The "post-truth" world that Trump's supporters are gloating over, much to the professed horror of some in the media is something the media, itself brought about. It asked to be able to lie without consequence, it was handed that right by the courts, the media lied and convinced large numbers of people that their lies - often told to be salacious and audience attracting - were true and made someone like Donald Trump not only electable but inevitable when an effective margin of voters are convinced of those lies. NOW the media is complaining about the "post-truth" world that they made?
I wish I had the time to do the research into the legal thinkers behind the ideas that led to those lines of legal decisions and what their wider philosophy is. I know a lot of its champions, especially those in the media, have been atheists. I can't help but suspect that it's a manifestation of the common, a-religious bent of the intellectual establishment which has become pervasive in the past centuries and nearly uniform in our own time. You certainly can't maintain an indifference to the need for the truth and the reality that lies serve no good purpose* if you have any moral sense at all. It's clear that those who have given us "post-truth" are effectively amoral. Egalitarian democracy can't survive in an amoralized country, made that way by being fed a diet of lies.
I wish I could talk to the woman who has been much in the news - no doubt now they've done her, she and her issue will fade into dim memory. I mean the woman who voted for Trump and is now upset that he's appointed the foreclosure king Steven Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury. Mnuchin made a huge fortune by aggressively foreclosing on mortgages in the most heartless of manners, one very elderly lady lost her house due to a short payment of 27 cents. The Trump voter had her property foreclosed on by being told she had to skip three payments to qualify for an adjustment in the terms of her mortgage when it was a ploy to allow them to foreclose on her. In the interview I heard with her she rather disdainfully said there was no way she would have voted for Hillary Clinton. I had to wonder what she listened to as news, what the source of her clear disdain for Hillary Clinton was. How much and what of the quarter of a century of lies carried by the American media from alleged top, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, to the bottom feeders that so often even the most elite of media carried as "it's being said". What made her vote for Trump, a man anyone with any sense of what is true and what isn't could see as a total phony and liar and fraud, a man whose misogyny and sleazy real estate practices were out there but certainly lost in the wall to wall coverage given on his terms? She clearly depended on what the American media told her about Hillary Clinton over the past decades. That media is what brought us Donald Trump and it was through their decades of "post-truth" practice.
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Now, after a whole campaign season of its own Hillary Clinton slamming, sometimes lying, and the promotion of "alternatives" the secularist lefty media are moaning over the harvest they also helped sow. I'll forego lots of it, largely because there is so little of the lefty media I can stand looking at just now. But I saw an article up at the lower end lefty market that Salon occupies, pointing out that it's just about certain that Jill Stein voters in swing states actually did get Trump the electoral college. If that's behind Stein going through the motions of getting recounts, I don't know. I do know that those same lefty magazines were still carrying the most idiotic articles about why it was principled to not vote for the only woman who had a chance of preventing Trump. Some of those magazines and websites have lost any credibility I'd have once granted them, some of them I've seen do this one election cycle after another for decades. One of those which I've decided has no credibility at all, now is In These Times, though it's hardly alone. There are some lefty magazines and websites I won't link to because they've been so irresponsible this year, Salon and In These Times and Alternet are three of those.
After watching them aid the election of George W. Bush and now Donald Trump by promoting not voting for the only real alternatives to them, after watching them do that for virtually the entire period of the Republican ascendancy, you would think they'd have figured out that's stupid by now. Only they haven't. Reading In These Times and its articles about what's needed is a revolutionary radical lefty party, Joel Bliefuss and his crew are just one tiny tub in a fleet of ships of fools. I don't expect that we'll find any of them have really learned anything. What we need is a real left, the secular one is a total and complete flop.
I've lost my faith in the media that thinks its colleagues should be able to lie with impunity. That pretty much covers all of it, most of all the lefty-secular media which doesn't serve democracy or a real agenda of the left. A real left-media would want those lies that enable fascism stopped in view of the triumph those lies have given the fascists, repeatedly, as they bleat out the old line First Amendment interpretation that allowed that.
I've given up the lefty-secularist religion of my young adulthood because it has failed through the contradictions it was always riddled with. There is nothing more obvious from that failure that the real program of the real left depends on morality in the law, in the government in society and, yes, even in the media. And the past half-century of experimenting with amorality in all of those proves it only enables fascist depravity.
Political ideologies are served by those things that promote what they are made of, amorality serves fascism, democracy can't be anything but damaged by it. That is true, most of all, for egalitarian democracy, the only durable form of democracy. Any alleged leftist ideology that is served by lies or which promotes the ability to lie is a fraud, they are fascism in a mask. That is true even when they do so because "First Amendment." That is the slogan that post-truth rode to victory this year.
* Before anyone can raise the ruse about the necessity of lying to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are hiding, that lie is made necessary through the evil of the Nazis. Of course in that kind of case a lie serves a moral purpose but that purpose is made necessary because of the lies that produce Nazism. If the original lies hadn't been told the scenario requiring a lie wouldn't have existed and telling someone where children were hidden would not be wrong in that way.
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