IF THE FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTS those in the media who lie about people like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Democratic politicians, etc. then the people who assert that that would be correct in asserting that there is a "right" to lie that is superior to the right of people to not be the target of false witness. People have a right to lie and the "founders" though, actually, it was the members of the First Congress who wrote and voted on the thing and got it into the Constitution, intended that people telling lies had that right.
In order for self-government through elected officials to be any good at all requires people to know the truth. If they are told and believe lies and their votes are cast on the basis of those lies then the government that is elected on the basis of those lies will not likely produce good government. Included in that right to lie, I guess, is included the right of politicians to lie themselves into power and to lie about what they do and to have the self-interested media lie about what they're doing and the effects of those lies being bought will perpetuate that into perpetuity.
How is that any better than what happens in a dictatorship that stages phony elections in its effect?
One thing that is bound to come from a dysfunctional "democracy" of that kind will be the active suppression of the truth or, minus that, the flooding of the truth with lies that lessen the good effect of the truth or its complete impotence to produce any good. The lies told by Republican-fascists, the Murdoch and worse media are an experiment in that freedom to lie, one for which, in the Covid pandemic, the death toll is rapidly climbing toward the body count of a million. It is far from the only high-death-toll result of the freedom to lie, though those are mostly done through foreign military intervention as the lies that got us into the Iraq debacles of the Bush presidencies, there are also body counts here, such as those who died as a result of the racist lies that maintained both slavery and its extension into Jim Crow and the related genocidal violence against other People of Color and the not dissimilar violence against women which has victims every day and is such an accustomed part of our life that it is as unremarkable as "honor killings" that get into our news when those happen in Muslim countries.
I fully expect one of the results of the regime of lies being granted the privilege of being considered a right will be the destruction of the ability to have the truth, to have that truth be known and the good effects of that truth in real life being made real.
WE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW THE TRUTH WHICH THE PERMISSION TO LIE DESTROYS, THAT RIGHT IS THE CONSTANT LOSS TO ALL OF US IN THE LIBERTARIAN, "FIRST AMENDMENT" ACLU-SUPREME COURT REGIME OF "FREE SPEECH-PRESS" SINCE 1964 WHEN THE SULLIVAN DECISION WAS ISSUED. The constant drift ever towards Republican-fascism and back into Jim Crow has happened exactly lock step as the results of that decision have been enacted, starting with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 if not the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the first Republican to use the "Southern Strategy" of attracting and the attempted harnessing of white racism to put Republicans in power. Any claims of it producing a "robust media" is only evidence that a robust media freed to lie will produce degenerate decadence which is the opposite of a robust egalitarian-democratic government based on The People knowing the truth and the truth making them free. I remember the 1968 campaign, Nixon may have hated the media but they're the ones who put him in office and kept him there. Even as it was clear he had set a presidential record as the most then corrupt president, the media pulled harder for him in 1972 against one of the most decent men to have ever gotten a party nomination, George McGovern.
I refuse to accept any of that regime of free-lying as legitimate or necessary or, in the idiotic libertarian traditional ACLU formulation a good and wonderful manifestation of robust "free speech". Anyone who presents it as good and necessary is an accomplice to the murder of egalitarian democracy in the United States, they are doing here what the Putin gang did in Russia, what Mussolini did in Italy, what the Nazis did in Germany and literally every gangster thug anti-egalitarian democratic regime does everywhere.
The Warren Court requiring politicians lied about to prove the mental state of the liars did, in fact, create a right to lie about politicians for liars who were protected by the near impossibility of a lied about politician to prove the required mental state of those who lied about them. That they used a case by a white racist who sued over inaccurate information posted by those working against white supremacy in the South to make their bombshell ruling is ironic and instructive as to the dangers of court-made law. They greatly privileged liars and, if their intent was to extend egalitarian democracy they proved they were incredibly stupid because it would empower the worst liars with the worst motives on behalf of some of the people who would be the victims of those lies so freed from restraint. That it was a court of well-off, white males who didn't understand that it was, in fact Black People, who would be among those most damaged by that "freedom". That it is white supremacists, including the heirs of the KKK and America's indigenous form of fascism, the Trump cult from whom and in whose behalf "freedom of speech" is being most loudly asserted today, as egalitarian democracy is holding on by its fingernails as those fascists destroy the right to vote and other rights proves my case. Not that I expect the lawyers for liars, the "justices" of the Roberts Court to be much troubled by that, the ACLU still holding up the torch on their behalf even as they will destroy democracy.
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