I HAVE NOT been following the Governors race in Virginia but from what I read this morning, the Republican-fascist could win because of the Republican-fascist-Murdoch media lies whipped up around a misrepresentation of "Critical Race Theory" getting suburban voters in a swivet over something that isn't happening and never was. Of course, it being Republicans-fascists, the Murdoch media, white-voters, the underlying theme of that is lies fashioned, honed and told to take advantage of implied mild to flagrant racism among white people, among the foremost tools of America's indigenous fascists from the start, greed and envy being to other such tools.
The thing is that the issue of lies being enabled under the vague language of the First Amendment has very real, very dangerous and very harmful effects, effects big enough to negate the promise of freedom for Black People, in slavery, in the post-Reconstruction period, the lie of "separate-but-equal" that led to post-slavery American apartheid segregation and, now, the brief period of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights correction to that being overturned by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - placed there by presidents and Senators lied into office, the very same phenomenon that is said to be leading to the loss of a sizable lead for the Democrat to a Republican-fascist who is riding that lie to power.
This issue is the central issue on which America's far from complete "experiment" with democratic self-government is kept from even progress toward that completion. It is responsible for virtually all of the major evil done by the American government put in place by the votes of American People. The corruption of The People today through mass media lies is the major tool to prevent progress by our indigenous fascists, originating in the slave-owning class, the financiers who worked hand in glove with them - and when not owning legally defined slaves used the forgotten wage slaves in, at times, in as brutal a manner. The mass media, entertainment as well as "news" has been one of their major dispensers of lies, racism, envy and greed.
We will have to change the words of the First Amendment to make the distinction between the real right to tell the truth and the stupidly created and false "right" to lie with impunity or American democracy will die and it's on its sick bed if not death bed right now.
Something will also have to be done about the Second Amendment being used by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts to put modern mass killing machines in the hands of our indigenous fascists, the racists, the neo-Nazis, the Klansmen, and those who, perhaps not fascists at heart but who can be duped into joining them by the lies told by the mass media permitted by "The First Amendment." They have explicitly and knowingly armed the already deranged who have been shooting up schools, offices, outdoor audiences, churches, synagogues, etc. without the Courts or the Republican-controlled legislatures and executives doing a single thing to stop it. The same people who wrote the idolized First Amendement wrote that one, the language of which is getting us killed in enormous numbers right now. And the fascists are now openly threatening to use their arsenal to take power when the voters don't give it to them.
One of the things I have realized in the past four years, in the danger felt from the Trump regime was that a lot of White People got a little bit of a taste of the experience of Black People and other People of Color. Or that white men got a bit of a taste of what it might be like to be a Woman, though lots of white women don't seem to understand the threat of violence standing over them, they've gotten so used to it. White people are too much like that legendary frog in a pot being heated up in that regard, the frog thing is rather stupid thought experiment - the frog would get out or die after it stopped being used to the warming - any white voter who isn't a fascist but who would vote for a Republican-fascist on the basis of being scared by FOX on false witness over "critical race theory" is far more likely to vote us into death, lulled by the lying media that has lied us out of the high point of equality already.
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It seems a lot of people are turning to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the danger of stupidity. I don't have the book with the translation of his letter that is being quoted but I have found a source of the text online which I think I'll go over this week. It looks to me that it has a lot to consider, most of which is directly applicable to what's going on in the United States and many other Western countries as we lose even that level of democracy we once had. The role of Rupert Murdoch's media empire in the United States, Britain and elsewhere among the English Speaking People in both making us stupid in the way that Bonhoeffer warned about and in morally corrupting us is among the most important dangers we face right now.
Here is a passage I think is directly relevant to what I've said so I'll go over it first, here:
The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
That is exactly what the mass media does, a single source of lies that can be broadcast to millions during the same hour, repeated, either verbally or, on a network, over and over again, which is the FOX 24-7 method of inserting lies about real terms they can, by repeated lies turn around into maliciously useful slogans such as "critical race theory" into the minds and irrational, uninformed fears of, if not a majority, enough voters to put fascists in office. The next sentences seem prophetic of exactly our situation, today.
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
The revelations of how Facebook designed its algorithms to feed stuff to those susceptible to taking it in is not that surprising, it has been the method of propaganda from well before computers were a reality. It has been the science of lying so as to persuade and gull from the start. It's not much different from the fable of the serpent lying Eve and Adam into eating the fruit, a reality that certainly predates the composition of Genesis. Yet our founding document, our First Amendment in the so-called "Bill of Rights" neglects to make that distinction and it has certainly cost us, starting with the lies of racism and sexism and economic inequality. And a lie being a lie, it doesn't have to conform to reality the way that the truth does, it doesn't have to cohere with anything, it can take advantage of us at our least realistic, our least coherent to get its effect. Bonhoeffer's description of its character, its workings and its effects as he was waiting to be killed by the Nazis is a masterpiece of thought. It's a shame that the deeper meaning of it is lost to the sloganistic effect of the First Amendment as it was badly written and as it has become something that is placed beyond criticism and so beyond repair.
I, of course, believe that the reason it was so negligently written was because it would favor the liars who wanted to maintain and increase slavery, to lie to keep us in inequality and to prevent The People knowing the truth and, so, turning the United States into an economically egalitarian and just democracy in which the slave-owners and the rich would not be able to lord it over everyone else and to cheat and steal other peoples labor and the rights to the fruit of their labor. I don't think Madison and the rest of them were unaware of what they were doing. I think those slave owners were cunning as the snake and we are all gulled and enslaved and killed by it, still.
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