You don't solve propaganda, fake news, and public lying without consequences for the liars.

So here's a proposed solution that could go a long way to stopping lying liars in media and in government.

Dr. Robert Malone has a good piece today on how journalists engage in propaganda. Among other problems, he mentions how governments and the ultra wealthy sponsor journalists and “news” sources to spread their propaganda. I have previously posted about fake news, the brazenness with which left wingers in key positions will lie, and the left wing bias inherent in mainstream media.

But like with my previous solutions articles on preventing big business and the wealthy from buying politicians, and how you can stop voter and election fraud, and also how you can hold politicians accountable, I want to suggest how to deal with propaganda at its core. Make it much easier to take legal action against “news” organizations, politicians, and government officials for propagating false claims.

The smear against Nick Sandmann was a very good example. While the Sandmann settlements so far have been private, you can be sure that the settlement amounts were in the 8 figure range, as in more than $10 million each for CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post. The degree of the falsification of what actually happened was that bad and it defamed Sandmann horribly.

But there are many cases where the falsification is not as bad as in Sandmann’s incident, or cases where there isn’t one individual being smeared. Many times it’s just generalized fake news that may not identify specific people by name, like the wealthy don’t pay taxes, people on the right are racists, the police all over are out there murdering people because they have dark skin, or that peaceful protesters on the right are violent “insurrectionists”, etc.

Or it’s against a public figure where the rules are much looser, like the completely shredded claims that Trump colluded with Russia.

To stop lies like this, it has to be possible for everyday citizens to file lawsuits on their own with very little upfront fees or complex paperwork. At most, the filer would need to provide a fairly detailed description of what happened, along with video, audio, and/or pictures as evidence of the false information. There would be an initial review of these lawsuits that would weed out most frivolous and/or false claims of fake news or false statements, and there would be large fines for claims brought that were found to be without merit later on during a hearing. Of course the initial review would have to eliminate minor false information claims, and consolidate multiple similar claims. This sort of thing already happens in civil procedures in various ways.

As part of this process, and again a wide ranging solution, I would prohibit out of court settlements and legal shenanigans that draw things out for years. Cases would have to be heard within 100 days (or some other brief period of time certainly no more than 6 months at the longest), and any and all legal filings would have to take place within that time. I would probably suggest one single pretrial hearing where both sides would make any motions they desired to make verbally, and the judge would rule on them right then and there. In the vast majority of cases like this if not all of them, the alleged false information would have been publicly disseminated, so there would rarely be any need for a lengthy discovery process or any valid claims that the material should be suppressed.

Part of this is a rule that ignorance of other easily available public information (that contradicts the false information) would not be a defense, so there is again little reason for any delays. To a large extent this concept is not new, but right now it’s backwards where it does apply. In order to prevail in a defamation, libel, or slander case now a party must usually show malice on the part of the party disseminating the false information. This means ignorance of contradictory public information is a defense right now.

Under my rules the ignorance defense and the requirement to show malice is long gone, along with the need to hire high powered and expensive attorneys. If you’re a journalist or public figure and you don’t want to get sued, do your damn research and make it standard practice when reporting or speaking to put in a very prominent disclaimer that you have not verified information that indeed you have not verified. And make sure to present the other side fully without hiding information. If you’re being paid by someone to report or make public comments, you have to state that potential conflict of interest any time you speak on that someone’s behalf.

If an individual was suing on his or her own with no attorney(s), and was not an attorney themselves, then employees of the accused organization would have to respond to the lawsuit on their own without in court legal help and be doing the talking in court. Ditto for politicians and government officials, although any party could seek legal advice outside of court. Part of this solution would require that many of the silly and even useless procedural requirements would have to be changed.

This would have huge benefits across the board for reducing costs and speeding things along. This streamlined process is already used in most small claims courts, and to a large extent you can watch it in action on one of the TV judge shows that are so popular. The judge listens to the simple arguments directly from the parties to the lawsuits, looks at any simple evidence the parties have, and then makes a ruling. While certain episodes add some dramatic flair in one way or another for ratings purposes, the basic idea works perfectly well in reality without TV cameras rolling.

Many more civil procedures could easily be decided this way, and false information related decisions of all kinds are among them. Cases like the smear against Sandmann can be reviewed in a matter of hours without the useless red tape we have now. Just like with TV judge shows, it’s literally a one day affair, or less, if the judge or trained jury is simply looking at the video evidence and hearing some brief testimony.

With no out of court settlements you also reduce the chances of unscrupulous parties making questionable claims and just hoping to get a quick offer to make them go away to keep legal costs down, and everyone gets to know who prevailed and why they prevailed. You also establish a pretty good baseline of facts on various topics.

Another great example is the Corona “vaccines”. At this point, anyone making any claims that they are “safe and effective” would absolutely, positively, no doubt about it, lose in a legal proceeding where all evidence can be presented and an intelligent and neutral jury is there to make the decision. These “vaccines” are absolutely the most dangerous in history, and over time whatever effectiveness they may have had at any point earlier has waned to nothing or worse than nothing.

A case on the “vaccines” would take a few days to cover the most prominent evidence well, but with even the big pharma CEOs admitting their limitations, there is no doubt that “safe and effective” is horribly false relative to other real vaccines. In spite of all the evidence shredding safety and efficacy though, many “news” organizations, tech platforms, and idiotic or lying politicians can still spread the actual misinformation of “safe and effective” and/or censor people telling the truth.

Now it is true that stopping lies on certain topics, even if they are complete lies, does have 1st amendment implications. But just like slander, defamation, copyright infringement, yelling fire in a theater, there are certain well defined exceptions to the 1st amendment. You can argue whether other items should or should not be added to the list of exceptions, but here you’re talking about tens of thousands to perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths overall due to the false information. I would suggest this is plenty enough damages to warrant inclusion. (Not to mention Nuremberg 2.0)

Left wingers still spouting “Trump - Russia collusion”, even with the direct contraindication of Putin waiting until after Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine, on top of the exposure that Hillary Clinton’s team was behind the claims and not even a dozen rabid dog democrats could come up with anything to charge Trump is also a very serious matter. If you want to stop this propaganda and fake news, there have to be consequences for the people and organizations doing it.

So after a “news” organization or government entity is found guilty of spreading key false information, they are required to report extensively on how and why they were found guilty. The winner of the lawsuit can, if they choose to, provide the content that the news organization must publish or broadcast. And if the false information was during prime time, for example, the correction would have to occur in the first 2 minutes of every prime time program. Each instance of them losing a false information claim would result in another 2 minutes.

If it was an online or print publication, the false information correction would have to appear at the top of the home page or the top of the front page for at least 30 days. If you get the sense that CNN and MSDNC, to name just two, would not have any broadcast time left or any space left on their web pages, you would be correct. They would have to stop lying or the legally required corrections would stop them from lying due to time and space limits. Of course the fines they would be paying would be quite large and punitive as well.

With lying politicians and other government officials found to be lying about material issues (As in something much more relevant than Trump exaggerating the size of a crowd at one of his rallies, or Biden claiming he was a civil rights activist back in the 1960s.), even if they were spouting false information due to sheer ignorance, they would have to pay the fines and legal fees from their own pockets, they would have to issue public apologies multiple times for each false statement that was made, and after a certain threshold of lying was met they would be removed from office or fired from their employment.

If you have any doubts about the need for this, make sure to follow my link above to coverage of the smear of Nick Sandmann. The truth is that he was in a group of high school students that were being harassed by a small group of full on loon racist blacks that were yelling obscenities at them. Then, a nasty old skank who is also a lying left wing activist approached the students and harassed them right in their faces, beating on a stupid drum in a play for sympathy for Indians.

In a sane world, the racist loon blacks and the nasty old skank Indian are immediately arrested for harassment and hauled off to jail. As part of their punishment after being convicted of the harassment, they are required to pay fines to the high schoolers of at least $500 per kid. So it gets very expensive for them and serves as a huge deterrent against them engaging in such horrid behavior again.

I digress here, but free speech rights do not include hurling obscenities at a group of high school kids who were neither approaching you nor trying to communicate with you in any way. And free speech rights NEVER include someone getting right in someone else’s face, even just to talk at a normal volume level, let alone banging a drum in their ear. Not even if that person is not a butt ugly slimy old skank.

And no “news” organization or low life politician or public figure anywhere should be able to smear high school kids with complete lies.

Obviously horribly biased left wing judges are a huge problem, but they are already without a simplified process for dealing with false public information. Solving biased judges is another topic for another day.