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"Can you imagine how right-wingers would have reacted if Obama or Biden had issued sweeping executive orders like Trump does?"
The right-wingers think they did. I need you to understand this. The right-wingers think they did.
Right-wingers live in a hermetically sealed media bubble. And since the days of Bill Clinton, that bubble has been telling them that every Democratic president is a lawbreaking tyrant, disregarding the Constitution and ruling by decree.
This is why they don't panic watching Trump break the law. They don't think they're crossing a Rubicon, because they believe the other side went across first.
@jalefkowit They told everyone our side already did, and I legitimately cannot understand why this fact is still not broadly understood.
@kissane @jalefkowit i was aware of right-wing media constant lies and/or bullshit, but i wasn't aware of this particular lie, because i'm not interested in watching/reading a gish gallop, because that would be exhausting.
The fact that it's a gish gallop seems like it goes a long way to explaining why we're not as aware of the most damaging lies as we should be: they buried a needle in a constantly-growing pile of needles, and that makes it hard to focus on any one needle for long.
@kissane @jalefkowit but also, it seems like "false claims damaging to the public perception of the legitimacy of government" maybe should have been a category of speech that isn't protected by the 1st amendment.
Like, why should it be the responsibility of hundreds of millions of people to fact-check every false claim of tyranny, every day? Ain't nobody got time for that! Why shouldn't it be prohibitively expensive to publish those false claims in the first place?
@JamesWidman @jalefkowit That's actually how they put journalists who report the truth in jail in Russian, Myanmar, and a lot of other places.
Freedom of the press is so tricky because any government will be bad a lot of the time, so you have to do rulemaking that attempts to be resilient in that situation.
@kissane @jalefkowit but:
1) the determination of whether a claim is false wouldn't be up to the executive branch; it would be up to a court (just like in defamation lawsuits).
2) in theory at least, a court would take some care to check whether a specific claim of tyranny was backed by evidence that meets some acceptable standard...?
@JamesWidman but let's not forget who owns SCOTUS at the moment...
@kissane @jalefkowit
@punissuer @kissane @jalefkowit
1) that's fair, but... how did we get that SCOTUS in the first place? Sure, a big part of it is _Citizens United v. FEC_ (and the fact that billionaires exist), but another big part is that we have a voting population that has been catastrophically & *deliberately* misinformed.
2) there's a limit to how bad a SCOTUS ruling can be without destroying public's respect for SCOTUS and the rule of law more broadly (e.g. see _Dred Scott_).
@punissuer @kissane @jalefkowit
3) a catastrophically-misinformed voting population will eventually lead us to actual tyranny anyway (as we've seen). So either we find a way to prevent/ameliorate that problem, or we have a state of bipolar political instability forever (or until this country destroys itself).
No government should be designed to operate under these conditions, because it's not *possible* to have a stable government under these conditions.
@punissuer @kissane @jalefkowit
So we have to (1) defeat fascists and (2) design government based on the assumption that fascists will be defeated.
It's a gamble, but playing it "safe" when it comes to freedom-of-speech is a big part of what brought the nazis to power this time.
@JamesWidman all true. I just wanted to point out that we may not rely on courts to achieve our goals.
I had hoped the point where we decide to ignore a clearly defunct SCOTUS has passed already, but here we are
@kissane @jalefkowit