From time to time I hear people talking about “stolen valor”. That is, when someone pretends to be in the military when they really weren’t. Identity theft is nasty in any circumstance, but it is truly despicable to claim you served and sacrificed for your country when, in actuality, you didn’t.
Many people felt the same way.
In 2005, then President George W. Bush signed into law the Stolen Valor Act. The act made it a federal crime to falsely claim that you were awarded a military medal.
In 2007, Xavier Alvarez was at a meeting of his local water district and introduced himself as a retired Marine who had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Since he hadn’t received that award, he was indicted, convicted and fined $5,000 under the Stolen Valor Act. He decided to appeal his conviction.
In 2012, the case of The United States v. Alverez appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court. Alvarez won the case with the Supreme Court ruling that lies are protected by the First Amendment.
To reiterate, the Stolen Valor Act no longer applies. Lying is protected by the Constitution.
There ought to be a law against Stolen Valor, but there isn’t. We should be able to believe that when someone says they earned our nation’s highest military award for bravery, they actually did.
There ought to be a law, but we shouldn’t need one. We should be able to rely on people’s good judgement, honesty and common sense to not claim they are something they’re not. But we can’t. Not anymore.
I was talking with one of my neighbors this morning. We never talk politics but the conversation wandered in that direction so I decided to see where it would go. After a few minutes, I mentioned that I believed that election fraud occurred, and that Biden stole the election.
He looked at me for a few seconds and then said that he had heard that there may have been some problems but that he didn’t think it was a big deal. He’d heard that the accusations of election fraud were some wild conspiracy theory made up by Trump.
So, I asked him if he had seen the video of ballots being pulled from beneath a table in Atlanta after the election monitors had been told to go home. He had not. He seemed surprised that it had happened and that he hadn’t even heard of it.
Then we talked about some of the other obvious examples of election fraud and he was aware of none of them. He gets his information from Big Media, and Big Media has completely ignored the issue.
He agreed that regardless of who you voted for, you should be demanding an investigation into the claim that Biden stole the election. Even the possibility that our elections weren’t fair should concern every single American.
It probably would. Except they don’t know about it.
It’s amazing when you think about it. The mainstream media is lying to everyone and calling it “news”. The problem with that is that people believe they’re staying informed but they’re really not. Big Media is selectively feeding people “facts” to control what they think. My neighbor, and everyone else listening to Big Media, is being fed lies and other misinformation. And it’s perfectly legal.
The 2020 election is simply one example. Reporting on “Russian collusion”, quashing the Hunter Biden story, saying that Trump called the military “losers and suckers”, “mostly peaceful protesters” and propagating the whole BLM farce are more examples of the same thing happening. Big Media isn’t reporting the truth, they’re pushing an agenda. And it’s all perfectly legal. They can lie all they want, and it’s protected by the Constitution.
But it shouldn’t be. So let’s fix that.
There ought to be a law that requires anyone wanting to present themselves as a provider of “news” to be honest and truthful. Anyone caught misleading or misinforming the public will go to prison, as will their immediate superior.
It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. If your job is to inform the public, and you lie, you should not be protected by the First Amendment. Period.
We shouldn’t need a law. We should be able to rely on people’s good judgement, honesty and common sense to police themselves and make sure that they are reporting the facts. We should be able to tune into the news and believe they are telling us what is, not what they want it to be. But we can’t. Not anymore.
