How To Use The First Amendment To Destroy The First Amendment

...and do it like a maestro

Totalitarian regimes just hate the freedom of expression that’s enjoyed in free countries, and they especially hate America’s First Amendment to its Constitution. And so they set out to undermine both the culture of free expression wherever it’s found, and specifically the First Amendment in the USA.

It’s Easily Done

The first is more difficult than the second. Where freedom is part of the communication firmament of those who grow their conversations and ideas from it, that invasive species is difficult to eradicate. We in the free world have a wonderful, precious ingrained habit of speaking our mind, even when our ideas may be a bit weedy.

By contrast, it’s fairly easy to undermine a law that says “with certain practical exceptions, you can say whatever you want wherever you want, whenever you want.”

Here’s How

Let’s look at how a totalitarian orchestrates the undermining of the First Amendment with the smooth facility of a maestro directing an orchestra from behind a one-way glass wall.

First, the dictator has his trolls craft a series of stories that include incendiary, false, libelous claims.

Next, he directs his trolls to hire some bot farms to create echo chambers where the lies will be spread far and wide, generating dozens of little ideological civil wars.

After doing this for a while, journalists and leaders of organizations and institutions who value responsibility will become sufficiently annoyed by the trolls and bots to try to shut them up.

That’s when the dictator has his trolls scream These people are enemies of the First Amendment!! at the top of their lungs.

Hoist By Their Own Petard

What can those leaders say? While their intent is to stop abuse of the First Amendment, the words of the First Amendment itself do not distinguish between use and abuse. Everything beyond the proverbial shout of “fire!” in a crowded theater is fair game.

The dictator gives his trolls a digital pat on the back, with a hearty “you got ‘em!”

Civil liberties is thus hoist by its own petard. (Look it up, I’ll wait.)

Through all this the totalitarian sits behind the one way glass, laughing as he waves his orchestra conductor’s baton toward his trolls and their wind section, the bot farmers, all of whom move obediently at his every gesture.

Fighting, Oblivious Choruses

The choruses, whose members are oblivious to the fact that their perceptions have been skillfully manipulated, obediently respond. The resulting clash resembles Béla Bartók's Cantata Profana and Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces, where choruses actively fight with each other.

Each chorus is convinced that members of the other chorus have been brainwashed by the trolls and bots, who are clearly working for the other side, and turned into a cult.

Meanwhile the dictator-conductor smiles at the masterful performance by the skilled members of his orchestra. Together, they have created two cults, each convinced that they are the ones who love freedom of expression, while the other is a cult.

America’s Adversary Has No Ideology

We make a big mistake when we impute ideology to America’s adversary. They have no more ideology than a bear marking its territory, claiming as much turf as it can get away with. Remember when they claimed to adhere to communist ideology, then when that didn’t work out they embraced oligarchic capitalism? Did that signal any difference in their behavior?

Our adversary, for that matter the West’s adversary, is simply a mafia, and mafias don’t have beliefs beyond “I want what you have and I will get it with lies and manipulation.” They passionately hate freedom of expression. Allowing people to speak freely encourages questioning of the lies of those in authority. That’s simply not to be tolerated.

That’s true of other dictatorships as well of course. But the other dictatorships seem to adhere to some set of beliefs about the way things should be, even in some cases a theology.

This one believes in thuggery. Lie and steal. End of belief system.

They depend on bot farms. A bot is not a real person and so it cannot be held accountable for its actions, or its speech.

Therein lies the source of the problem - and the pointer to the solution. Learn more about the solution at Authentiverse.

To learn more about bot farms, see my post entitled Sutton Smith Has Important Advice For You.

About the Author

In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.

Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.

Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.