"FREE SPEECH" IS ANOTHER PHRASE that has come to mean something it should never have meant. As I pointed out it has come to mean a "right to lie." It has also come to mean a right to swindle, a right to deceive, a right to con, a right to encourage the worst in us for political gain by the liars, the con men the swindlers, the haters and the greedy.
Free speech in so far as it would be important enough to codify in a constitution should mean a right to tell the truth. But that right also comes with responsibilities, the first of those in a democracy which also applies to all rights, you can only safely exercise that right to the extent you accept the right of others to tell the truth.
Above all, it also comes with the serious responsibility to discern what is true, without that just meaning what you want to be true or what you will assert to be true without caring if it is really true. It also does not mean what lawyers an judges and "justices" twist that into, something between seeming plausibility to whatever someone they want to pretend to believe says. That's why you can have the spectacle of the Roberts Court pretending to believe that John Sauer's lying assertion of presidential immunity which includes a president having a right to commit murder - AS TRUMP WAS EFFECTIVELY GIVEN IN TRUMP V USA.
I'll say that everything Trump II has done, from the worst such as the murders of Latin American fishermen, the murders of Iranian school girls, and down to the merely sensibly and aesthetically appalling acts of demolishing the East Wing or painting the Reflecting Pool (which, by the way, should never have been installed, it was a really stupid idea because it wouldn't work in DC) or Trump's Nazi style arch to himself IS A DIRECT PRODUCT OF THE SIX REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS ON THE SUPREME COURT WHO ACHIEVED THEIR UNITARY EXECUTIVE. If it hadn't been Trump doing it, it would have been the next Republican-fascist. Imagine what Nixon, Reagan, Bush I or Bush II would have done with such immunity from the law. I dare say even a Biden or Obama would have probably given in to the temptation to use such power in ways that the Republican-fascists on the Court wouldn't like, though, I'm absolutely certain, that those thugs in black robes would have found some lawery-liarly way to make THAT different.
Anyone who believes Trump isn't getting kickbacks from the contractors who are being hired to do everything from the demolition to turning the pool a putrid shade of aqua is too gullible to take seriously. Though it's certain the courts will, in many cases, pretend to be that gullible. Let's stipulate that watching the lawyers, judges and, worst of all, "justices" over the past twenty-five years has led to me truly and honestly hating that profession.
When you magnify the "right to lie," the "right to spread hate," the "right to appeal to the worst in People" the "right to con People," with the "right of the free press" (which is a legal myth giving "rights" to a corporate entity which cannot have rights, which adhere only to natural living beings) it makes everything under our idiot Constitution worse and the criminal regime of law, habit, norms and perverted scruples that have arisen out of that poisoned ground, it does nothing but magnify the danger enormously.
When you combine all of this in the line of rulings that flow from Sullivan v New York Times, the truly evil Buckley v Valeo (which made money = speech and so gave billionaires and millionaires millions and billions more of it than mere mortals have) and combine those with other such novelties such as in Citizens United, the whole thing destroys equality and democracy.
All of that is a creation of lawyers and judges and "justices" whose profession is based in lying for the maximum profit and benefit of whoever the lawyers, judges and, worst of all, "justices" want to profit and benefit. And in a lot of cases, that means nothing more than those who are paying them. And along the way, they can get other pudding headed lawyers, judges and "justices" who mistake the norms and scruples of their dishonest profession as a substitute for morality, to pretend that they are wallowing in virtue. AND THEY GET ON TALK SHOWS AND ON THE MEDIA THEY'VE FREED TO LIE AND PEDDLE THAT BULL SHIT TO THE STUPIDER MEMBERS OF THE LEFT who then are afraid to reign in the evils of lying, peddling hatred, conning people by appealing to the worst of them, etc.
There is no political or legal exposition of "rights" which is safely executed without there being overriding limits in morality and, in that first and foremost prerequisite for real democracy and legitimate government and law, equality. The milieu of late 18th century "enlightenment" scientism and materialism (and atheism) - as was the real faith of most of the framers or they wouldn't have been slave holders and crooked financiers - was probably about the worst time in Western history to be framing such articles to be in a constitution. The First Congress under the, by then, cynical slave-holder Madison did a really crap job of it. They gave us minor and vague late 18th century poetry of the kind that harkened back to the minor poetry of earlier in the century. It turns out to suck in reality.
There, I said it.
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