Today the Supreme Court heard a couple cases related to government efforts to suppress dissenting views of Covid information. It is a rather big First Amendment case and how the Court rules will be important going forward. During the back and forth Justice Jackson expressed concern that allowing people to speak completely freely could restrict the government’s power. This was ripped into because of course the purpose of the First Amendment – as well as all others in the Bill of Rights and plenty of other provisions in the Constitution – is to limit the power of government. It seemed to shock people that a Justice on the Supreme Court could say such a thing.
To which I said: why in heck are you surprised?
Ketanji Brown Jackson is the completely conventional product of the American education and judicial systems. We need not trouble ourselves about whether or not she was affirmative-actioned into her positions; it doesn’t really matter. Whether she did it on merit or by box-checking, the result is the same. And anyone else who is a product of the American education and judicial system is going to be the same unless somewhere along the line they stepped out of it and learned something they weren’t supposed to. The small percentage who get off the ranch are the “conservative judges” that we pin our hopes on – only to all too often find that for all their ability to some times get it right, their default position is still the Establishment (only Clarence Thomas, the late Antonin Scalia and a very few others up and down the judicial line have completely freed themselves from Establishment orthodoxy). The Establishment Mill turns out Establishmentarians. It is what it is for; if there was a happy time when we had colleges and judges who were for thinking, that time is long past.
With all the back and forth about the First Amendment today, something occurred to me early on: there is a crucial issue at stake here. Two questions, really:
- Do lies have First Amendment protections?
- If not, who determines what is a lie?
I’ve talked about this before and I have come to the very firm conclusion that lies are not protected speech. In fact, can’t be protected speech. That we’re downright stupid if we think that we should fight and die for the right of someone to lie to us. But I’ll also note that no matter how you answer those questions, you are on treacherous ground. If you say “yes” then you’re plagued with liars. If you say “no” then you have to figure out how to suppress lies while retaining liberty.
In the end, there is no 100% “right” answer. This is pretty common in human affairs, actually. Hard and fast rarely works out that well no matter how stable you might think it is. It is rigid and rigid things tend to collapse. But balance is also precarious as you might recall from the last time you tried to walk on a narrow beam – there is just that perfect position where you don’t fall but just a little bit off either way and over you go. But, not being rigid, you can continually adjust yourself as you go along and so navigate the peril. Just as an aside, we are not here discussing the Laws of God, which are immutable. We are discussing human affairs; that is, how to we twist and weave with the mass of contradictory humanity towards an approximation of Justice?
To get back to Justice Jackson. As noted, she’s Establishment. In fact, bi-partisan Establishment. Uniparty, that is. When she was first put up for the Federal bench, she was introduced by Paul Ryan. She’s related to him by marriage. Ryan praised her character, intellect and integrity. And she’s been praised like that her whole career. And, hey, don’t get me wrong: maybe she’s the nicest person in the whole, wide world. I don’t know: I’ve never met her and probably never will. But her intellect and integrity? So, what Ryan was telling me back in 2013 was that he knew her, loved her, respected her…and never got around to finding out that her reading of the First Amendment was 180 from the intent of the Amendment? That’s a kind of crucial thing, don’t you think? This isn’t a variation on an obscure aspect of law. This is the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. Pretty clear, no? But Ryan never had that discussion with her? I mean, with the family. Over Thanksgiving. Little back and forth about differing views…she being a liberal jurist and he (at the time) being a Conservative House member. Never came up?
I guess that is possible but, honestly, figure the odds. Could it be that Ryan was that incurious about her views? Well, then why was he out there touting her as being this excellent person if he didn’t know anything about her? He was either lying out of ignorance (saying good things about her that he had no idea about) or lying out of malevolence (he knew she was a judicial Maoist but didn’t want to alert the people to this fact). In either case, when Ryan introduced her in 2013, he was lying. And so, it turns out, was she: she went through the confirmation process many times in her trek to the Supreme Court and never did she let us know that she felt there was a legitimate reason for the government to censor speech. That, in fact (per her questions today) she felt that it was wrong to stop government censorship because that would make us all unsafe. This is a rather crucial bit of information, don’t you think? Its also not an opinion you arrive at all of a sudden…either you thought about it for years or it was drilled into you for years. There is no way you just suddenly look at “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” and go, “know what? Congress shall make that law – I don’t care what the Constitution says, in certain instances I think that freedom of speech should be abridged all to heck and gone. And if Congress won’t, then the President unchecked by any authority can go ahead and do it.” It doesn’t matter that nobody asked her directly about it: we have an obligation to tell the whole truth. You are a liar if you leave crucial information out as much as if you relate false information. If a bank robber said “I went to the store and then came home” when he actually went to the store, robbed the bank, and then came home, then he’s a liar in addition to being a bank robber.
If Ryan had said, “Kentanji is a very nice lady and a wonderful part of my extended family but, my goodness, she’s a commie fanatic; don’t let her near a court”, then he would have told the truth. And it is what he should have said in 2013. But that would have made her mad. Other parts of Ryan’s family, too. And, of course, the larger Establishment which was already clearly grooming her for the judicial heights, if not the Supreme Court at that time. And when she did her first confirmation hearing, she should have told us that her judicial philosophy was warmed over Leninism with a side of Maoism. That her judicial view was to rule in conformity with her desired ideological outcome, law be damned. Had she done that, though, she wouldn’t have been confirmed. But it is more than that.
The Senate reviewed her several times, right? Plenty of time for people to dig into her background; find out her views. And as she advanced, we even started to have judicial actions and rulings showing where she was heading. All of that should have been brought to the floor of the Senate. On both sides. Friends and enemies should have been completely forthright about just who she is and what she’d do. That didn’t happen. A gigantic conspiracy of silence was created about her philosophy so she could coast into one position after another…and now she’s got a lifetime seat. She’s 54. Twenty years from now she could be part of a 5-4 Court eviscerating the First Amendment. And all because starting in 2013 everyone lied about her.
Do you start to see it? How bad lies are? And the lies to get Justice Jackson are just tiny, little lies. Mostly of omission. But, my friends, we are awash in lies. There is an ocean of lies infecting very aspect of modern life. We here on the Right perceive them pretty well (the Left gleefully engages in lying) but even we don’t really see how overwhelming it all is. Everything is shot through with lies. And it is very hard to face up to: as the late Neil Peart put it in his song Distant Early Warning:
Who can face the knowledge
That the truth is not the truth?
That is what we’re really facing: for most of the people, a pack of lies is the truth. They’ve been told for so long and so incessantly that, just as Hitler said it would, the lie has become the truth. To see that – to react to it – is very hard. It is to give up a lifetime of certainty. But we must see it. We must react to it. And we must stop it. If you wonder why we’re such a mess these days, it is because almost everything we do is based to one degree or another on a lie.
We’ve got rafts of laws on the books based upon lie after lie after lie. What we saw today was that raft running up against something true – that is, something written by the Founders more than 200 years ago. It is written in very simple English. Anyone even barely literate can understand it. The modern Establishment looks at it; they are puzzled and then angry. It doesn’t fit! If someone can say I’m wrong about mask wearing, then people might not wear masks! How can this be endured? So, they want it gone. Justice Jackson just said the quiet part out loud today. Make no mistake about it, they all feel like that. And don’t forget that a least a majority of the GOP/Conservative “leadership” also wants it gone. When McCain denigrated us as silly Hobbits he was also speaking the quiet part out loud: why can’t you dumb peasants just do as you’re told? He, too, looked at the First Amendment and found it an obstacle (remember, he of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law). And as lies have been piled up to get us to where we are today, they’ll just use more to get rid of the last threads of truth…they’ll simply lie one day and say, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” doesn’t mean what it means.
All our problems, every last one of them, is based upon a lie. We have found out over the past 50 years or so what happens to a society when it says that lies are protected speech. All that did was allow lies to worm their way in, take over and now go after Truth, as such. It has to end. Whatever is required, we must do it. We must find the means – judicial and social – to utterly destroy those who lie. We must make lying a shameful thing again; something that mortifies the liar when caught and causes all to reject the liar and the lie. This could take some very stern action, my friends. Liars won’t go quietly. But we have to do it.
It is either that or drown in lies.
Blogs For Victory 
And when she did her first confirmation hearing, she should have told us that her judicial philosophy was warmed over Leninism with a side of Maoism. That her judicial view was to rule in conformity with her desired ideological outcome, law be damned. Had she done that, though, she wouldn’t have been confirmed.
If Democrats were in charge of the Senate at the time, she would STILL have been confirmed. In fact, I’ll bet she would have even gotten some GOP votes.
Fair point – but, also, if we really were a people of Truth, then only those ideologically committed to her outcomes would have voted for her.
During the back and forth Justice Jackson expressed concern that allowing people to speak completely freely could restrict the government’s power.
I’d go so far as to say that I’ll bet not a single senator who voted for her confirmation wished he or she could take back their vote when they heard her say that.
The most obvious answer to how to deal with lies is to open discourse to all speech, because when this happens the lies tend to sort themselves out.
As for the point Spook made, that the Democrats would have voted for Jackson no matter how candid she was about her radical Leftist leanings, this is a different problem.
Over many years on this blog and in other comment sections I have learned that very few Democrats are Democrats because of an objective (or even subjective) belief in the tenets of the Left. On the contrary, most seem oblivious to them.
Ask a Democrat (probably even a Dem Senator) why he believes the best blueprint for the nation is the consolidation of power in the hands of a few and he will probably huff and puff and deny that this is his political philosophy.
There is never debate on the facts and merits of the Constitution. There is never a public forum in which people discuss what it says and why, and the motives behind every element in it. This ignorance is why someone can get through college and then law school and then years on the bench without ever having the slightest idea of the meaning, or the intent behind the meaning, of the 1st Amendment. That’s a lot of years without a single discussion or class lesson on the Founders belief that a free nation must have the ability for its citizens to speak out including the ability to criticize their government.
That’s a lot of years without a single discussion about how the purpose of government is not to control people but to be controlled by them.
I not only have no problem in publicly, repeatedly and with great intensity subjecting Jackson to ridicule for her position. I’d actually like to see her subjected to so much ridicule that she decides this SCOTUS gig isn’t the free ride she thought it might be—-to let her know that finally, FINALLY, she will be held accountable for her positions and decisions.
Well let’s not forget it was Jackson-Browne who couldn’t define what a woman was during her confirmation hearings. That question was “above her pay grade” according to her, yet the Senate still confirmed her. So not only do we now have a Justice who doesn’t believe in an absolute 1A, we also have a Justice who doesn’t understand biology, but this is all ok in the new DEI world.
All our problems, every last one of them, is based upon a lie
I’ve been saying this for years. Every issue the Democrat Uni Party/Media pushes, is a lie. Climate change, Jan 6, white supremacy, saving democracy, secure border, etc., etc. those are all lies. But they are carefully crafted lies designed to stoke fear amongst the masses, leading to more government control. It’s clear as day. And let me say this … brown and black people are the most compliant to government control, which is why we are seeing the open border and millions of uneducated brown people flooding the country. Historically, white people are the only people who have ever fought back against authoritarian governments, and that’s a danger to the uni Party, hence the daily “MAGA extremist” media narrative. Honestly, a well educated 5th grader could discern what is going on in America right now, but thanks to Teach Unions, that 5th grader can barely read. Our problems in America will not be overcome by civility. Some glass will have to be broken.
Speaking of another woman of color who is deeply indoctrinated and dishonest but still enjoys a position of power …
Far Left Squad Member Cori Bush Blames Problems With Power Grid on White Supremacy and Climate Change
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/far-left-squad-member-cori-bush-blames-problems/
And again, here’s yet another example of an ignorant, indignant, and indoctrinated Leftist woman of color. Let’s add to this list, Fani Willis, Letitia James, Kamala Harris, Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, Joy Reid, etc., etc. It’s a lengthy and highly destructive list
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1769928864124608627?s=20
I see Trump is suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation for saying on-air that Trump was found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case. I hope he’s suing for $459 million.
Plus interest starting from the day he said it.
I am still stuck on the a simple question of who decides what is truth and what is a lie without all players in the arena? I am thinking black and white-truth/lie…big, small, omission. It certainly could not be our government including the regulatory agencies. Congresscritters lie so much they had to exempt themselves. As my views have advanced over the years I am now on the us / them has never been Rep./Dem but one of us deplorables v. the government we created.
Over the years I have paid a steep price for telling the truth believing in an old adage about “If you don’t want to know the absolute truth then never ask a NCO.”
LOL. But, you’re right – it is tricky. That is why my preferred option is via civil courts where only citizens can lodge complaints. Not government agencies. Not corporations (certainly not large corporations). I would have it before a jury and I wouldn’t allow legal representation. You say so and so lied about you: ok, tell it to the jury. The guy you accuse of lying also gets to state their case. After both sides speak their piece, the jury retires and decides. LOSER PAYS. If you’re accused and lose, you pay. But also if you accuse and lose, you pay. By not allowing government or major corporations to avail themselves of Libel Courts we protect the little guy from harassment.
It would work like this: Joe Reporter says “Mark is a racist, sexist homophobe”. I hear about it and sue. We go to court. I do not have to prove I’m not a racist, sexist homophobe – I merely have to state, under oath, that I am none of these things and it is up to Joe Reporter to prove to a jury that I am what he accused me of. I am, of course, given an opportunity to dispute any evidence Joe Reporter provides. Back and forth, like that. Once we’re all done, the jury decides. If they think it was proven that I am a racist, sexist homophobe then I’m on the hook. OTOH, if Joe Reporter didn’t prove his case, he’d better get his checkbook out.
As the loser pays we will limit false accusations of lying; who’s going to risk that? But by having it hanging over their heads that any poor slob out there can sue them – and they can’t hide behind lawyers! – then they will have a massive incentive to not lie. That is the point of the exercise: not to have us all in court arguing about it, but to put financial fear on the MSM, especially.
Unfortunately, these days it seems prudent to make sure it isn’t an election year for the judges. Juries can decide but the judges can easily manipulate them as well.
The other issue, even though I fully agree with you, is another common one. “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
This could be a great indication of what November might look like. A Trump endorsed Cuban immigrant Bernie Moreno just walked away with the Republican primary in OH defeating the Gov. Mike DeWine/Establishment endorsed candidate.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-primary-elections/ohio-senate-results
There are definitely some rumblings out there – polling, voter registration trends, some voting patterns.
We’ll have to see – the Uniparty will pull out all the stops.
So here’s an anecdotal observation from yesterday. Biden was in town, in fact just a few miles away from me. The Mrs. and I, and some friends, had tickets to the Cubs spring training game which meant we had to travel right through an area that you would think would be packed with people considering the President was in town … so we left early and we drove right by the Intel facility that Biden was at … and at the time Biden was there. Nothing. Not one detour and not one traffic delay, in fact, we arrived early. There was ZERO evidence Biden was in town. Now if Trump had been in town … it would have been much much different.
Flashback to 2020 when Biden and Harris were in town at a local Native American Museum and reporters were shocked when they were reporting “no one is here”. The only way Biden wins AZ is if they cheat. That’s a fact.
I don’t. What Trump loses in moderate Republicans, he more than gains in Hispanics, blacks, and the youth, of which he is polling very well. The GOP will be much better off without moderate, establishment Republicans. If you haven’t noticed, we’re $34 trillion in debt, involved in two major world wars, have a wide open southern border, have out of control crime, have kids which are academically behind the entire civilized world, and have a two tiered justice system which models a banana republic. Anyone who currently supports the Uni Party in Washington is just not a bright or serious person.
“Serious people don’t lie in their response” lol – well that excludes all Uni Party politicians including your President but that aside, what was the lie?
Here’s a good read for you Fielding. Turns out, hispanics, blacks, and young voters don’t think climate change, trans rights, and saving democracy are legitimate issues and instead want a better economy, a secure border, and more money in their pocket. You know … concerns of real people.
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jorge-bonilla/2024/03/20/oof-arizona-latinos-laugh-weijia-jiangs-question-january-6th
The Bobulinkski testimony yesterday was not only brilliant in exposing corruption, but could be a huge turning point as well, IMO. Tony showed us all exactly how to fight these losers, and there’s nothing civil about it. He got in their face, he called them liars, he exposed their game, and he didn’t flinch. And just look how unhinged and angry they became when they were called out. KEEP THE PRESSURE ON. This is how we win. Remember, everything Democrats stand for is a lie … don’t ever be afraid to call them out. As Obama once said, “get in their face and argue”
https://x.com/gc22gc/status/1770573046258303086?s=20
This is the current state of Joe Biden’s America. You know, the President who showered with his daughter …
Shocking moment TikTokker tells illegal immigrants how to ‘invade’ American homes and invoke squatter’s rights as provocative video is seen more than 3M times
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13222453/moment-tiktokker-illegal-immigrants-invade-american-homes-invoke-squatter-rights.html