THE DANGERS OF SUPPRESSING LIES may be real, though I think most of the claimed dangers are imaginary dangers based in a pretense that judges and jurors can't discern easily 90% of lies they're told from something close to the truth. It's absurd to base an entire system of government on the small percentage and few times when it's impossible to sharply distinguish the truth from a lie, such as happens in our inadequate liberal democracy. By allowing 90% of the lies, you also allow the evil that comes with the enormous amount of lying that represents. Just figuring that's the cost of not accepting responsibility for punishing lies is too dangerous, as the past eight years of the rise of Trump has proved. Trumpism is a product of lies permitted to be told in the mass media, we nearly lost even our imperfect democracy once and are still in danger of losing it, how much worse does it have to get before the lies that brought it are prohibited?
The dangers of making lies actionable may be real but so is making them a matter of "rights," especially under the daffy Constitutional notion that media corporations or any corporations can have rights.
Of course, unmentioned in that is the danger from dishonest, corrupt, ideologically anti-democratic judges and "justices" but pretending that isn't part of the system that results from the way things are now does nothing to avoid such dishonesty and corruption. The system as it is has given us that, already, the legal profession is the source and the end of that sewer.
I've mentioned how much care judges and "justices" are when it's a matter of who owes who money, sometimes in the most absurdly technical and attenuated cases, they'll figure out who was owed money. Yet the same judges and, especially, "justices" will pretend they can't discern truth from bald-faced and obviously self-interested lies from the most glaring of truths. It really isn't any great surprise, given how they have no real devotion to the truth, not enough to value it over bald-faced lies or the protection the truth has for equality and democracy. If Americans had never lied, the worst of our history would probably have never happened. Much of it certainly wouldn't have.
Lying is how we got here, to start with. That and the kind of professional lying that lawyers learn in elite law schools. Harvard, Yale, etc. were the schools that started the kind of fascist ideology that resulted in unitary-executive theory, MAGA, state legislative nullification of elections and the encouragement through permission of fascism. Those are schools where the law became a matter of twisting words to suit those who could pay the most and come up with Constitutional excuses for lying to produce results that were entirely unequal and not infrequently evil. The legal profession has certainly never done much to kick out and de-license scumbag lawyers who serve some of the worst clients, enabling them to get away with murder, theft and the corruption of governments. The Dishonor Roll of scumbag lawyers and politicians who were produced by elite universities is something those places should have to wear around their worst products around their necks, I think they're business and especially their obscene endowments should be taxed into a reduced status, the money used to fund public education, grade schools and high schools, 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities. They certainly don't deserve the absurdly given respect and honor they are habitually given. The same is true for other engines of fascism, such as big media and the social-disease media that has given the United States the equivalent of syphilitic dementia.
The amorality of the legal profession also flows from the privilege given to lawyers that they use the formal privilege of client confidentiality to cover up obvious and even expressly articulated and admitted law breaking and the commission of evil. While many lawyers wouldn't use secrecy to do that for a client, if someone wants to do that they can hire lawyers who will do that for them, depending on the secrecy rules and permissions even to break the law, themselves, and get away with it. Gangster lawyers, such as those who serve Trump are obviously the kind of lawyers who do that, and he's the tip of the toxic iceberg. That kind of thing is obviously bound to bleed over into politics, the number of lawyers who go into politics would guarantee that, many of the lawyer-liars who work for the rich and corrupt for the most money are the kind who have political careers, many of the worst of them are Ivy League level products. Many of them also go into the media or, like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the judiciary.
What really shocked me was hearing lawyers who are supposed to be better than that, even civil rights lawyers whose clients are the victims of lies sounding like Chatty Cathy went to law school and recorded the phrase, " they have a 'right' to lie." It's clear they imbibed the same obvious immorality at law school that built the corruption we are endangered by and which will obviously destroy any progress made towards equality and the only legitimate government there is, egalitarian democracy. The idea that there is a right to do something that is so objectively wrong is something you would hope a 9 year old would have learned better than that by then.
I have gone into that before, I am not a liberal democrat, someone who thinks that there is a right to say whatever and do whatever they can get away with doing. I'm an egalitarian democrat, I am also more radical than a socialist, I am a leveler. Some idiot Marxist online accused me of being a capitalist because I told the truth about Marxism, that it has built such a huge mountain range of murders that it, like fascism and Nazism and capitalism, are only rightly seen as definitively discredited. I believe that any alleged democracy that doesn't specifically choose to put morality above immorality, justice over injustice, equality over privilege is a fraudulent democracy that is bound to end up endangered by the likes of Trump, made vulnerable to billionaires foreign as well as domestic by a corrupt Supreme Court such as those which have put us on that road starting with the permission of the mass media to lie with impunity in 1964, permitted the corruption of money when the Congress tried to address what led to the Nixon crime spree in the Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976 and which subsequent Courts have made disastrously worse in rulings that followed on those. It started in the "liberal" Warren Court but the Berger, Rehnquist and, especially the Robert's Court has made it steadily worse. The majority in the Citizens United case were specifically warned they were opening up the political system to exactly the kind of corruption that Putin and other billionaire crooks aimed at the America's electoral democracy, the Ivy Leaguer Republican-fascists on that court did it anyway. They obviously don't want equality or even an effective electoral democracy. They are all guilty to some extent.
So if you're going to cry like a baby that I slammed those slammed above, you are welcome to go soak your head. You should have learned that much about the truth by the time you were nine.
