BFT Video: 'A Thought-Terminating Cliche'

We finally found someone who will happily expose the right's bad faith for what it is: A perversion of reality that allows right-wing actors to bring their radical politics into the mainstream.

This includes, of course, issues of speech in the US. Senate Republicans this week were once again crying about the right's speech being suppressed, even as the authoritarian Trump regime kidnaps political opponents off the streets and denies them their basic constitutional rights.

Dr. Mary Anne Franks, a law professor and author, wasn't having any of it. During her testimony before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday, Franks spoke eloquently about the bad-faith reality in which is vast censorship apparatus is silencing right-wing views and voices. Some are saying she's a Bad Faith Times subscriber.

"The censorship industrial complex is a thought-terminating, gaslighting cliche that attempts to portray the most powerful people in the United States as oppressed and silenced," said Franks, who said in a recent interview that "whatever it is we thought the First Amendment was supposed to be doing, protecting us from censorship, allowing us to exchange ideas freely with each other, that's not working."

Franks' advocacy for a rethinking of First Amendment rights – which have devoured themselves in the social media age – is something I'll write about in the coming weeks. I think it's an important idea that must be mainstreamed if we are going to have any chance to reel in the out-of-control far-right voices that have used their massive platforms to oppose democracy and endorse authoritarianism.

Become a Bad Faith Times member (for free!) to access today's video (and audio-only version) on Franks' testimony and how it might create a viable path to reshaping the discourse around First Amendment rights in the United States.

A thought terminating cliche

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