The first things a dictator on day one does is purge perceived enemies and consolidate the press to control the flow of information the public may get. Control the news, weaponize information/disinformation, control public opinion, control reality. First US commercial air disaster in 16 years, days after you decapitate the FAA by firing the head of air safety, his deputies and freeze hiring of air traffic controllers? “Incompetent, nasty Black bitches who, through illegal DEI, replaced expert white Christian men, resulting in mass casualties!” was POTUS’s very strong, equally ignorant and lying, opinion, as the bodies of children were being recovered from the Potomac River. That’s how you drive the news!

There is truth and there is such a thing as a lie. We have all experienced these things in our personal lives. The difference between the truth and a lie is generally easy to spot, as long as you have accurate information. If you have a full picture of what took place you are free to believe whichever one you like, but embracing a lie does not make it true. January 6, 2021 was a violent riot, a vicious attack on law enforcement that sent more than 100 officers to the hospital. The violence was based on an incendiary lie, deliberately spread during a $50,000,000 ad buy, and the attack was fomented by the man who knew he lost the election. This is true, no matter how many times you force your loyalists to call it a peaceful day of love.

This is where the press comes in, reporting truthfully or hedging to ensure the continued flow of corporate profits. In its compromise corporate media repeats that there is “an honest conflict” about whether the events we all saw were a riot, an insurrection, or merely “legitimate political discourse”. Say it until people who witnessed the ugliness are sick of arguing about which is true and which is a lie and check out in frustration.

For an alcoholic, sexually assaultive, manifestly unqualified White Christian Nationalist Secretary of Defense to proclaim that Black History Month will no longer be recognized by the Pentagon is not at all surprising, though it is sickening. Unless you believe that even though 150 years ago there was minor prejudice against some Blacks by a few Whites, and that even though Blacks are arguably imprisoned, and unarmed Blacks killed by law enforcement, in disproportionate numbers, that there is really no serious issue of ongoing institutional racism in our perfect nation (though Black women are mostly, well, nasty… as POTUS always says).

Choose your reality, but what is true remains true and what is a lie is still a goddamned lie, no matter how fervently you pray for it to be the truth, no matter how many of your tribe embrace it as true, no matter how many lying officials proclaim it.

Trump has long vilified and attacked all critics. He has always trained his beady eyes on any critical media, media that, for example, reports truthfully on the evidence of his misdeeds. He calls his campaign’s 140 documented contacts with Putin before the 2016 election a hoax, the closing of his fraudulent university, his fraudulent charity, his defamation of a woman he sexually assaulted, his clear violations of the Espionage Act, his two impeachments, his January 6 call to political violence, his pardon of those who gouged the eyes out of police officers, all fake news. He refers to all non-far rightwing media as “lying liberal media” (translated from the original German lugenpresse) and “the enemy of the People.” He should know, he is the people, the dictator is always the embodiment of all of us. That the dictator must terrorize and often kill many of us is a small price to pay for him to be the true embodiment of all of us.

Dan Rather wrote an excellent piece about how essential access to true information is to democracy, to keeping ourselves out of the clutches of destructively greedy, heedless madmen who want to keep us in the dark so their nefarious schemes may prosper. He nails our current challenge — bypassing crass corporate profiteering by media conglomerates who kowtow by paying millions to a wannabe tyrant who sues and threatens them, to get the journalistic truth of what we face into public discussion that we, the public, may act in an informed manner when selecting the government we consent to.

Dan writes:

They [the framers of the Constitution] enshrined freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution, up at the top of the Bill of Rights — not because they were great fans of journalists, but rather because they knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.” source