Typing Out Danger, Typing Out Warning

It is one of the rare good things on television these days that people like Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers and Samantha Bee, in covering current news and issues give Americans lessons in our own history, lessons that were probably not covered in the American History class that, ridiculously, took up only one year of your educations and wasted months on the ridiculous focus on the Age of Discovery romanticism as it neglected to tell you anything important about The People, the politics and the real character of the United States you have to live in and govern through your vote.

The history lesson as a means of covering the vicious racism and anti-Latino campaign of Donald Trump covers the collapse of the Whig party over the issue of slavery, the rise of the party of Abraham Lincoln (which almost immediately collapsed into the corruption of subsequent administrations) and the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement which spread across the country, scapegoating recent immigrants on behalf of the continued empowerment, enrichment and rule of the previous waves of immigration, especially the Anglo-Scottish WASP ruling class, with some of the old line Dutch families mixed in.  I recommend watching it because Rachel Maddow and her staff are very good at these short history lessons and what they mean to us today.

I know there isn't time to cover everything but one thing I would have added was that the rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s was pushed and empowered by the movie Birth of a Nation, one of the most dishonest and racist movies ever made by D. W. Griffiths, romanticizing one of the most violent and murderous terrorist groups ever to afflict the United States and demonizing Black Americans and the attempt to achieve equality.  It is especially relevant because, like the 1920s Klan the current crop of natavist hate is also a product of the mass media, year after year of Lou Dobbs demonizing Latinos on CNN, The campaign of racist hatred on FOX TV - including shows like COPS, the blanketing of the United States with hate-talk radio.  If that isn't enough to convince you that the great "free speech-free press" of the United States has created the hate group activity that swamped the financial branch of the Republican Party, its nominee is a 100% creation of "reality TV" and scores, perhaps hundreds of appearances on TV and radio shows.  

And, from what I understand, the new owners of MSNBC are trying to empty out the evening liberal ghetto hours in their schedule, gradually, so Rachel Maddow will possibly be out of a job on TV.  And I don't know where Samantha Bee has gone.  And eventually the perpetual presence of the elderly but energetic Bill Moyers will be as gone as Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be from the Supreme Court.

The interpretation of the First Amendment that has allowed American media to turn this country into a country where it could definitely happen here and may well as soon as January of next year, is extremely dangerous and no one is sounding the alarm.   Donald Trump is the giant corpse lily that is the flower of a compost of lies, paranoia, hatred, racism and bigotry which has flourished in the American media, cross country in the past fifty years, starting with the legalization of lies by the Sullivan Decision, gaining momentum through the 70s, accelerating in the period after Ronald Reagan abolished any kind of standards for obtaining a broadcast license and in the rise of the cabloid 24-7-365 "news" cycle and on to today.  

You won't hear that from the media which is enriched and empowered by that system, you certainly won't hear professional journalists talking about it because they know it is taboo to mention it, you certainly won't hear the Know Nothings, right or left who do know it isn't to be mentioned or who are so ignorant that they couldn't begin to understand that these decisions have real consequences in real life.

You certainly won't hear it from the New York Times which is proud of its role in kicking the septic tank down hill in 1964.  They're apparently trying to get Trump elected through their continuing quarter of a century of Clinton hating.  The Associated Press has done a lot to bring up Trump's chances with its own and newer campaign of whipping up phony scandals made of entirely routine, entirely legal and even admirable actions.