"Free speech" is an interesting object of study in regard to the "civil liberties" industry - heavily funded by porn interests and corporate media - the shifting stands of America's fascists from anti-porn absolutism to them being the biggest fattest "free-speechers" in the world and what utter dupes and suckers America's liberals and leftists have been as they weaponized "free speech" championed by the old-line, mostly affluent-white-male liberals and lefties to lie us into fascism.
The old conservative, generally Republican opponents of "free speech" absolutism over the issues of porn and lefty political speech were a real force in the United States up into the 1970s with vestiges of them perhaps still around. The ones who had a real effect on the law and politics back before they gave way to the law-school academics, their students who got on federal courts and have now come to control the Supreme Court. Those who saw the golden opportunity handed to them by liberals on earlier courts which they have used the "RIGHT TO LIE" to allow the billionaires, foreign as well as domestic, and big media to lie us into Republican-fascism and Trumpian Imperial rule.
The Roberts Court is staffed by those who know that their ideology can only keep power as long as the lies and bigotry financed by billionaires and millionaires keep their fellow Republican-fascists in power. They don't care one bit for the lives of children, no more than the Trump regime does, they've green-lighted Trump's harm to all of us, not excluding children. They are nothing to the Roberts Court majority as compared to their hold on power and the money they can steal - the Roberts Court majority is in on that theft as clearly as John Marshall and Roger Taney were on the profiting from slavery. And, these days, he biggest profiteers from porn from Murdoch to Musk, are making money off of those products that come from "free speech absolutism." It's a self-financed racket, the Courts First Amendment rulings a cog in that machine. The First Amendment lawyers and rackets like the ACLU part of that, too.
Lies are what fueled the latest "will rise again" of America's indigenous fascism the lies that media magnification and repetition and all of the tools of persuasion that have been invented and tested by the PR industry, "free speech" lying fully and with enormous effectiveness that all of the "more speech" imagined by the "civil liberties" lawyer-liars and the clearly professionally interested liberal media liberals promoted as the weapon against that have proved to be about as impotent as any such nonsense has ever been.
I don't exactly remember the first time I transgressed that in a major way in one of these pieces, but this one was early in that development. The news story that led to it was the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court throwing out a lawsuit by a mother whose daughter had been hounded to commit suicide by a bunch of mean-girls in her school WHO HAD BEEN ENCOURAGED TO DO IT BY THE MOTHER OF ONE OF THEM. The issue that the Massachusetts Court threw it out on was that it was the "free speech" right of the malignant mother and the girls she had encouraged to hound the girl to her death.
And now they could do it with pictures as well as social media messages thanks to Elon Musk and "AI". I don't know which ap that the girls used to do that more than sixteen years ago, perhaps it was the one that Zuckerberg invented to rank girls on the Harvard campus.
I think it was an earlier post that led to the first firestorm of indignation I got on this issue, alas, the comments that I recall so vividly aren't there anymore. I remember a good number of those were due to my dissing one of the idols of old-line liberal piety when I said this:
The most important right that children have is to the protection of adults, their parents, their community and the world. For children that is more important than the entire Bill of Rights. Without it they have no life and no chance to pursue their own happiness free of deception and the worst forms of abuse. They have a right not to be lied to by mass media. This is so clear that it shouldn't ever have gotten lost. It might be prettied up in legal nice talk but too many law professors, judges lawyers and the constitutional purity industry have chosen corporate profits over the protection of children. Theories of freedom of the press concerning commercial speech are part of it. And that's over. If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes.
That Lady Chatterly's Lover is a piece of crap has nothing to do with it. If it was a work of genius* it still isn't anything compared to the life of a child. And I don't think that D. H. Lawrence's proto-fascism, racism and eugenics is irrelevant. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that the champions of that and other such books (such as Last Exit To Brooklyn) gave America's fascists their golden opportunity, I think that the number of such coincidences in the development of America's freest "press" in history and America's fall from the height of our legal equality with the Voting Rights Act to our neo-Apartheid period can credibly be held to be a coincidence. NOT WHEN SO MUCH OF IT COMES FROM THE SAME LAWYERS, JUDGES AND "justices" AS HAD A HAND IN BOTH.
The weirdness of mid-20th century liberalism and its remnants today and the unintended role that those have played in the implosion of American democracy is told in such stands and those for whom those stands were really mounted.
I have pointed out here before that a number of such lawyers who made a profession of such "free speech" absolutism turned out to be total hypocrites, Ephraim London filing the lawsuit to ruin Mary McCarthy for telling the truth about the AS Seen On TV "free speech" champion Lillian Hellman, that she was a flagrant liar. I've also pointed out that I once pointed out that Alan Dershowitz (whose vaunted "free speech" advocacy was a series of cases he did for figures in the porn industry) was also a liar, a torture advocate turned genocide apologist who sought to suppress the accurate accusation of his own lies and plagiarisms through threatening the same tactics that Hellman and London used.
"Free speech-press" as those are nearly universally defined is one of the most stupidly absurd concepts in common currency, especially when presented as the supreme and absolute value, held to have such power that it overrides literally every demonstrated instance in which it harms and kills that it is a danger to life and every other right. I do blame the drafters of the First Amendment for a lot of that, putting it first, including a corporate entity which cannot have rights, "the press," not differentiating between the right to tell the truth and that there is no such thing as a right to lie, etc.
And it is something that has been turned into an unthinking idol through rote repetition of the phrase in that context that that idolatry turns it into a real danger to the lives of millions and billions. Especially when matched with the real and genuine creation of a material idol, the Baal of America, "corporate person-hood."
Corporations have no rights, they are not natural born creatures, they are not human beings, only humans have rights and no right is unbounded outside of a context of moral responsibilities to other living beings. Humans. Our law is so dangerously stupid that it can't make those distinctions and refuses to acknowledge the clearly catastrophic consequences of them.
And People have their lives ruined, their reputations ruined, their lives ended as a consequence of that.
* In that other piece I mentioned Ulysses, one of the other idols of such idolatry, Though I think Joyce really peaked with Dubliners. If it were necessary to sacrifice every work of fiction to bring about egalitarian democracy, I'd go farther than what Joseph Brodsky said in this famous three way with George Steiner and Mary McCarthy. "As a human being and not as a writer the first thing I would say that if you give me a choice between let's say democracy and Solzhenitsyn, I say democracy."
I think Brodsky's life experience gave him much clearer insight into what's really at stake than almost any living Western intellectual, writer, scribbler, lawyer, judge "justice" is likely to have. White, straight, and most of all, affluent males, especially. I have to say I really miss Mary McCarthy style intellectuals. I'd never have thought I'd miss that kind of discussion at the time.
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