counter propaganda: The Hill on rigged elections

This is a retort to the following article:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/325834-money-doesnt-buy-elections-and-elections-arent

I will dissect it paragraph by paragraph for your entertainment and reflection.

Searching for “rigged election” in Google News turns up “about 288,000 results.” Add “Trump” to the search and you get “about 342,000” hits. Enough already. The rhetoric is everywhere, and it’s misleading and dangerous.

This is the leading paragraph of the article. Misleading and dangerous rhetoric? We'll get back to that in a second.

Overlooked in all the rigged rhetoric is the use of the term by those who want to give government more power to control speech. Those opposed to truly free speech use this tactic on a regular basis. Issue One, a group supporting limits on political speech, claims, “Our politics is dominated by money, creating a rigged system where most Americans are shut out of the political process.” Every Voice, another group opposed to free speech, opines, “We know that the game is rigged against the majority of us.”

We're going to look at https://www.issueone.org/the-solution/ now, the group cited, and look at how The Hill defines free speech. Notice how not a single mention of media, platforms, rights to assembly, or freedom of expression is mentioned anywhere. What they do talk about is fund raising, super PACs and corporate lobbying. Three things that are in no way free speech.

If bribing an official to do your bidding is free speech, then Pinochet's Chile was the most liberated nation in history.

So two paragraphs in we're already seeing the blatant propaganda of this piece. How's that for dangerous and misleading rhetoric?

These groups and others argue that they are saving democracy by working to pass policies aimed at restoring public trust in government. But there is no evidence that such speech regulations do any good. If the system is really rigged, then how does giving government more control over its critics help?

This is begging the question, and completely distorts the argument. There is for a fact evidence that corporate funding regulations in elections play a role. Because when you turn a party into a corporate entity, it obeys market forces as opposed to the interests of their constituents. Commodifying elections is the reason they're no longer elections.

The underlined question is just laughably pathetic. Controlling its critics? By their logic, Exxon Mobil was the critic of the Iraq war. JP Morgan was the critic of the banking bailouts. Monsanto was the critic of the agrarian protectionist policies that starved thousands of people to death in South America. These are not critics, they're benefactors. And yes, using legal means to prevent politicians from representing corporate benefactors rather than their constituents is proven to make elections more democratic since literally the whole point of elected officials is to have them represent their constituents! 

The truth is, academic research demonstrates that existing campaign finance regulations do nothing to reduce perceptions of corruption or increase trust in government. More speech restrictions will equal more of the same.

Again with the misleading. Nobody is discussing trust in government. They're discussing defunding the government from private benefactors. If all they wanted was for people to trust their government then they'd fund this hogwash publication to tell people everything is fine.

Secondly, that's a bad retort. Saying that current means to assure there is no corruption clearly demonstrate how everyone thinks there is for a fact corruption, ipso facto; Revising these means to assure there is no corruption will therefore never work under any circumstances.

But that's the most self-defeating thinking imaginable in just about every situation there is. It's like saying that there's no evidence humanity will ever fly because the first ever flying machine never worked. Even though now we even have space travel due to our capacity to revisit and improve ideas. I shouldn't even have to explain this since it's so evident in literally every facet of the human condition.

Nor is there evidence that money “buys” electoral outcomes. Just ask Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. Each vastly outspent Trump in the primary and the general elections. Indeed, pro-Clinton spending was more than double spending in support of Trump. But the fact that higher spending didn’t translate to a Clinton victory shouldn’t come as a surprise. The list of candidates who won the fundraising battle only to lose an election is long. It stretches from high-profile presidential campaigns to little-noticed Congressional races.

 This is another fallacy. It's not about how much the candidate spends, they're not the ones buying the election. It's about how much influence their corporate benefactors can buy. How many lobbyists they have, what sort of media platforms they can provide, which congressmen that they've donated to, and so on. It's not about campaign funding, it's about bribing. Two different things entirely.

In other words, advocates of further regulating political speech are making demonstrably false claims that call into question the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.

I'll just let this embarrassing remark hang in the air...

When Donald Trump first claimed that the election was “rigged” as a candidate, critics were quick to suggest that making such a claim was a threat to democracy. Why? Because it called into question the legitimacy of our election results.

So blindly trusting that the votes of three hundred million people are just magically checked and accounted for without any interference or negligence is the key to preserving democracy?

As president, Trump has continued to make similar claims. Most recently, he said that he would have won New Hampshire if not for widespread voter fraud in the state. And again, he has been charged with threatening democracy with false claims about the integrity of U.S. elections.

This is a red herring. We're discussing private funding for political parties and elected officials here, not idiotic things Trump said. Deflecting the fact that this is poor journalism by bringing up slightly different poor journalism is incredibly poor journalism.

Trump’s critics are right to call him out for making such serious allegations without providing any legitimate evidence. But the evidence that money buys elections is just as lacking as the evidence of voter fraud in New Hampshire. Those same critics who call out Trump should also criticize the “reform” lobby with equal fervor.

Ironically, some of those critics are actually part of the “reform” lobby. And unfortunately, even if Trump does drop this claim, baseless “rigged” rhetoric is unlikely to come to an end any time soon.

It's not ironic! They've vaguely defined two completely separate issues with such broad strokes that they think they both fit in the same category and are therefore identical! That's not irony, that's the early signs of dementia!

This anti-speech coalition of nonprofits will continue to spend millions of dollars each year telling Americans that our political system is corrupt and undemocratic because other citizens are also spending money on speech. That is their right. But their rhetoric does as much as Trump’s to tear down faith in the integrity of our system of government.

That's the entire argument for bribery? That's their right? Anything that's legal is someone's right. The holocaust was the right of the Nazis. Slavery was the right of the Colonists. Child molesting was the right of the clergy in Rome. Hypothetically, anything can be their right. It's a terrible appeal to state dogma, and the justifier of pretty much every horrible idea in history. Fun fact: If murder was legal then murder would be their right too. By that logic we shouldn't be allowed to repeal any laws what so ever in a political system since once it's legal; That's their right. 

Furthermore, adopting speech restrictive policies based on these activists’ claims would do more to damage our democracy than any false rhetoric itself ever could. A vibrant democracy requires that citizens be able to speak freely, particularly about political issues. And spending money on speech is essential for bringing attention to and gaining support for issues, especially those that are initially unpopular.

And there we have it. "We need people to be able to simply buy political influence because of how otherwise those pesky proles would just vote against our interests."

We're looking at the makings of the French Revolution here. Where each house, the clergy, the nobility and the commons each got one vote. A perfect system for the bourgeois government. Even though the commons had the most people. It's the same workaround. To provide a way in which to override the interests of the common people using societal privilege. It was oppression then, and it still is. 

Many ideas that are mainstream today were once considered radical. Had people not had the ability to spend money promoting those ideas, our world may have turned out vastly different. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s ability to freely raise money from his supporters played a vital role in building political opposition to the Vietnam War. He surprised then-President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic Primary — and ultimately forced LBJ out of the race.

Ohohoho.... you did not just say what I think you said. The Viet Nam war was not ended because of fund raising. It was direct action. Activists on college campuses, the hippie movement, black liberation movements, and most importantly; Viet Mihn. 

The US were defeated in Viet Nam. The war wasn't just politely ended. Not to mention that to start the war required billions of resources poured into Anti-communist propaganda that had been carried on for three decades prior! Not just private sector fund raising but even state-funded propaganda. What are you talking about? The economy bent over backwards to start the Viet Nam war. It wouldn't have happened at all if people weren't indoctrinated and propagated to over an entire generation. 

Not only is this blatantly ahistorical, but it erases in particular the black liberation activists who fought the hardest against the Viet Nam war and their efforts and relevance only to give credit to a rich white guy. So on top of that it's also racist. Eugene McCarthy is the Abraham Lincoln of the Viet Nam war.

If you want to discuss real figures of influence, then look at Tariq Ali, or Noam Chomsky. Two people who reject great person theory and doesn't believe you can ascribe the end of the Viet Nam war to a single individual, and yet were the representing figures at the time. 

I'm digressing, let's see what the next outlandish claim is. 

Limits on political spending are limits on political speech. And limits on political speech are limits on democracy. If these groups really cared about protecting American democracy, they would stop attempting to delegitimize it in the name of further restricting First Amendment rights.

Limits on when to do surgery are limits on medical procedure, and limits on medical procedure are limits on public health. If these groups really cared about protecting the NHS, they would stop telling surgeons that they're not allowed to perform lung transplants on perfectly healthy people. 

That's the logic they're using. That's them. I'm done. Fuck this shit.