who noted that he and other Black People were held in slavery under the Constitution and Bill of Rights even as he was fighting to maintain the Constitutional order. It is perhaps less of a delusion among Women than men, Women living under a perpetual lynch law terror campaign that is so ubiquitous that no one even admits that's what the daily murders of Women by men comprises that. Not even most Women.
The media, Hollywood, TV, radio, internet social-disease media freed by Madison and his muddling colleagues, dominated by slave holders, is the source of most of what replaces formal education for most Americans. The lies that those media liberals and moderates and former-Republicans bemoan ALL COME THROUGH THAT NOTION OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND PRESS. Few get them directly from a speakers mouth in a stadium or auditorium, fewer than that get them from some corrupt man or woman of the cloth in a church though plenty of them get it from some huckster hallelujah peddler on TV.
Among our greatest needs is to suppress lying which is of such proven a clear and present danger to egalitarian democracy, in other words of ANY LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT. In the absence of legitimate government the only alternatives are anything from bad to totally controlling gangster governance. What has, in fact, governed minority groups for our entire history, the parallel reality of white Hollywood's affluent-middle-class view of that history, what replaces actual history for most Americans. To a good extent that has also been the history of poor-working class whites, who have been successfully gulled into believing they had it so good because Black People and others had it worse off.
The great change that came with Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and then Trump is that increasingly criminal gangs have made even the affluent white crowd who read increasingly sense their own peril, even some who participated in earlier administrations now realize that the course they were embarked on has led to the open gangsterism of Trump. Some realized it earlier in the reckless foreign crimes of the Bush II regime imposed on the country through the governorship of Jeb Bush and five of the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court.
This has all been building throughout most of my life and it has all been built with lies enabled through the language of the First Amendment. I would include the gun-industry profiting carnage which was, as well, sold in lies, though many of those are now told from the Supreme Court bench.
We either will change the language of the First Amendment to remove the protection of lies, including those lies told about politicians, or we will get a perhaps fatal lesson in the idiotic "enlightenment" notions mouthed by meat-heads like Voltaire which don't stand up to a minute of hard thought. There is no reason for any American to die for the rights of white supremacists to have yet another epoch of American history to repeat the de facto slavery of the post-Civil War period, there is no reason for any American to lift a finger to let Nazis or fascists or Communists, for that matter, to try to impose what those regimes have proven they could do in other places. Anyone who strikes that phony pose of Voltaire is probably notably not in any danger of getting attacked or murdered by them, they are as authentic as Reagan or Trump. They're just striking a different pose, one that we are stupid of we take seriously.
Other than a few truths that would endanger the security of the country, that would endanger well-regulated and properly conducted police and criminal investigations and other such legitimate functions of government and society, there should be a legal protection for telling the truth. There should never be a legal protection for telling lies about individual People, about groups of People, or even more generally. There should never be a legal protection for promoting the denial of rights to People based on their identity or other aspects of themselves so in order to deprive them of a normal, decent, private life. The consequences of the Courts protecting lies and slanders and libels have been terrible, both in personal lives destroyed and, now, in the very existence of America's far from perfect democracy. We don't have to worry about the imaginary and theoretical dangers of the amendment of the Bill of Rights to fix its known problems, those are killing us right now. They have brought us as close to a fascist coup as we have come since the creation of the American-fascist Confederacy and the Jim Crow regime. Those are happening right now under the freest press-speech we have ever had. Free to lie is free to kill.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
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