THE AFFLUENT WHITE no doubt mostly straight-male answer to the arguments I made on Monday, "If you don't like what they're saying you don't have to listen to them, " shows nothing except how safe and secure the affluent-white-straight-males who invented that feel. They may feel so secure and are rendered so stupid in their leisure that they can't imagine this as anything more than a matter of preference and offense of sensibilities. They know they have little to nothing to fear from the kind of hate talk I say should be suppressed, that would be because the ones who have the most to fear would probably be attacked or killed by other straight-white-males who are too cowardly to attack those with more money than they have. And they know they have little to fear from those who are the focus of those lies.
I am far more surprised when it is members of groups who are the main focus of lies and hate speech and receive the full measure of violence that comes with those who are as willfully deaf to the insanity of what they're saying.
Look at that quote from Cornel West, "They have a right to spread their lies."
TO SPREAD THEIR LIES.
Even someone as degenerated as the once better West understands that the hate speech is spoken, it doesn't just dissipate in the air to no effect at all but the ideas it transmits take hold and spread, no doubt being repeated by those it has spread to and spread to even more People. Next thing you know you've got a lynch mob or a fascist party or a fascist government - which we have had in large numbers in the United States. I doubt Mississippi, Alabama or any number of states in the USA have ever not had one governing it and many states have seldom had anything but a fascist government - white supremacy having been our indigenous form of fascism before fascism had a name. The United States was under overt white supremacy up until 1865 and under de facto white supremacy for much of the rest of its history. The white supremacist faction has always had more than its share of representation in the Congress and has been able to control the presidency through the Electoral College for much of our history. That is historical fact made legal fact through the majority of the laws passed and enforced. That the Supreme Court has been even more securely in the hands of white supremacy, AND NEVER MORE SO THAN IN THE ROBERTS COURT is even more evident in the history of its rulings. They are about to reimpose Jim Crow. All of that is supported by an ocean of lies and hate talk, all of it spread by the freest of free presses in human history. The internet which some of us naively believed would be a force for breaking through the lies of corporate media has become a tsunami of lies and hate speech, now automated by "AI." Still the civil liberties asses bleat their slogans of "free speech" absolutism as it is the vehicle driving us to fascist empowerment.
It was easy for the affluent, white, straight or passing as it men of the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress to pretend that their second-rate late 18th century poetry of the First Amendment was sufficient without excluding lying and hate speech under its absurd general protection. I've said that many times, that it is as plain as the distinction between good and evil that there can be no such a thing as a right to do what is evil and lying is except in the most exceptional circumstances, evil to some degree or other.* These days, as off on the legal professions as I am, I wouldn't be surprised if those lawyers who drafted both documents understood how professionally and financially profitable their lying had been and they didn't want to include any possibility that their lies might someday be even mildly taken to account. Though in my experience lawyers are such habitual liars - far more so than cops in my experience - that might not even cross their minds. I'd always attributed it to Madison's distaste for having to keep that one promise, to push through a Bill of Rights and, so, just coming up with something that sounded good on its surface in the past.
I have noticed one thing, the last time I slammed an individual for saying that there was a "right to lie" it was the noted civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley. I attributed her myopic view of the real life consequences of such a dishonest framing of the right to free speech - which should have noted the right to tell the truth but stated there is no right to lie - to her law school training (she's a Dartmouth and Columbia product, the goddamned Ivys). Cornel West is an Ivy product too (Harvard Princeton) but not the law schools. Come to think of it, most of the most influential framers with a university education probably were too. Members of the groups most impacted by the violence and oppression and murder that comes from the spreading of lies must have to eat a special brand of lotus to blind them to what that should have taught them. It comes naturally to the affluent, straight, white males who have created the culture of such institutions and professions. Most such lying is done by them on their own behalf.
It is less surprising to hear it from an affluent white woman like Nadine Strossen whose identity includes the greatest number of victims of such violence, WOMEN, even white Women, primarily because she's a lawyer and one who has gained her professional and public status through that most morally compromised of idols of liberalism, the ACLU. And - surprise, surprise, she's an Ivy product too, Harvard and among the worst of it, Harvard Law.
* I've dealt with the evasion that claims that then it's evil to lie to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are. The greater evil of the Nazis - who believed in all kinds of lies of the kind I hold should be totally suppressed, those lies being the basis of their evil - is what makes lying to them a moral imperative, preventing a greater evil. I would hold that as an emergency exception to the evil of lying in general. Such as you and the ACLU would use it as an excuse to permit the Nazis to lie themselves back into power wherever they can dupe themselves back into power through their lies.
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