Every citizen who can gather and analyze news from multiple sources, and write with any degree of clarity, should be doing it in the public forum. We need to constantly push back against the calculated ambiguity of corporate mass media. In a tsunami of disinformation and misinformation (Trump administration official submits affidavit swearing that Elon Musk is neither head of the fictional DOGE nor calling the shots as his youthful team of hackers continues to breach secure citizen data and ignore court orders to fucking stop) we need truth tellers calling out these lies. Trump, the five dimensional chess champion, after one of his flunkies submitted the lying sworn statement in federal court the other day, immediately reiterated on live TV that Elon is doing a great job as head of the “government department” illegally assembled after being pulled out of autocrat Charles Koch’s crusty old asshole.
The aligned interests of corporate mass media conglomerates and our greatest, and most pathologically greedy and savagely competitive billionaire citizens, ensure that the news reporting we get is filtered to their monetary advantage. We saw this in the lead up to the 2024 election, when first Biden and then Harris were raked over the coals for perceived infirmities and inconsistencies, challenged about a claimed lack of detailed policy plans, while the billionaire’s candidate, Donald Trump, got a pass for a stream of colorful, incendiary, non sequiturs, lies, mental lapses and constant denials that the blueprint for his regime, Project 2025, although written by loyal members of his first administration, had anything to do with him. He knew nothing about it, he’d never read it, and he also disagreed with a lot of it, he said. That he is carrying it out point by point and that the primary author, a radical reactionary named Russ Vought, is now his confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget, pure chance, one supposes.
The head of “DOGE” (an illegally created government “agency”) is a racist, an actual Nazi supporter and spreader of hate speech (in the name of free speech absolutism, as long as nobody says anything bad about him or Trump). The world’s richest man, outside of the oil sheiks and Mr. Putin, gives two sneering Nazi salutes, on live TV during the inauguration festivities. He directed these “sieg heils” to invited visiting members of the present day German Nazi-like party, the AfD, a party he is financially backing.
There follows a collective wringing of hands in legacy media over whether the autistic, socially awkward, dorkish, racist Mr. Musk, meant to just give a heartfelt gesture when he inadvertently sneered and raised a stiff arm in an unambiguous Nazi salute, twice. Steve Bannon, international fascist (figure that one out), recently gave a public Hitler salute to a far-right audience he urged to “fight, fight, fight” and the news discusses what he might have meant, in a non-Hitler kind of way. And of course, all this Heil Hitler shit is just to distract us from the real damage these pricks are doing as they decapitate the government that represents we the people.
This is where citizen journalists come in. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, brilliant author of the nightly Letters from an American, is probably my favorite, but there are a number of excellent writers who are fleshing out truthful accounts and informed perspectives of ominous things that are happening behind the obscuring fog of “legacy media”. Robert Reich’s analysis is great, Allison Gill is fantastic, as is Timothy Snyder, a historian specialized in fascism and the lead up to War Two and its murderous excesses. Snyder offers imaginative, provocative thought experiments based on history. Brian Tyler Cohen partners with Marc Elias, of Democracy Docket, and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, two very sharp legal minds, and provides very important updates on the fascist agenda. Mary Trump is doing great work. David Feldman provides important news with a sardonic sense of humor. The Meidas Touch network is a source of actual news and analysis, with a shout out to Lee McGowan, the Politics Girl. Mehdi Hassan is another important voice, and source of rational analysis, with his independent news service, Zeteo. Amy Goodman and her team continue to provide indispensable perspective with the War and Peace Report on Democracy Now! David Pakman gives an intelligent take on what’s happening in our country. Wikipedia provides an important, instant source of fact checking, as do websites like Snopes. None of these news sources are answerable to corporate overlords and the inviolable financial bottom line.
The original resistance to monarchy’s overbearing exploitation of its American colonies took the form of Committees of Correspondence. These writers informed citizens in other colonies of Britain’s predations and excesses in their particular colony. The back and forth of these committees resulted in the first gatherings of representatives of the various colonies to organize and fight back against a King, who sat by Divine Right, imposing his will on subjects thousands of miles away who had no voice in anything that that God’s ordained ruler decided to impose on those unrepresented subjects. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico come to mind.
I wrote a series of pieces on Substack putting together everything I could learn about fucking Looey DeJoy, the Trump megadonor whose mission was to bankrupt the US Postal Service (carriers of the correspondence the original resistance committees sent each other) and make sure millions of selected mail-in ballots went quietly, untraceably undelivered. Few read what I was able to gather, and no politician or media organization, or anyone listed above, for that matter, answered my many urgent queries, but it is important to have the information out there. DeJoy lost $9,500,000,000 for the USPS in 2024 it was revealed in a December Senate hearing the pugnacious partisan attended. There’s no way to know how many ballots were undelivered, in the first election since 2008 where the number of ballots didn’t increase, in fact, fell by upwards of 20,000,000. Now Looey, his barely compensated work done, steps down and Trump himself has stated he is going to personally take over the USPS, after illegally dissolving the board of governors.
Make no mistake what we are up against. These loyal kamikazes Trump has assembled, based primarily on their expressed love of the taste of his “ring”, are no different, in any meaningful way, than anyone who joined the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1933 when it became clear that radical measures were needed to restore the right people to absolute power over “majoritarian tyranny.”
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