The First Amendment.
Is under attack by you know who… Vengeance is mine saith Trump!
The president-elect spent his campaign suing news organizations for billions of dollars. In office, he could strip press freedoms and kill legislation that aims to protect sources, Alex Woodward reportsIndependent22 November 2024Less than two months before he returns to the White House, Donald Trump is embroiled in several lawsuits and legal threats against news organizations and seeking billions of dollars in damages.He is commanding Republicans in Congress to block legislation that would protect journalists’ sources while he takes advice from wealthy allies and right-wing groups who want to block publicly funded media from getting a single public dollar.Trump spent his three campaigns and first four years in office raging against a free press he calls “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” He is now waging a legal war against the media in courtrooms across the country and preparing to take aim at an adversarial press once he’s back in office.On Wednesday, Trump demanded that congressional Republicans block a bipartisan bill intended to safeguard confidential sources, what civil rights groups have called the most significant measure for press freedoms in modern history.
Beware! Those that speak ill of Trump will face his wrath!
Trump’s far-right allies like Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, who has reportedly been floated for a leadership position at the FBI, have not been shy about their fantasies of a second Trump administration criminally prosecuting journalists and media organizations.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said on Bannon’s War Room podcast last year.
The First Amendment be damn!
A second Trump administration is poised to be devastating to journalism.Columbia Journalism ReviewBy Kyle PaolettaNovember 6, 2024Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media “the enemy of the people,” a “threat to democracy,” “fake,” and “crooked bastards” whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and TimeWarner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. “I don’t mind that so much.”
Fox walks on air as far as Trump is concerned even though in court Fox has said that is is not a news show but rather an entertainment network. And is you are not on the good side of Trump… you are banned!
Next year, Trump’s assault on the press will become a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic. Access to the West Wing will be limited, perhaps by aides only credentialing journalists from conservative outlets—or even closing the White House briefing room outright. More consequential are the plans of Trump and his allies to turn the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission against the media, which will entail a raft of leak investigations, the politicization of broadcast licenses and antitrust litigation, and the potential indictment of journalists for espionage. Reporters covering protests and immigration enforcement will face detention from not just local police, but the Department of Homeland Security. It’s possible that Trump may even seek congressional action to reform libel laws or otherwise criminalize dissent.
The full weight of the federal government will come down on news agencies that don’t toe the party line!
In the early weeks of the new administration, the most urgent threat against the press will be the prosecution of reporters covering mass demonstrations. When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, nine journalists were arrested while covering the protest that ensued in Washington, DC, including several who were charged with rioting. That set a tone for the next four years, over which more than two hundred reporters faced criminal charges for covering protests. The vast majority of those charges came in 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd, as journalists scrambled to chronicle the racial-justice protests that seized the nation. According to Kirstin McCudden of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, it was a year of unprecedented attacks, with a “record shattering” six hundred and forty assaults on journalists, and nearly a hundred and fifty arrested.
The freedom of the press is under attack! What is the first thing that dictators do? In 2000 when Putin seized control of Russia one of the first things that he did was according to the Air University at Maxwell AFB, Alabama...
The propaganda machine in Russia is alive and well. While Western media highlight the disastrous state of the Russian armed forces, the perception of the war effort within Russia remains much more favorable. Although commentators note the unreliability of Russian public opinion polls, in the metrics that matter—the ability to mobilize the power structure in Russia to support the war and prevent foreign nations from fighting directly—Russian propaganda strategies have proven successful. As renown international relation theorist E. H. Carr argued, propaganda is one form of power equivalent to economic and military might. In his three major speeches during the first year of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin has demonstrated mastery of this instrument evident by his use of emotionally charged language, mythologizing of Russian strength and Western hostility, ability to shift messaging to support battlefield conditions, and balancing messaging for internal and external audiences. As war is a political action undertaken to subdue the hostile will of an adversary and not just about the physical destruction of enemy troops, it is imperative to understand how and why Putin’s propaganda has resonated with key stakeholders despite repeated failures on the battlefield.
Trump has learned this lesson well. His attacks of the press is an effort to control the message. The dictator in Venezuela when he took power,
VOABy Graham KeeleySeptember 25, 2024Jesus Medina used a fake identity to flee from Venezuela to Colombia by walking across the border like thousands of compatriots.A journalist for Dolar Today, an independent online publication in Venezuela, Medina said he was persecuted by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for six years.He was imprisoned for nearly three years between 2017 and 2020 in a high-security military jail awaiting trial.[…]His story is typical of other journalists who have left Venezuela in the wake of a crackdown by the Maduro government against the media and political activists after disputed presidential elections on July 28.Several journalists have been detained, while others face travel bans. Reporters covering politics are looking for innovative ways to stay under the radar and keep covering the news.
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Take Hungary's Viktor Orbán for example, he took control of the press when he took power,
AP NewsBy JUSTIN SPIKEJuly 31, 2024In the months leading up to elections for the European Parliament, Hungarians were warned that casting a ballot against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would be a vote for all-out war.The right-wing Fidesz party cast the June 9 election as an existential struggle, one that could preserve peace in Europe if Orbán won — or fuel widespread instability if he didn’t. To sell that bold claim, Orbán used a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.[...]“Everything has fallen apart in Hungary. The state essentially does not function, there’s only propaganda and lies,” said Péter Magyar, the leader of that new party who has emerged in recent months as perhaps the most formidable challenge yet to Orbán’s rule.
Gee does that sound familiar?
Is this what Trump has in store for us?
The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about the fake news about us, and Fox News wrote,
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon slammed the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Tuesday for doxxing several of his website's anonymous writers, in a post that went viral on X.The Babylon Bee is a Christian conservative-leaning satire site that produces humorous fake news stories. Dillon revealed several of the writers for its non-satirical sister site – called "Not the Bee" because it features real news stories that seem too outlandish to be true – were about to have their identities exposed by the SPLC."The discredited, scandal-ridden smear factory known as the SPLC is about to publish a hit piece doxxing several of our ‘Not the Bee’ writers who wished to remain anonymous so they could speak freely, without fear," Dillon announced.
SPLC wrote on their website;
An SPLC Data Lab investigation of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant content on The Babylon Bee and its sister site, Not the Bee, has uncovered multiple controversial businesses formerly run by owner Seth Dillon, along with the identities of 14 pseudonymous Not the Bee writers, despite the website’s efforts to keep information secure.The Babylon Bee is a right-wing satire site that borrows a format from the satirical news outlet The Onion while amplifying far-right rhetoric and disinformation. Its sister site, Not the Bee, is a junk-news site with salacious headlines about culture-war issues designed to stir up right-wing outrage. Dillon, who purchased the Bee in 2018, has been tight-lipped about his past businesses, with prior biographical articles making only vague references to his history in “e-commerce” or a “legal filing service.”[…]Despite the claim to be “humor-based,” many Not the Bee stories feature strongly anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant themes.Nearly 600 stories on the site were tagged “Illegal Immigration,” “Biden’s Border Bloodbath,” “Border Crisis,” “Deportation Now,” “Build the Wall” or “Great Replacement,” while the word “illegals,” a dehumanizing word used to refer to undocumented immigrants, was used in 109 stories.More than 800 stories were tagged “Transgenderism,” “Transgender Craze,” “LGBT,” “Trans Cult” or “Trans the Kids.” These stories frequently misgender and mock the appearances of trans people, and some refer to Bible quotes about “millstones” being tied around the necks of LGBTQ+ people. Another 96 stories were tagged “Libs of TikTok,” promoting content from Chaya Raichik, an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist. Bee owner Seth Dillon stated on Twitter in 2022 that he “worked out a deal” with Raichik to financially support her and her videos.
The Fox article goes in to write…
Dillon said earlier that the SPLC did what they did because they were activists and "vindictive bullies who've admitted their aim is to 'completely destroy' individuals and organizations they disagree with by making them pay a steep price for speaking freely."
It is the type right-wing defense. Blame the oppressed for speaking up. When Black spoke up about their civil rights, they were uppity! When we spoke up… we were perverts trying to groom children.
What will we see in the next four year… will Trump have ABC, CBS, NBC and the other networks under his thumb and be too afraid of speaking up?
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