Listening to the welcomed but no where near adequate condemnation of Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, rigging the election through stopping the vote, really of Donald Trump's refusal to commit to leaving the White House if he loses the election, I think we are in far more danger than even those who are alarmed by Trump's ever increasing fascist moves are willing to imagine possible. The fact that he got in - AFTER LOSING AN ELECTION BY MORE THAN THREE-MILLION VOTES - and remaining there as not only his criminality but his actual treason as a puppet of the dictator of Russia should tell such people that that danger is here and now. The danger of having Trump there for four more years, or until he rots like so many of the successful despots of so many countries, is the same as the danger he's been here for four years with the open support of the Republicans in the Congress, in state legislatures and governorships, and in many cases, the Supreme Court and lower courts and with the unshakable devotion of his TV-hate-talk-radio-billionaire-swayed-Facebook-Twitter lied to cult.
The way we got here is clear, he got in because of the phony CEO dictator role he played on a long running "reality" series on TV and the clown he otherwise played, all the while being sold as a business genius, despite the fact that he wasn't. The free-press, print as well as TV and radio, created the Trump of cult devotion. HIS CULT WERE PREPARED TO WANT A FASCIST DESPOT THROUGH ENTERTAINMENT TV. His despotism is a creation of the First Amendment, which, in the modern interpretation of it allowing the media to lie with impunity, never should have been expected to serve an egalitarian democracy. The idiots on the Supreme Court who voted to start that chain of rulings which has been wound round the throat of democracy had the examples of modern dictators' use of mass media to lie themselves into absolute power to show them that the Madisonian-Jeffersonian theory of "free press" was certainly proven to be wrong, that without the ability of people lied about to effectively and remedially punish the media for lying about them, that would be turned on those who were an inconvenience to the wealthiest and most powerful, those who own the mass media and who dominate it.
The already terrible consequences of allowing that after the Sullivan Decision in 1964 was made immeasurably worse with the rise of "social media" with the internet ruled by the methods and means that most dishonest of all media has mastered, advertising, suckering people into doing what was wrong and what harmed them.
So we have about 40% of the country, unevenly distributed in a way that makes the manipulation of the Electoral College system their tool to rule even against the will of the majority, a situation where a Trump can win while losing the election, an election where he ran against a woman the media, from the lowest of the low, the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair, to the New York Times lied about and libeled for a quarter of a century. And I guarantee you, when Barr releases his lies about Joe Biden, they will carry his water even as they see the criminal insanity and incompetence of Trump. I'm not at all confident that he will beat Trump, why should I be confident when Hillary Clinton beat him and still lost.
As I've been pointing out over and over again, even if Democrats win in a landslide the media will immediately start where they did in 2008, after Obama won in a landslide, they will tear at and attack and carry the Republican-fascists' water in exactly the same way. MSNBC may not, CNN definitely will, so will NPR, so will the New York Times. To the extent there is a culture of the media, it is a culture that reflexively and knowingly serves the same wealthy owners and advertisers that the Republican Party serves. Without a legal, regulatory requirement of them not slanting their coverage of the kind that that previous Hollywood-show biz president, Reagan got rid of, without the ability of Democratic politicians to sue them when they libel them without the absurd requirements of mind-reading and get effective redress to keep them from doing it again, the terrible history of the last four and forty years will just continue on into this march into fascism.
Lies are what got us here, those lies that are called "journalism" in our degraded anti-democratic culture, those lies that are typical of show-biz at the best of times, which our time certainly is not. The fictionalization of our history has played a huge part in this, most of that done through movies and through TV shows, not a little of that also coming from the ridiculously named "journalism" side of it.
Until we take the prohibition of mass-distributed lies as a requirement to save democracy - AND THAT WILL TAKE GETTING OVER THE CLEARLY WRONG THEORY OF "FREEDOM OF THE PRESS" CONTAINED IN THE LITERAL READING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT - we will never be nearly safe from the manipulation of those who use the methods of lying perfected in the advertising industry in the mass media. I started using the internet in the heady days of self-publishing when lots of us were stupid enough to believe it was going to save democracy. Well, that turned out to have been ridiculous as the big "social media" turned out to be a deadly social disease that has given us a potentially fatal infection with Trump. And they're getting better at manipulating our Constitutional system with every success and with every failure. We change that or we will find every danger that regulation was asserted to have as a potential is, itself, guaranteed by such "freedom" for the corporate media.
As for Charlie Baker, other Republicans horrified by Trump, what the hell does it take for you to get out of that fascist party?
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