Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/24/first-amendment-offers-too-m.html
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Trump wants America to be like England, "where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong"
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says millionaire Donald Trump
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“I’m a strong believer in the freedom of the press … And nobody believes it more than me”
right…
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That’s a pretty weak-sauce defence of Garbage Island’s evil laws, though– “England’s libel laws are so terrible that merely appealing to them makes you look bad, unless you successfully silence and/or bankrupt your enemies, which you probably will if you’re richer than them”.
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The Yes Men provoked GW Bush into saying “There ought to be limits to freedom”.
I sense a trend.
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I would love to see Trump go the David Irving route.
For those who don’t know, Irving was a Holocaust denier who in 1995 sued over a book which debunked his work as lies, deliberate misinterpretations, and half-truths. Irving lost, and was revealed to be both a fraud and an anti-Semite. (A movie about that trial just reached theaters)
And the thing is, Trump has already gone through that once. I can’t find a link but I know Trump sued a reporter over statements about Trump’s ownership share of a business venture. The tl;dr version is that Trump had to admit under oath that the story was factually correct, and that Trump had lied.
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It’s not a defense of Brexitland’s evil laws: it’s simply one ironic yet predictable outcome for overconfident abusers of them.
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Imagine the dystopian hellscape this world would be if literally no one had more respect for women, minorities, and free speech than Donald Trump.
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A downward trend. In Trump’s case, he didn’t even need The Yes Men, just the yes men…
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The problem for Trump is that he’s provided plenty of evidence that he’s narcissistic, stupid, arrogant, a prick, a nazi, an idiot, racist, sexist, xenophobic, ignorant, a moron, emotionally insecure, intellectually stunted, socially troglodytic, full of trumpery, a liar, a cheater, a scam artist, a pathetic business person, and a YUGE LOSER.
So I don’t see him winning any slander or libel cases unless they are against Mike Pence, who has called him all kinds of untrue things like trustworthy, dependable, smart, and a good person.
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Irving illustrates the lifecycle of the media provocateur very well.
- Failure to access mainstream
- Identification of a wedge issue
- Success on the fringe
- Mainstream interest at last, but…
- … ultimately tied to the fringe by it
- Audience dwindles to fringe
- Lawsuit
- Doom.
Key thing: the point of the lawsuit (or other retaliatory action) is to regain control of the self-narrative, to escape the fringe
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Trump is right. We should be more like that country we fought a war with to leave.*
- Trump 2016!
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I think you may thinking of this one:
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“Respect” for Trump probably always precedes erections and intimate submissiveness toward the women and men in question. I think Trump honestly believes what he is saying, I just think the word means something so different to him that most people wouldn’t even recognize the feeling behind it.
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That was the one.
Thanks!
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While cable/tv news networks have served as Trump enablers, and some print media’s been typically poor, my respect for the WaPo has grown - they’ve been doing good enough work this election that Trump banned WaPo reporters from events for months.
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There’s a post that pops up on friends’ pages every few months to the effect of “some people think respect is being treated like an equal, and some people think respect means being treated like an authority.” So to the second type of folks, being held to equal standards feels like disrespect.
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