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The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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What they want is freedom to control reality. What Republicans say, every day is not real, they don't live in reality. What they want is not free speech, they have that more than ever. What they want is to dictate reality to the rest of us.
All conservative are bad, acab as it were.
I think what they want is as many big-money donors as they can get, for which they require as many reliable Republican votes as they can get, for which they require Trump, for which they are required to give prima facia credence to whatever misinformation Trump is pushing on any given day.
It didn't always used to be like this, but that was a long time ago.
Trump didn't create his voter base -- he stole it, from Rush Limbaugh, Bill Reilly, Glen Beck, Alex Jones, and all those other millionaires who spent decades feeding working-class conservatives daily servings hate for huge profit.
And in all of history, who has been the conservative pundits' all-time number-one biggest and best favorite target for this hate? It has to be Barack Obama. (Our first Black president. Coincidence?)
Trump didn't create his voter base, but he has owned it outright for going on a decade now, starting way back with his entirely bogus claims against President Obama's citizenship. It didn't matter that the claims were bogus -- all that mattered is that they were against Obama, in an outright demeaning (and overtly racist) way. Dittoheads and O'Reilly fans ate that shit up.
Now here we are, eight or nine years later, and Trump still owns it. Only now, instead of feeding that voter base, and growing it with strongman posturing and punitive policy, he's using it exclusively to try to save his own skin. And at this point, the only way Trump saves himself is in an alternate reality, with alternate facts.
Now Trump lies to save himself, and half of congress has to play along or risk losing their own reelections. Thanks Obama.