If We Don't Junk The 18th Century Assumptions About Press Freedom And The Freedom To Lie Democracy Is Doomed

ONE OF THE WORST things that has happened in the past few decades is the lie that people, that consumers, that voters are purely rational actors capable of discerning and rejecting lies so that lies and the liars who want to tell them, whether to deceive someone who they want to cheat or to get suckered into voting against their own self interest must be allowed to lie freely and that it is the rest of us who are to blame when they succeed in gulling us into being robbed or our right to a government which works for us stolen from us.  That is a huge lie told by "federalists" "originalists" and other academic liars who have brought us to Trumpian decadence and put democracy in danger.  The academic scribblers and babblers who came up with that clearly fictitious kind of "rational actors" are right wingers, libertarians and the kind of phony, secular-liberals who are all in on the swindle.

Along with that billionaire financed lie campaign made so that judicial and Supreme Court fascists will have slogans and lines which are as dishonest as those they want to cheat us with is the rise of technology that literally will magnify the ability to lie by an incredible factor of influence.

 

Democracy here and around the world cannot exist if this kind of lying is allowed under the idiotic interpretation of "freedom of the press" that currently rules in alleged and nearly real democracies because it makes assumptions that don't even really work when "the press" means words and pictures in ink on paper.  The assumptions that government which is the result of a choice of The People in an election is more dangerous than mass media which can subvert the nature of government is one of the stupidest ideas that Jefferson and Madison had.  They had no experience of egalitarian democracy, either in approximation or in the modern sense, as slave holders and aristocrats they, even Jefferson, had too much contempt for We The People when that phrase includes People of Color, Women, People of modest means and without the means of obtaining a good education.  

 

They certainly had no notion, whatsoever, of technology that would do what can already be done to deceive a margin or a plurality of people into putting fascists into office such as is shown to be a real and present danger to us our equality and the democracy that is merely a product of the desire for equality as informed by the truth.   

The Supreme Court will prove to be the last part of the government to get it because they are the most out of touch, the most arrogant, the most tradition bound and, frankly, under the Republican-fascist control of it, hostile to equality and democracy and the truth as it is.  I think that if democracy is going to survive even by the skin of our teeth, we will have to destroy the 19th century innovation of Supreme Court review of laws made to address these modern crises because, as they did campaign finance laws and other laws to protect electoral democracy, they will work to destroy the possibility of those as certainly as this technology will.