First Amendment rulings since 1964. Elections are won through what the media puts out and our media puts out lies and slanted information based on who owns the media and the interests of the rich men and a few women who own the media and finance it through advertising. The rich having ever so much more money than the poor and middle classes, their lies and slanting dominates the biggest and most politically effective media. There's nothing complicated or mysterious about that, though the Ivy League product on the Supreme Court pretends it isn't entirely obvious and one of the most salient factor in American life and politics.
Franklin warned that experience keeps a hard school but a fool will learn in no other one. He was right but it's hardly enough. It is a hard fact of American politics, that the media has the power to overcome even the hardest of even lived experience. That the Covid 19 criminal insanity and idiocy of Trump I didn't bury his political aspirations forever is a product of the American media lying for him during the catastrophe and lying for him after, during his nonfeasance , malfeasance and misfeasance which were the entire substance of his first regime.
Even his completely catastrophic economic shit show, what the media and its owners care about more than anything MORE THAN UP TO A MILLION UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF AMERICANS NOT FIVE YEARS AGO didn't force them to tell the truth about Trump's disasters. And worse, as Joe Biden did literally the best job in the world of recovering from Trump's disasters, they sandbagged him and undercut him and lied and lied and lied about him and his team of perhaps the most competent appointments in recent history - and I do make an exception of Merrick Garland in that - to pave the way for Trump II EVEN AS TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS INTENTION OF BEING A CORRUPT DICTATOR WHICH HE IS PUTTING IN PLACE AS THE MASS MEDIA LIES TO SUPPORT HIM IN THAT.
That is all a result of the Supreme Court, from the Sullivan decision of Earl Warren's time, when the remote priests of the Supreme Court got addicted to setting up would-be progressive milestones of "freedom" in permitting the New York Times and the rest of the media to lie with total impunity when it came to politicians and other public figures, to the Burger Court's Buckley v Valeo, and the even more blatant First Amendment enabling of political corruption and election corruption by overturning the clean elections laws passed by the Congress AFTER WITNESSING AND EXPERIENCING THE CRIMES OF THE NIXON YEARS, Nixon having been a direct beneficiary of that first, the Sullivan Decision, and onward in the parade of increasingly corrupt and incompetent and bungling Republican administrations, its magnification through the Gingrichization of the Congressional Republicans, through further Supreme Court decisions, the Roberts Court's Citizens United expansion of the line of Sullivan and Buckley v Valeo, announcing that American elections were on the market for billionaires such as Musk and Thiel, and before them the likes of the Mercers and Kochs to buy themselves the Congress, the presidency and through such dark money groups as Leonard Leo runs, the Supreme Court.
I have been a life long student of politics and a news junkie and there is literally nothing clearer about American politics of my lifetime than that analysis of how things went to shit in America. And I will bet you if I or someone brought that case with full documentation to even the three non-bought, Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court they would literally be as clueless as to its meaning as the aged member of the Brit aristocracy who didn't know how to put toothpaste on his tooth brush, his valet hospitalized having done that his entire life before him. Such is the power of the lore of "Constitutional scholarship" to blind even those who are somewhat willing to see what's right there before them FOR DECADES.
And all of that flows from the sloppy, nonspecific, and incomplete wording of the First Amendment of the Constitution as it was molded and modified, especially by first the rather stupid liberalization of the Warren Court and then far less attractive aspirations of further courts, partly through a stupidly and falsely virtuous building on those Warren Court aspirations to - and they really are this politically stupid - "enhance freedom." Even the "liberal justices" went along the more obvious motives of other "justices" to enable exactly the buying of elections on behalf of a party which was increasingly addicted to the financing of millionaires and billionaires. That motive BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT CONGEALED IT INTO ITS CURRENT FORM was most blatantly expressed in the Court's Bush v Gore decision, in effect five Republicans on that court choosing to put George W. Bush in office, though he'd lost the election, one of them, Sandra Day O'Connor, having expressed displeasure over Gore winning the election because she wanted to retire and didn't want a Democrat to choose her successor.
That the Constitution didn't and still doesn't expressly prohibit the goddamned Supreme Court from stealing an election on behalf of the party of its majority is a damning indictment of the document.
But now that the Supreme Court has made those previously uncut trails to corruption and dictatorship through the already far less the pristine virgin forest of the First Amendment, the only way to shut down that road to dictatorship is to change the wording of that stupidly inadequate text. It has to be blatantly set out that "free speech - free press" does not include that oxymoron of secular legalism a "right to lie." It has to include language that the press is an artificial, human creation and has no rights, those only adhering to natural living creatures but that it may have permission to tell the truth and operate for the public good but not the public damage. It has to be made plain that media and speech which attack or damage equality and democracy can be acted against civilly in ways that prevent the media from damaging equality and democracy. That has to be done because it is the story of American history that millions of Americans have been denied the most basic of rights on the basis of lies and, especially, lies spread by the media, including "entertainment" media.
We have a number of rights under a democratic government, as they say in Canada, speech is a right but it's not the only right. One of the most interesting of those rights but one which the legal scholars and Supreme Court "justices" don't seem to have much interest in at all is the right all of us have to being governed by a LEGITIMATE government. There is no truly legitimate government which has been devised by human ingenuity except egalitarian democracy, and within that realm of legitimacy must come the admission that even an egalitarian democracy is a product of human aspiration and human trying and with that comes the susceptibility to human error. We have a right to a far, far better government than the one which our Constitution has given us, certainly People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. have suffered terribly under the United States Constitution, the only good things in our history are the story of the struggles to right what has been wrong under that document AND THE SO-CALLED BILL OF RIGHTS throughout our history. The very framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were some of the worst oppressors of People of Color and Women, the oppression of both groups has been the law of the land for almost all of American history, under the Constitution, under the rule of law under that Constitution, the few hiccups in that under random Court rulings have been only temporary as the history of the history of the Rehnquist and, most of all Roberts Court have proved in their headlong return to Jim Crow and motel-room abortions and the most florid period of corrupt, bought government since the previous periods punctuated by a brief period immediately after Lincoln,* immediately after the Republican crash and the FDR years and the brief period after the now dead Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were in effect. There was, in truth, no such a thing as legitimate government without the voting of Women and People of Color, there is no such a thing as legitimate government through most of American history which we have fast returned to under the regime of First Amendment permitting lying by hate-talk media as championed by that group you are unhappy with me telling the truth about, the goddamned ACLU.
By the very terms set out in the preamble to the Constitution - the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence having been set aside by our slave-holding, financier aristocrat-framers - the American Constitution has now failed catastrophically in the Supreme Court aided return of Trump, this time as the dictator he promised he would be. The Republican partisanship, the servicing of the billionaires who put them on the Court matter to the corrupt Roberts six more than anything about even an effective or mildly beneficial government. The diseased Clarence Thomas and Alito are interesting cases in pathology but it's the genteel Virginia white supremacy of Roberts that has interested me most right now. I think in his articulate and somewhat hesitant support of the most blatant of corruption, his desire to present an attractive fascade even in the face of the crudeness of the rest of his coalition of Republican-fascists on the court might give us some insight into how those corruptions baked into the Constitution by the framers, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Ellsworth, etc. were shit presented in the form of an heroic monument.
I've also become more interested in something I read from Louis Boudin in his discussion of the problem having a written Constitution presents. He discussed the proud legal erudition of the early "justice" Joseph Story, one of the most learned legal scholars in the history of the Court but one who was wedded to the long history of the English law in the way that the least learned of today's corrupt Court, Alito cited in the government takeover of Women's reproductive systems. Boudin pointed out that the very provisions of early English law that Story cited to support his American Constitutional decisions had, by the time he cited them, already been discarded in England through the courts and government addressing the defects in those earlier legal holdings. He said that the flexibility that the unwritten British Constitution allowed was foreign to the legal system under the written Constitution and so a learned "justice" could remain totally clueless as to what was wrong with what they ruled. In the case of Storey, it lead a putative opponent of slavery to write what was, before Dred Scott, the most infamous pro-slavery, anti-egalitarian and most blatantly unjust rulings of that already blatantly unjust Court in its history, the Prigg decision.
The reverence we are taught and rotely give to the Constitution, the Bill of Right, the Supreme Court are misplaced and not based on an honest, accurate and informed assessment of their real existence in reality instead of hagiographic lying. The fact is that slavery, genocide, land theft, the theft of labor, the turning of the bodies of slaves and Women into chattels of white men and the bodies of workers into the chattels of rich white men (Goresuch on companies freezing their employees to death as a term of employment proves that's still ongoing) all of that has existed under the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution. The corruption of our politics by money and by media lying is permitted under the U.S. Constitution and the idoloized First Amendment is the vehicle under which that corruption is maintained even in the face of bi-partisan attempts to clean up our elections. The corruption of Trump II, blatantly bought by billionaires and now running the United States government into the ground on behalf of the billionaires who bought it is a direct product of "free speech-press" as it is laid out in the First Amendment as that has been made to mean by Supreme Courts for the past sixty one years.
You have to be a total idiot to not realize that something is wrong here and that that is what is wrong. We are required by our civic superstitions to pretend nothing is wrong and what we can see right before our eyes is not happening. Such is the "civic religion" to use Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid phrase, it would seem to be dependent on the lies it permitted and now promotes.
* Which would lead to a discussion of the Electoral College and other slave-power enhancements baked into our corrupt Constitution.
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