Never Thought I'd Say Something Like This

but I'd give twenty dollars to a go-fund-me for Hunter Biden to force Melania and Trump to be deposed in her threatened lawsuit against him.   I can't say I have had an extremely high opinion of Hunter in the past but if he carries through on this suit and forces them to tell about their past in regard to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell he'd be a hero to me in that regard. 

Do it, Hunter. 

I've Got To Make It A Rule

to turn off Toby Laboutillier before he gets to the pop hits of 1965.   It seems to be the year that pop music in the US took a real nosedive.   I mean, "Hang on Sloopy?"   "We Got To Ge Out Of This Place?"  "Summer Nights?"  "Where The Action Is?"  "Who'll Be The Next In Line?"  

Geesh!  It's almost enough to make me want to hear The Association.  

Save me

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog and Down Home Shakedown

It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics - Hurray For Gavin Newsom

THE FIRST THING in the first blog post I ever posted at 9:45 AM EDT on May 13th, 2006 * started this way:

To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.

Yesterday a Democratic Politician, for the first time of any significance, took a step out of the worse than futile, prissy,  sanctimonious, liberalishy-laywerly scrupulosity that sacrifices everything,  democracy and millions of lives to, as I heard one of the MSNBC type lawyers piously say it "the rules, the norms and the manuals."   I'm talking, of course, of Gavin Newsom's plan to put it to the highest authority in any government,  The Voters, to override the liberally-lawyerly reform to prevent that ubiquitous anti-democracy practice under our corrupt system, partisan gerrymandering which Republican-fascists never put into effect in the states they control, so as to rig the Republican minority into a majority in the House of Representatives.    In doing so he not only FACES REALITY INSTEAD OF THE PIOUS CORRUPTION OF HEAD-IN-THE-SANDS THEORETICAL IDEALISM,  HE DID SO IN A WAY THAT MAKES IT WHAT REPUBLICANS NEVER WILL MAKE IT WHEN IT'S NOT A SURE THING FOR THEM,  A CHOICE OF THE VOTERS.

The corruption of the Federal system,  dreamed up largely by John Adams, even more so than that baked-in corruption I noted in a post the other day,  by rigging House districts began as soon as elections under the Constitution were held.  The "Gerry" in gerrymander is Elbrige Gerry, one of the founders,  VP under Madison and one of the drafters of the so-called Bill of Rights who rigged the Massachusetts Senate districts to keep his party in control of the Massachusetts Senate.   A practice that has proved popular with incumbents bent on holding on to their seats but has been extremely popular with America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, both as the slave-power and today as Republican-fascists as a way to thwart equality and, so, any legitimate government in the United States.  When I read that on Gerry's death John Adams praised him as an unusually moral politician it did a lot to open up my eyes, not about Gerry, but the real character of John Adams.   And it wasn't in his favor. 

I remember when the idea of "making things fair" through taking redistricting out of the hands of the so obviously interested politicians in state legislatures took hold in response to the scandal of ubiquitous gerrymandering to give more power to a party whose policies and actions in government were unpopular.    As I recall it, it was one of those schemes dreamed up by politician-lawyers and the lawyerly types who tend to get control of so-called civil society non-profits.   And it would have been a nice idea if it wasn't an idea guaranteed to never be put into effect by Republican-fascists in enough places to ensure that the anti-People, pro-billionaire-millionaire-white supremacist party would control things.   Democrats in reliably Democratic majority places should always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE SUSPICIOUS OF "REFORMS" THAT THEY KNOW WILL NEVER BE PUT INTO EFFECT IN PLACES LIKE TEXAS or other white-supremacist majority states.   Facing reality even when that means you don't adopt the piously advocated, purity asserted plans of the scrupulous and, especially, lawyerly should be the universal rule, the norm and even written in the manuals of Democratic Party politics.  

Maine has suffered enormously through the idiotic scrupulosity of such "liberals" of the past and today., most of those I know of by name,  yes, lawyers.   But the United States as a whole has been put in danger by them.   It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics and fight fascism without two hands tied behind our backs.   I say any "reform" commission that ends up with the House in the hands of the Republican-fascists is no reform, it's sheer idiocy.   I wonder if the reason Newsome is willing to do that is that he isn't a lawyer,  a profession that, despite what you see in TV and movie fiction,  makes big money through cowardice and surrender to evil    I wonder if the reason that the governor of the third largest state,  Kathy Hochul hasn't proposed that is because she's a lawyer. 

I will pray every day that if Democrats win back control of the government that they don't let the lawyers talk them out of really, really taking power and doing what's necessary to defeat Republican-fascism, that they do what the lawyer and law school teacher Obama never would have done and which Joe Biden should have certainly known he had to do - BREAK THE RULES, THE NORMS AND WHAT IT SAID IN THE MANUALS BECAUSE EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY ARE THE ONLY LEGITIMATE THINGS IN GOVERNING.   As I've mentioned, my nightmare is that the next Democratic president will appoint another Merrick Garland who cares more about keeping his own lily white hands clean and not the breath of scandal away from his name,  a goddamned "institutionalist" who cares more about the "DoJ" than he does democracy as Attorney General.  And if that's not enough to keep me awake at night, the lawyers in the Senate and House will be there to surrender egalitarian democracy to the jaws of Republican-fascism.   And then there's the Republican-fascist stacked judiciary.   We need a rule-breaker, even more so a norms-breaker and someone who will order the manuals be rewritten to take reality and hard experience into account.   If Gavin Newsom is that person,  I now have fewer doubts than I did the day before yesterday.   He did so as Mayor of San Francisco when he started issuing same-sex marriage licenses before the country, temporarily, caught up to him.   I have some deep disagreements with him, none more so than over the homeless but I think he'd try to do something more effective to house them than the alternatives would.    If he became the nominee, his first wife, the psycho-fascist Kimberly Gilfoyle would be a problem.   But so far he's looking like our best chance to save democracy.  

*   I remember what motivated me to finally post something on that blog I'd set up but hadn't posted to was hearing the smarmy Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition scolding about some Democrat not rolling over backward to be fair to some Republican-fascist, otherwise I'd have dealt with the first one first.   I loathe Scott Simon.  

Are RFK jr. And His Sleazy Colleagues Chasing Another Ambulance?

AS SOON AS I HEARD LITTLE BOBBY say:

Nobody blamed The New York Times for spreading that disinformation that football can cause injuries.

to deflect his role in motivating the guy who murdered a cop as he shot hundreds of rounds at the CDC campus the other day, the first thing I thought is what a massive fucking liar that scumbag lawyer was.  Have I mentioned that Little Bobby Kennedy is one of the things that definitively put me off of that scumbag profession?   I mean in the last several days?   

If there's one thing that is known about football without any possible question of it being a fact IT IS THAT IT CAUSES INJURIES.   The first recorded deaths FROM INJURIES WHILE PLAYING THE GAME date from the earliest years of the game in the late 19th century.   Teddy Roosevelt named a commission during his administration to address the massive number of deaths from the game.  Though I am within my rights, due to what the lying scumbag said to include that,  I assume the scumbag lying lawyer was denying the clear fact that among those injuries are long term and often fatal brain injuries - another fact as clear as any about the favorite sport of his family.  It was one of the things that drove poor Ted's first wife to drugs and mental illness that the assholes in that family made fun of her during their famous touch football games.   

But, of course, that fucking liar of a lawyer, with all of the arrogance of the worst of his kind lies about vaccines and, as we found during the questioning of him during his confirmation hearing  the scumbag lawyer liar intends to keep on profiting perhaps in the tens of millions of dollars off of his anti-vaxx ambulance chasing which he is currently providing with lies for the courtroom about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.  

So,  I have to wonder if he and his fellow scumbag liar lawyer colleagues are hoping to cash in on defending football whether professionally or at the college or high-school or even pee-wee levels as they are sued by those that industry feeds off of.  

The Trump regime is full to the top of scumbags but Kennedy is in a class of his own both trading off of his family name but far worse than that in what he's doing which has the potential to, over time, get millions killed.   And I have ever confidence that he's planning in his worm rotted brain, to profit off of it. 

I hate that guy and I'm not ashamed to admit it. 

Update:  The college-credentialed "r" word journalist and resident wit at Duncan's idea of an athenaeum and Little Bobby level liar wants to post a comment that's especially stupid even for him.   If someone other than him begs me to post it,  I will and I will answer it.   He's at the Pee Wee Herman level of stupidity without the late Paul Ruben's talent or intelligence.   Writing pop reviews for an ad flyer must have been close to the minimal requirements to be an American journalist in the age of the Sullivan decision.   I haven't considered that decision as the reason that American journalism, briefly and in part once somewhat better than the Hearst-Pulitzer period has gone even stupider than it traditionally had been but it may not be just a coincidence that it happened in the same timeline as that decision brought us to fascism. 

Israel Is a Genocidal Apartheid State - Hate Mail

Katie Halper,  Dr. Feroze Sidwha and Dr. Mark Perlmutter talk about just a few of the atrocities the so-called "IDF" have committed in Gaza and the Israeli government supports in the West Bank, including the IDF burying Palestinian children alive.   

Katie Halper says that opposing Zionism is a mitzvah.   I don't have the right to say that but I would say it's a mortal sin for a Christian to not oppose "Christian" Zionism.   

Back in 2006 when I first wrote about the disaster that Israel is, in reality,  I made a prediction that I think is coming true:

Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.

Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.

I have every confidence that these ideas have been thought about in Israel. I can’t believe anything I’m writing here hasn’t been more fully considered there where investigating every contingency is a matter of life and death.

I was clearly wrong about a majority of Israelis not wanting that because it was in their hands and no one elses to keep that from happening and they haven't. 

Elsewhere at that time I said in all sincerity that I would be in favor of admitting Israelis who hadn't committed war crimes into the US as full citizens.   At the time I believed I was talking about the large majority of Israelis who were innocent of the crimes of the Israeli government.   Now I'm pretty certain that it would be a minority of Israelis who didn't have blood on their hands.   Which is sad but, especially if the poll are right, is true.   I would not want any former members of the IDF here, we've got more than enough home grown fascists already.  I'm less willing to pretend that Israel deserves the benefit of any doubt,  they'd already lost the right to that by 1980. 

Summer Rerun Brokeback Mountain, Good Story, Meh! Movie, Great Opera Has It Really Been 20 Years Since The Movie?

Note:   Hearing it was the 20th anniversary of the release of that horse opera I went back to see what I'd written about it.  Here's something I think is worth going over again.   You might want to read the brawl at the original posting which featured mostly the superior observations of RMJ and the opposite from you know who and one of his side-kicks and with minimal content from me.   I found it interesting  

Friday, November 18, 2016

I've Never Heard Liberals Say "Mansion Trash" or "Penthouse Trash" The People Who Really Gave Us Trump

I suspect that, unlike most of the people who throw around the term "trailer trash" and who use that form of housing as a term of disparagement, I've known a lot of people who lived in trailers.  Most of them are quite decent people who have that most unforgivable of conditions even among the allegedly liberal, being poor*.

Having gone to college, knowing lots of college faculty, having spent time among the Ivy League class of people, I also have had a chance to see the clean, well coiffed and manicured wealthy up close and in their element and. as well, the academic and intellectual class.   I will say that they've got nothing on the people who live in trailers by way of trashy behavior.  If anything, more of the people I've known who live in trailers have higher morals than the wealthy and well-educated, a number of them have more sense, as well.

I can't talk about this without again bringing up the main character in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Del Mar and that Annie Proulx not only put him, that most sympathetic of tragic figures among the liberal elite, in a trailer,   And the admirable Ms. Proulx, not only put him in a dilapidated trailer, she made him what would be considered "trailer trash" from the start, having him urinate in the sink.   I doubt anyone I know who lives in a trailer does that, though almost every man I've known who lives in a trailer has a wife who wouldn't put up with that.

But urinating in a sink, if it's your sink and no one else uses it, is a crime against your own sanitation, it isn't rank amorality and moral depravity of the kind our elites envelop the world in.   Reading about how Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trumps father in law father got back at his own sister and brother-in-law for turning states witness against him.

Now he has stepped down as chairman of his company. His days as a political force both nationally and in New Jersey are over. Saddest of all, he has shattered his once close-knit family. The days when the Kushner clan—Charles and his three siblings and all their spouses and kids and grandkids—would travel to Miami together for Passover are long gone. He and his older brother, Murray, have not spoken in more than two years as a result of a bitter lawsuit over money Murray believed Charles owed him from deals they had done together—a lawsuit that Charles Kushner’s supporters claim opened the door for the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into his campaign-finance activities.

And, of course, to add to the horror, the federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.

As he sat in his office less than 24 hours after his guilty plea, the phone rang. The caller couldn’t have been more unexpected—it was Governor Jim McGreevey. Though Kushner had given the governor more than $1.5 million for his two races and was instrumental in his rise to power, the two had barely spoken in months.

I don't know anyone who lives in a trailer who has ever done anything worse than these guys and their tale of trashiness could be met with equally trashy stories from the millionaire and billionaire class thousands of times.  You wonder why liberals don't put the blame for the creation and election of Trump where it really belongs, with this class of trash.  Could it be because their alleged liberalism is a manifestation of upper class snobbery far more than any real devotion to economic justice?  Could it be because it's far less risky to kick down than up?   Or could it be that they're really just not liberal?

The rich class, beyond any doubt, contains a far, far higher percentage of people who engage in the trashiest of behavior than the poorer class, yet it's poor people who are blanketed with the behavior of the worst of them.  Rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists and buy politicians and judges to make their trashiest behavior legal and allowed, they get praise for it in the well paid media, staffed by rich people - look at Trump.   A real difference in what gets called "liberal" and what gets called "conservative" in the United States, Britain and elsewhere is in which poor people are the objects of their scorn and hatred.   Conservatives in the United States focus theirs on Black People, Latinos, and others while treating poor whites as stupid people who can be manipulated into a resource, acting as their tools.  Alleged liberals, those people who are always congratulating themselves on their brilliance,  aid them by heaping scorn and derision on poor white people while sentimentalizing the poverty of Black People and Latinos.    The liberal supported American media has been part of the right-wing's gaming of the stupidity and hypocrisy of alleged liberals to their political and, so, financial advantage.  In this, the biggest dopes of all have been liberals of the type who have not learned a single thing in the past half-century of what happens when they play along with this.

As I said, to the fury of several people, after watching them for more than half a century, secular liberals are about the stupidest political identity, the kind who can go on with a rotten and stupidly self-defeating habit as it fails and fails again and again. They really are stupider than the Sneetches in Dr. Suess's story.  They learned from getting cheated through their own stupidity.  I see little sign that many liberals have or will.

I put any hope for liberalism learning and not acting so stupidly on those who put egalitarian democracy and justice before their own preening self-congratulation.  The kind of people who wouldn't think in terms like "trailer trash" or find it fun to say it because they know it is wrong and the don't want to hurt people.

*  I used to wonder what the difference between living in a trailer was and living in one of the "tiny houses" that may still be a fad among such wealthy people.   I suspect the difference is in the price per square foot.  When I first started reading about the "tiny house movement" my first thought was of small houses that would be good for poor people to live in, then I saw the bijoux boxes that, somehow, seem to get bigger and bigger in the "tiny house movement" little custom made mansions that have more to do with Thomas Jefferson's useless garden folly than with Thoreau's cabin or the Mad Houser's outlaw huts for the destitute.   I can't think of anything more trashy than some of the Faberge class tiny houses I've seen.  They turn my stomach in a way that reading about Ennis Del Mar pissing in his sink doesn't.

Update:  An example is demanded.  Well, here's what the oh, so amusing Rude Pundit had to say recently.

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them." 

Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.

Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.

By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

Just who does he think has benefited from large numbers of the white underclass believing this is how liberals think about them for most of the past fifty years?   And why does a smart guy like him figure that pattern won't continue?

Poor white people will make common cause with poor Black People and poor Latinos before such liberals give up their preening conceit.

Update 2:  I've pointed out who voted for Trump, white people in our age group whose median income is about $72,000 a year.  Higher in income and older and whiter than those who voted for Hillary Clinton.   If you want to blame anyone for electing Trump, Simps, it's more likely to be people who were grooving with you in college than not.

Update 2025:  You don't have to take my word for it,  you can hear and watch the opera.   Annie Proulx did a really, surprisingly good job with the libretto, which is a far different thing from writing a prose story.   I have no doubt at all that of all his many works this is the one work of Charles Wuorinen that will enter into the repertoire.   If he has "a" masterpiece  this is it. 

I Can't Imagine The Roberts Court

will not be actively participating in the Republican-fascist campaign of 2026,  which is why it will blow up marriage equality ten years after the Court declared its banning to be a violation of the Constitution. 

I don't for a single second believe any of the Republican-fascists on the court care deeply about the sanctity of hetero-sexual marriage,  considering how they are facilitating the biggest, most publicly known serial adulterer,  serially married (and ACCORDING TO SCRIPTURE IN AN ADULTEROUS MARRIAGE TO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL NEO-SOVIET HONEYPOT , RIGHT NOW) and, lest anyone forget for a second, CREDIBLY ACCUSED CHILD RAPIST in his quest to become an even more absolute despot in the US than the Roberts Court has already made him,  those whited sepulchers in black robes don't care about that at all.  

Nor do I believe a majority of them really care if same-sex marriages are legal or not.   I mean, maybe Thomas does but only because he can use it as a chance to practice his sadistic cruelty against LGBTQ+ People,  maybe Alito does because he's such a prissy little and totatally corrupt goody-two-shoes.  Maybe Coney-Barrett due to her membership in a deeply twisted "trad-catholic" cult  But Goresuch, Kavanugh (speaking of credibly accused sexual criminals) the so deep in the closet Roberts that he believes no one remembers he's there? 

But them taking up the case or it making it this far has nothing to do with the issue of same-sex marriage.  

NO.  What they are dedicated to is being part of yet one more of the every-two-year whipping up of hate that is the perennial theme of Republican-fascist election campaigns, hoping to get the idiot seniors and low-info voters to forget that Trump and the Republican-fascists in the Congress have just robbed them of an average of $1,200 dollars as they give it to billionaires and millionaires and have promised to rob them of even more if they continue in office in any security by appealing that the drug that Republican-fascist voters are addicted to,  hate.   THAT IS WHY THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN BAKING IN THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST SUPREME COURT TEST CASE KITCHEN SET UP BY THE BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES.   They want to ride it to success in yet another election in which, along with People of Color,  LGBTQ+ People are the boogyman used to scare their low-info-high-on-hate voters to the polls to vote against their own welfare,  yet again.   They've been doing it every election cycle of my lifetime, even those I don't remember but have looked back on.   

On Trump Bragging About His Gold Gilding The White House

Can't say it better than someone in a comment online did: 

I thought he'd put a tariff on all that Temu junk.  

Update:   It occurs to me he's got a 6-year-old girl's sense of beauty.   And I mean one who's watched way, way too many Disney princess movies. 

If Truth Telling Reigned They Wouldn't - Hate Mail

THE SENSIBLE CANADIAN OBSERVATION that speech was a right but it isn't the only right has it right, as far as I'm concerned.   The Canadian anti-hate speech law is far better than free speech absolutism which gives words more rights than the objects of lies and hate speech are given.*   The victims of lies and hate speech might have that "more speech" which the preening idiots of the American civil liberties industry give as the universal antidote for the most deadly of hate speech though those idiots - Ivy League JD'd or LLD'd or credentialed in some just as bogus degree in journalism or whatever - don't seem to be able to notice that if their victims have "more speech" the hate speakers have their "more speech" on top of their hate speech ("more-more")A ND GIVEN THE FINANCIAL INTEREST THAT MANY OF THE RICHEST AMONG US HAVE IN LIES AND HATE SPEECH AND THE GIANT MEGAPHONE OF THE COMMERCIAL MEDIA that hate-more-speech is louder than the speech of their victims ever is.    If "more speech" was the antidote for hate speech and lies that the idiots of the ACLU pretend it is then slavery, women's' subjugation, wage-slavery, etc. would have ended quite abruptly centuries ago instead of not only persisting but flourishing sixty one years after the Sullivan Decision made lies told in the mass media theoretical equal of truth being told.  Only the golden age of liberty that was the promise of the free speech theorists of that age up till today has not worked out that way, at all.   "Civil liberties" as it has come to be in reality means that millions can die after living lives of slavery and subjugation and it's no concern of the "free speech-press" crowd if all the blather in the world doesn't change that.   The most rational view of this by the victims of lies and hate speech is that the "civil libertarians" can FOAD.  

It is the most telling thing about the wrongness of the ACLU types,  that Strossen idiot,  the pantomime Fredrick Douglass,  Cornel West (he has every right to dress up like him and I have every right to point out he ain't no Fredrick Douglass) is that today the biggest, fattest proponents of "free speech" "free press" are not only the liars and haters but also THOSE WHO IN POWER ARE ATTACKING THE FREE SPEECH AND PRESS RIGHT TO TELL THE TRUTH THEY HATE SO MUCH and that the "more speech" of the civil liberties industry is failing so abjectly in defeating them.  American Nazis and fascists (white supremacists) and Republican-fascists are the biggest fattest "free speechers" there are.   Look at how some of the biggest fattest "civil liberties" lawyers like Dershowitz **is thick as a thief with them these days!   

The idea that since the courts are unreliable in the even-handed, non-interested administrations of the law that we are to always give up to the hate talkers and liars is absurd.   They have shown themselves to be just as capable of being biased and entirely interested under "free speech-press absolutism" as they have been under any other aspect of legal action.   They may feel the need, on occasion, to make some phony, bogus rationalization of their suppression of speech and truth telling ESPECIALLY WHEN THOSE PROVE TO BE A REAL DANGER TO THEIR PREFERRED PARTY AND IDEOLOGY but they'll lie through their teeth to back the suppression of it.   Watch the Roberts Court in regard to any university that really challenges the Trump regime's suppression and wholesale control - control which so many of the most elite educational institutions HAVE ALREADY SURRENDERED TO, SOMETIMES IN ADVANCE, as well as the big networks and the few big rags on paper.   

The question as to who will decide what is a lie and what is hate speech,  well, the answer to that is we will.  With all of the risks and dangers of that,  we will because no one else can do it.   The risk of letting lies and hate speech reign are far more certain than the theoretical risks of making that a matter of the law,  risks that we take in so many other instances.

What we can be certain of is that the likes of the Roberts Court, the lower Trump-McConnell-Grassley packed courts will do whatever they have to to suppress the truth being told whenever that endangers the Republican-fascism that they favor.   That is on those occasions when truth telling isn't already effectively banned by the corporate media, the networks, the big online operations and, when that doesn't work,  their goons with their very real as well as threatened violence and endangerment of the truth tellers.    And make no mistake about that, IF TRUTH TELLING REIGNED, THEY WOULDN'T.  

Scratch a professional civil libertarian and you'll find someone who's really  OK with oppression and even murder.   Especially the lawyers but even many of the academics. 

* I suspect one of the reasons for that perverted inversion of values is that words can be a property of some monetary value whereas People are not.   The perversion of the Anglo-American legal tradition cares far, far more about objects of monetary value than it does human lives.   I dream of a time when Americans and others are so fed up with the perverted values of our legal tradition and systems that they scrap it for something that puts life above property.   It is one of the most effective refutations of the widespread superstition that the American legal system is based on Scripture that the Mosaic Law and the even more radical economics of Jesus are far from the Anglo-American system that turns property and money into the all-powerful idol of the civil law.   I'd trade the entire legal code for the teachings of Jesus and I'd fully expect that the entire society would be better off,  though the rich would be leveled out of their wealth.    We should be so lucky as to have an egalitarian update of the Mosaic Law as the basis of it instead of the perverted neo-feudal English common law tradition.   

** Speaking of the Dersh.  I used to say "he's an advocate of torture who used to play a civil liberties lawyer on TV."  Look at how  his relationship with the truth and hate speech developed and how these days he's supporting not only torture but also genocide.