On The Day That Devin Nunes and The Trump Regime Release The Lying Phony Cover-Up Memo

“The radio will be to the twentieth century what the press was to the nineteenth”

-Josef Goebbels, 1933

We now know, a year into the quickly developing catastrophe that the Trump regime is, that the theory of the free press saving us from such a thing is wrong.   If Jefferson's assertion that a free press would save us from, not only protections from the domestic enemies of freedom but foreign ones were true,  Trump would have already been gone, his collaborators in the House of Representatives, Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan would be in jail along with many of the other figures in the federal government.    But they aren't and I doubt they will be.  With few exceptions, those hired by the large, influential media have either been complicit or, either by virtue of their timidity or their relatively few numbers, ineffective in causing the last hope of democracy in the United States, a swelling and effective protest against their blatant criminality and cover up and enabling of the most floridly corrupt presidency in our history.   

FOX, Sinclaire, and various other media under the control of billionaire oligarchs have been the primary engineers in producing a Trumpian fascism, yet you can bet on the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry of lawyers, law scholars and hack writers would go nuts in exactly the same way they aren't now, if those corporate entities and their owners were held responsible for the sedition and treason they are blatantly guilty of.   They'd haul out that most tread bare of mottos,  The First Amendment, to argue that what they've done MUST, MUST be allowed because a bunch of 18th century slaveholders and mercantile aristocrats wrote an inadequate Bill of Rights as an afterthought to a Constitutional system which would have immediately turned into a feudal oligarchy without even that list of truncated and over-general slogans.   That they included "freedom" for the corporate entities of 18th century book and newspaper publishers may have seemed like a good idea at the time - the slaveholders would soon realize their mistake and repeatedly try to take that back in suppression of abolitionist agitation - must have seemed like a good idea but as that developed, especially in a line of rulings started as dissents by Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and Louis Brandeis and reached a level of unrealistic insanity as the Warren court gave carte blanche to modern, massive corporate media to lie with impunity and pursue its owners financial interest above those of The People and democracy.  That has now been proved to produce government based on lies successfully sold to enough people to put a Trump in office, a Paul Ryan in the Speakership and a Devin Nunes in a position to conspire with the criminal regime in the White House to obstruct justice.   

You will hear even some of the good guys in the media, such as Lawrence O'Donnell talk about the time when things are back to normal, like they used to be but that is a pipe dream.  The tendencies and direction of things that produced Trump have been in place since the mid-1960s and are a product of lies successfully sold to the American People so that they will not be able to recognize morality form the most blatant of immorality, truth from the most blatant of lies told by the most extravagant and blatant of liars,  Donald Trump, the media that created him and made him president and the billionaires, domestic and from the Putin crime family that put their puppet in the White House.  The same people put Paul Ryan in the Speakership and Devin Nunes in charge of the Intelligence Committee of the House.  They put the Republican-fascists in office, the free-press, the freest in our history produced this under instruction of their owners, even the most allegedly responsible of media had a hand in that, none so much as the New York Times which carried on a quarter-century campaign of libel and vilification of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats even as they obviously knew what they were doing because they made a show of opposing Trump.   

The Jeffersonian theory that the "free press" would keep us safe from exactly what our free press has created in Trump, mixed with the Warren Court's conception of he First Amendment has gotten us here, it didn't protect us.  It caused this. That theory of press freedom, the freedom to lie for profit, for ideology, for racism, etc. has produced this as certainly as it kept slaves enslaved and promoted the reaction to emancipation that led to the reimposition of de facto slavery and apartheid.   One of the most obvious of things about the increasing Trumpian fascism is that a lot of White People might be able to understand what "freedom of the press" has meant to Black People in the age when TV shows briefly went from a positive depiction of People of color in the 1970s to the blatant promotion of racism in shows such as C.O.P. S. on FOX.   The part that "entertainment" TV played in the production of American fascism is little noted though, since far more people watched it and had their thinking and fears and paranoia and resentment fueled through it, it probably had more influence in producing the revival white supremacist fascism which gave us Trump than the "news" programming did.  

There is no rational reason to pretend that even if Democrats win a supermajority in the House and Senate that the same media won't produce Republican misrule because the people who own and control it have used their freedom to lie, given it by alleged liberals on the Supreme Court will always use it to support a party which, if The People had been truly informed by the media, would never hold any important office in the United States.   The same party that was voted out of office after the Bush II regime's crimes and disasters was propped up by them within one year into the Obama administration through their promotion of the billionaire financed fascist "Tea Party" movement which they covered in exactly the same way they have mostly ignored the agaition against Trump.   I remember, as I recall, the fine blogger Southern Beale pointing out that there was a Tea Party "convention" held in her city which got wall to wall coverage on the cabloids and other media even as they had fewer participants than a convention of knitters held in the same city.  How much coverage do you remember in the anniversary demonstrations against a year of  the Trumpian fascist misrule and blatant crime spree as compared to the Tea Party astro-turf?