CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES of people believing in lies for society and for individuals living in society, for the country, etc. it seems to me that the idea that believing what isn't true is an inalienable "right" is a major folly with extremely dangerous results in that folly. In the case of Covid-19, so far, that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, the illness and injury of many thousands - I don't know, perhaps even more people - the damage to others who are unable to get hospital care and who die or suffer permanent damage and everything down to the economic damage that results from those lies and the belief in them. Lies, especially lies told in and by the "free press" the media, have killed more than a hundred times more Americans than who died in terrorist attacks on 9-11, 2001. Lies are, by any rational definition, our most deadly enemy right now. More than all of our opponents in most if not all of our declared and undeclared wars. Republicans in office, by a stupendous majority, are the fifth-column that is killing us on the side of lies and pandemic disease, right now, the media, too.
To believe that there is a "right to lie" as, in fact, the Supreme Court has ruled without honestly admitting that is what it has held, and that the mental disability that believing dangerous lies also constitutes a "right" seems to me to be among our most serious and basic dangers right now. Covid-19 has the feeling of a final warning of danger, so does the attempted January 6 putsch, the ongoing war of Republicans against democracy, the packing of the courts, etc. All of those are results of people believing or pretending to believe in lies they were told by FOX, other billionaire owned and run sources of lies, hate-talk media, the social-disease media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube are allowed to get away with being on the basis of "rights" to carry lies and distribute them with algorithms designed to make those most susceptible to believing them having the lies promoted to them.
This isn't something that can be continued to be allowed due to the sloppy, inspecific language of "The First Amendment" as if that was a divinely given and perfect commandment of universal and absolute law. Deifying the very flawed, very fallible, in some areas extremely dodgy United States Constitution was always dangerous and as lawyers and scholars of the law, many of them under the patronage of the filthy rich and the anti-democratically corrupt came up with ways to game the document and the legal apparatus that has been glued onto the thing, those original dangers have become not only incompatible with egalitarian, electoral democracy but with the continuation of life, itself.
In coming to this realization at the insanity of the creation of "rights" for things which are as dangerous as "rights" to lie, to be lied to and to be deluded, not to mention the lie of pretending you believe that vaccination requirements are an evil thing as you work fully-vaccinated in the vaccine-passport mandated and, so, safer offices and studios of FOX news, I think I have come to another of the fundamental reasons that not only the vulgar-materialist, 18th century, style of ACLU secular "liberalism" is a total flop, along with the ideological "left," but why those who should be of better will and more wisdom flop along with them. If there is a human future, a future for reformed and protected egalitarian democracy, the ACLU with its fetish for the First Amendment language regardless of the results deserves to have its name permanently attached to what went so wrong in the period when those kinds of "rights" were exercised in all of their secular, amoral, regardless-of-the-results folly.
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