Republicans have created and disseminated, over the last few years, an idea that equates money with freedom of speech. This is ludicrous on its face, but logic never stopped conservatives from bamboozling people.
If anything money is the equivalent of a megaphone: you can speak without it, but you can speak a lot louder with it. That's all.
But say we accept the meme: Money = Free speech. What is this meme's logical opposite? Obviously, if the opposite of free speech is censorship, and the opposite of money is the lack of money, then lack of money is censorship. Q.E.D.
And the real-world effects are easy to describe. If money, and only money, allows people free speech and only those with enough money are thus allowed to speak and, more to the point, the government enforces this idea and its practice through its laws and regulations, then the lack of money becomes a de facto and, now, thanks to the "supreme" court de jure form of government censorship.
Is this a silly concept? Actually, yes it is. But it is silly because the original concept of money being equivalent to freedom speech is silly. Make that puerile.
To suggest that standing on a soap box on a street corner, even with a megaphone, and a multi-million dollar ad campaign running for months on every nationwide media outlet are equivalent forms of speech is the kind of bone-headed sophistry that only a republican could embrace.
Of course the reason that republicans embrace this idiotic precept is that they assume--and often quite rightly--that their side is the one that can afford to buy the biggest megaphone. Once again, were it not for double standards, republicans would have no standards at all.
However, there is a slight ray of hope. What the recent Supreme Court decision has done is created the framework for a massive bidding war for the right to speak in the public sphere (or, rather the ability to have one's speech heard). As more and more corporations battle for limited air time and column inches, the cost of such time and space will increase to a point at which no one without billions to spend will be able to say a word. Of course the inevitable outcome is that the "public" sphere will be reduced to only a tiny handful of corporations which are able to speak. At that point maybe the lesser, smaller corporations will cease their fealty to the religion of super corporations uber ales and start to stand up for their right to be heard. At that point maybe they might even be on our side.
Of course the more likely scenario is that they will force the passage of a law that states all corporations (and only corporations) are created equal and have the unalienable right to free speech in the public sphere. And remove us pesky humans from the equation altogether.
A republican dream come true.