In the nightmare that Trump has been, for the past decade, the role that lies have played in his ascendancy, his following, his bowel movement of a movement and his wielding of power has been mentioned probably hundreds of thousands of times - probably almost as many times as there have been lies that were issued by him and his crime gang. The media has bemoaned the lies and even the death of truth. Take that in THE FUCKING DEATH OF TRUTH. And even more than that, the death of valuing and even taking seriously the entire concept of reality.
The media - that is the minority of the "free press" who have not been at least mostly if not all-in on Republican-fascist-Trump-neo-Nazi lying - have constantly talked in those terms for this decade but, unless I've missed it, not one of those media figures who mourn the death of truth and the death of reality have made the connection to that and the "freedom of the press" to lie and lie and lie with impunity - the very thing which led to the rise of Trump to start with, lies told about his business acumen, his success, his genius, his artistic "deal making."
From the earliest publicity bull shit in the New York City media to the apex of the media phase of Trump's rise in the "reality TV show" in which he played the character the New York City media invented when he was just a sleazy real-estate heir who was running every business he ever had into the ground, TRUMP WAS A CREATION OF THE MEDIA, THE GODDAMNED FREE PRESS.
If any figure in the mass media from MSNBC to the Guardian, to the last vestiges of independent reality based media such as Keith Olbermann, Brian Tyler Cohen, etc. have faced the role that the "free press," freed by the Supreme Court to lie with impunity, has played in America's descent into fascism I've missed it entirely. It was the Sullivan Decision made on behalf of the New York Times against a truly evil segregationist that took us from those heady weeks during the LBJ administration when America finally achieved something like the status of an actual democracy with the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid to the resultant stream of lies about politicians (read that Democratic politicians because the lies told about Democrats and their loss of elections are the real life consequence of the Sullivan decision) . . . If anyone in the media has talked about that I'd really like to know about it because I don't know anyone else who has talked about it except me.
I can sort of narrow it down to one of the early blogs where I first raised the role of the Sullivan Decision in the rise of Republican-fascism and, then, Trumpian fascism, the blogs I said such things on back then. It may have been the rapidly forgotten once legendary Media Whores Online or it may have been on one of the offspring of that, Eschaton (back when it actually had writing on it), the good Roger Ailes blog, it may have been on Eric Altermann's blog where I first raised the idea that free speech absolutism in which no lie was too big or too dangerous to make the liar vulnerable to at least civil action was fatal to democracy. I can't remember where it was but I remember that it got some of the most rapid and extreme rejection and anger of any non-religious idea I have ever posted online.
When I started writing blog pieces at Echidne's blog exploring the dangers of that ideological stand I got even more rapid and angry rejection of what I said by people who never engaged with any of my arguments at any point. It still gets that reaction when it doesn't get just stunned silence.
I have yet to hear or read anyone online who didn't get the idea from me (Simps, of all people) raise the idea that we should take that bit of the Gospel seriously enough to admit the relationship between People knowing the TRUTH and even the possibility of them being free depending on them valuing that truth and the death of American democracy. I have yet to read anyone taking it seriously enough to recognize the problem that the Warren Court created for American democracy when the opened up the floodgates of media lying about politicians and public figures. Of course the stupidity of the First Amendment has always made media lying the law of the land, especially when those lies were told about women, racial minorities, other minority groups, genocide, more than anything lies told on behalf of the richest and so most powerful.
The relationship between media lies told about, as an example Black People, Native Americans and the fact that they have lived lives of subjugation, enslavement based on violence, terror and mass murder is about as strong as it could be. I have pointed out here before that the rise of the modern KKK was a direct and fully documented result of the movie Birth of a Nation, which was and still is used as a recruitment tool of our most powerful and effective terrorist group before the rise of MAGA. And that was only one of the media sources for the lies that birthed and sustained that most effective and violent terrorist groups. Similar lies created MAGA, most of those lies carried in the freest of free presses under the regime of "free speech-press" as defined by the Warren->Roberts Courts with the seal of approval of the ACLU.
The obscene slogan of the "civil liberties" industry that was supposed to protect us from that regime of lies "more speech" should be the thing that has finally died because it not only didn't prevent Trump I, it also didn't prevent Trump II. Just as it did't prevent Nixon, Reagan, Bush I or Bush II. It didn't protect us from media spread lies, no more than the clever satire of Wiemar Germany prevented the Third Reich. And that should not surprise one of the biggest fattest supporters of "more speech" the ACLU. It was with the support of the ACLU that "More Speech" is what the Supreme Court gave the billionaires billions of times more of when they declared money to be speech as they overturned the post-Watergate bipartisan campaign finance reform that would have prevented most of the bad governance of the last fifty years. I hate the ACLU for things like that. They are the criminally insane midwives of Trumpian fascism.
I would really like to hear a Keith Olbermann or a Rachel Maddow or some other media figure deal with these matters honestly because if there is one thing that is obvious, it is that those who make lots of money in the media have a financial interest in things as they are now. Even if THEY are rigorous writers and speakers of truth, it is to their advantage to not rock the boat when their fellow journalists lie their fucking fingers and talking heads off. In that they are exactly like the lawyers who, while posing as figures of virtue and, in some cases, even having professional lives of some integrity don't rock the boat for the general dishonesty and greed of their profession, the most extreme examples of that sitting on the goddamned Supreme Court right now.
I would really like to hear someone admit that there are deep problems with both the interpretation of the First Amendment and that those problems stem from its stupidly inspecific language from which the Court and the lawyers have created that thing which cannot possibly exist, a "right to lie." Do I expect to hear some of them discuss this supremely embarrassing truth about American law, governance and life? No. I don't expect that. But I'm not going to stop talking about it on the request of anyone who tells me to.
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