One of the more remarkable things about our era is how it isn't lies that have become disreputable, it is morality. When our society, our politics, our courts and other institutions are pervaded with lies and liars, it is calling their lies, lies that is forbidden. Perhaps that is because of the possibility of lawsuits that won't get thrown out before they become expensive, it is certainly related to the fashion of even Supreme Court judges rejecting their job description as arbiters of the truth. Perhaps the problem is that the incredibly low quality of justices appointed and confirmed by a lazy and cynical Senate during Republican administrations don't lead other justices to trusting them. I mean, look at how Alito lied in his decision in the Hobby Lobby case, as proven in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. Such a court as the Roberts court and the Rehnquist court that got away with imposing the worst president in our history in a baldly political act, is hardly trustworthy. Such courts, with no use for the truth have even rejected the role of a judge as the one who legally determines the truth, make a show of a respect for the truth very much a very rare and sometimes thing.
The courts and the FCC and other regulators have given the media pretty much a carte blanche for lying about politicians and politics and, increasingly, even private citizens, without suffering any real penalty. Perhaps that is due to how many of the regulators are the product of the same elite law schools as have given us the Supreme Court. In an aside, it was gratifying to see Robert Reich noting how the Ivy League universities have produced our elite criminal class of oligarchs and their intrinsic role in the complete corruption of American society, politics and touching on their corruption of the law as well as business and financial institutions. For American democracy to survive, the stranglehold on American institutions of the Ivy Leaguers and their legal theories will have to go.
The absurd corrective of "more speech" the antidote to slander and libel and bigotry which the media "free speech" absolutists recommend is entirely inadequate to prevent the damage of lies, especially those multiplied and magnified by the large media organizations that employ most of them. The period when "free speech" has gone from being a vital tool of telling the truth to a permission to the hugely rich porn industry and onward to being the major tool by which the Berger, Rehnquist and now Roberts courts have attacked representative democracy, has entirely disproved that theory of free speech. "More speech" can be more lies told by the same liars that the "more speech" was supposed to correct. We now have an absurd situation in which lies are protected by courts, even issued by the in court rulings, and the truth is suppressed in the media that is supposed to be the last best defense of government by an informed public. Only, it's not at all an uncommon situation, it is the common operating procedure for despots and dictatorships around the world and in history, societies in which lies are empowered and the truth is punished.
This can continue or we can stop fetishizing free speech that protects lies and liars who are destroying democracy. But to do that we also have to stop pretending that people are incapable of discerning the difference between lies and the truth in most of the important contexts in which that must be done in everyday life. We have to reassert our powers to do that in a democratic context. I think that the free speech absolutist cult grew out of the distrust of governments by liberals when they saw how bad it could get in the Nazi and fascist governments of the 1930s and 40s. They lost faith in the ability of democratic governments and courts and politicians working within the framework of democracy to do what dictatorships reject, discern the truth and use it to make life better. Only their solution, suspending critical judgement of speech, pretending that, somehow, allowing lies to be broadcast freely will produce a situation in which by magic, the truth will win, enabled the same force that produced those very dictatorships. *
There was never any reason to be fair to fascists or nice to Nazis, there was never any reason or even right to pretend that their theories and ideas haven't been given one of the most disastrous of all tests in real time that human beings have ever given to theories and ideas and they failed them absolutely.
In the end of her book, The Walk Down Mainstreet, showing life in a small Maine town in the throes of and aftermath of a state basketball championship in the late 1950s, Ruth Moore has a scene in which the former basketball star who was sent to prison for armed robbery comes back to his high school to look at the trophies and the picture of him on an earlier state championship team. In having a nasty conversation with the old principal who encounters him, he says that while he was in prison he read Mein Kampf which some idiot liberal had donated to the prison library, no doubt in line with "being fair to all points of view" or that the prisoners "had a right to read all sides" that was part of the same "free speech" fetish in that period. Just for the record, no one ever always read "both sides" of things, that was a pose behind which there was just more pose. The young thug had been converted to Nazism by reading the book mixing it with his own self-pity, to the horror of the principal. Moore obviously saw the stupidity of ignoring the fact that the world had just seen what permitting Nazi propaganda to become influential and effective in the real world meant. Perhaps she also wanted to make the point that the Nazis gained their first foothold by appealing to thugs and criminals who were their first soldiers even before they gained power, officially. The same kind of people who the gun industry and the Republicans on the bench recruit and arm with their Second Amendment fetishism. It is such an obviously dangerous mix, that danger massively proved by both recent history and the current world today, that anyone who pretends it can't happen here is a total idiot.
It is so bizarre today to have the same people who loudly scoff and mock "magical thinking" ignoring the truth that we have learned about how dangerous permitting lies in the mass, electronic media is, in favor of their own magical thinking that giving permission for the magnification and multiplication and continual repetition of those lies will, somehow, produce the triumph of the truth, clearly, by magic.
The worst idea can defeat the best idea if the worst idea is promoted through the media. That is a truth revealed by human experience, in real life, in real societies. It is a truth that speech in the media produced Nazism, fascism, the mass slaughters of history, the attempted genocide in Rwanda was a product of free speech and free press, that truth falsifies the theory of free speech absolutism. Our own Supreme Court proves that the slogans of the free speech fetishists can be used to attack our democracy on behalf of the stinking rich oligarchs who will give massive endowments to the elite law schools and universities where such theories are taught and made official legal dogma and which, in a self-reinforcing cycle, produce Supreme Court justices who give the First Amendment that meaning.
Democracy will die by the lie and it's not going to go out with a whimper but with mass slaughter, of us, civil insurrection, civil war and it will likely not rise again. It certainly will not rise in any safe way unless lies are called lies and are punished when they are broadcast, the liars banned from the media. I'd have banned Mein Kampf from prisons and any other book that promoted violence and murder. There is no rational case for allowing them the same protection of books and ideas that promote equality, moral obligations and democracy. Democracy doesn't owe anti-democratic evil the time of day, never mind the protection of the law. It doesn't owe those who enable it more than total rejection.
* The promotion of free speech absolutism by the Marxist left in the United States and other Western democracies was never anything but self-serving. The idea that "if we suppress the speech of Nazis it will be used to suppress us" is just stupid. There was never any comparable advantage given to the speech of leftists under that absolutism. When's the last time you heard a democratic socialist, or even just a real liberal, being given equal time on American radio or TV? How often does Diane Rehm have on competent democratic socialists to balance her typical panels of people from Cato and Am. Enterprise Inst, balanced by some NPR journalist (who is supposed to be impartial) or some bleeting dolt from The Brookings Prostitution?
The duping of liberals by Marxists, anarchists and others who solicited our pity while they rejected or scoffed at democracy, was one of the stupider things that happened in the past century and more. We never owed them any more than we owed fascists or Nazis, and we gave all of them far, far more than we owed them. And that only discredited and destroyed the political effectiveness of liberalism.
I would certainly include all anti-democratic ideologies and rants in what should not automatically have total support and protection. The domestic Stalinists were, no less than the domestic Nazis, supporting a mass murderer and dictator who totally suppressed free speech and free press as much as Hitler did, while presenting themselves and being presented as the martyrs of free speech here. People who advocate theories of government that depend on killing people and violating even their most vital of inherent rights should be treated in line with their own theories. I wouldn't be surprised if, when democracies survive, they don't find something like that is a certain requirement if you want to keep it. The lessons of history can be ignored for a people with the luxury of pissing away their democracy but those lessons will have to be repeated until they are learned and acted on.
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