THE SUPREME COURT of the United States in an act of monumental stupidity gave the media a "right" to lie about politicians and other public figures in 1964 and it is one of the least realized corruptions of our society and, so, our politics in every year since that. You may have caught me harping on this before because even as I do that I see every evidence it is the key to understanding the corruption of American life and, so, politics.
The criminal who lost the presidency in 1960, Nixon, won the election in 1968 largely on the power of media lies told about Hubert Humphrey. The common analysis that he lost it due to American involvement in Vietnam is certainly discredited by not only by Nixon's continuation but entirely illegal expansion of the American war into Cambodia and Laos, not to his political harm. He won the next election in 1972, against the anti-war George McGovern, one of the most decent men to ever have gotten a major party nomination, even as Nixon's crimes were becoming obvious through even more lies told through and by the media. Lying has certainly worked far better for the oligarchs and the Republican, now Republican-fascist party who own the media and whose interest against the majority of The People needs lying to succeed. Though that idea would have seem to have failed to gain the notice of the Warren Court who had lifetime tenure and didn't need to run for election or reelection to sit at a bench in position to make such stupid decisions.
I would like to get around to trying to research the etymology of that use of the word "right" to mean things we are entitled to do and have and how it once related to doing what was morally right and providing the necessities and goods of life to those who lacked them, trying to trace how that connection was corrupted to the point where "rights" are claimed by those who clearly are in the wrong and who are permitted by judicial pretenses of moral neutrality to get away with everything from petty conning right up to and including murder as a matter of "rights." Especially when there is a demonstrable destruction of real and the most consequential of rights for far more People when such "rights" are invented. Whatever that relation is the whole notion of "rights" as they exist in the United States, under our federal and state Constitutions is seriously and dangerously screwed up.
Our idolized Bill of Rights is highly problematic, even if my critique of the First Amendment makes you jittery consider the use of the Second Amendment by Republican-fascists to turn our schools into the shooting galleries of psychopaths. If, as I suspect, that game is a consequence of 18th century enlightenment refusal to admit the practical consequences of immorality under the guise of judicial impartiality, such a study might be far more useful than it might seem at first. Judges and, especially Supreme Court "justices" are never as impartial as they pretend to be, that's just another lie told with impunity like the ones Republican-fascists told during their confirmation hearings to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The idea that lying could exist as a right held, not only by individual human beings but the artificial corporate entities that "the press" are is an extreme danger to anything that depends on an effective majority of Americans knowing the truth. We saw an extreme example of that in the media carried Trumpian-Republican-fascist lies surrounding Covid-19 and the efforts of those with the widest knowledge of what truth could be known about it to reduce and diminish the dangers and public and personal health consequences of the pandemic. That is an ongoing consequence of the Courts and others pretending that there is a right to lie in the media which, fuck all else, will be the law of the land no matter how many tens and hundreds of thousands die as a consequence, no matter how long the promissory note of equal rights issued in the actual founding of the country is put off for members of oppressed minorities and Women and the working and unemployed poor. And the American media, by and large, have been entirely irresponsible in that regard.
The lies in everything from the lowest of the gutter press to the New York Times against Hillary Clinton resulted in the United States having the loser of the 2016 election take the presidency. Someone recently said Donald Trump was the man most investigated and least prosecuted in our history it is perhaps notable that known and proven con man and criminal that he is someone as obviously sleazy as he is was able to, even getting fewer votes, defeat the woman who is certainly the most investigated and most exonerated person in American history, and even more lied about than investigated. The power of lies over the truth is something that is certainly proven in our history, our lived, experienced recent history, the danger of permitting the enormously powerful mass media and the social disease of social media to lie with impunity is as proven as any other mortal danger. It is supremely ironic that telling the truth about the danger of free-speech-press absolutism is, effectively, one of the most forbidden areas of speech that there is.
The present regime of enabling and so empowering lies, especially lies amplified in the mass media and peddled by the expertise of advertising, a career of conning and carnival barking more effectively will destroy American democracy on behalf of organized criminals and billionaire gangsters intent on destroying democracy. Even in issues where a majority of Americans seem to want one thing, the media and its effects on elections - mixed with the gaming of the corrupt American structure of government which has been so effectively gammed by those hired by the oligarch-gangsters - has thwarted equality, gun regulation, climate change policy, health care, etc. etc. etc. Only a media freed from the entirely visible hand of the oligarch-gangsters has any possibility of telling the truth consistently. Though even such a press not required to try to tell the truth will be little to no help and will often be counterproductive in effect. I would point to the old lefty media organs who were as apt to champion stupidly counterproductive policies and carry water for anti-democratic ideologies like Marxism as they were to really help in the struggle for equality and equal and economic justice. We need a new lefty media that is totally and consciously free of that baggage. Outside of some little financed and little read religious left sources, I can't think of a single one which is free of it.
I am not the most experienced reader of Scripture there is but I don't find much in the way of the promotion of the mass delusion present in our secular society that there is anything right about lying. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head was the deception of the prostitute Rahab in concealing the spies Joshua sent to scout out how to take the city of Jericho. And that's not exactly a good fit. Perhaps there is something someone would like to point out in Scripture that gives the massive liars, the "christian nationalists" their Scriptural warrant to lie their heads off, not least of which is lying about who Jesus was and what Jesus said. If there is something that shows just how reliant on a "right" to lie American-fascism is, that certainly makes the case.
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