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What Would Nellis Say?

Truth
 

Truth

By Rick Stiller

 

President Joe Biden delivered his farewell speech with a stark warning for the American people about the many ways our rights and freedoms are being corrupted, dismantled, and destroyed at the direction of a tiny group of incredibly rich oligarchs who hold a “dangerous concentration of power.”

 

While President Eisenhower warned of a “military-industrial complex” dictating foreign policy and the American economy, Biden is warning of a “tech-industrial complex” in the hands of a clique of the wealthiest people on the planet who have no interest in anything that does not increase their bottom line.

 

"Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,"

 

Members of this tiny group are withdrawing all “fact-checking” on gigantic internet platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and many others that serve millions of citizens who depend on those resources for factual information. Opening the floodgates of misinformation, disinformation, and crazy conspiracy theories promotes confrontation and division instead of common sense or common decency in our national conversation. 

 

They and their colleagues command many of the television networks, newspapers, and radio stations that dispense “news” that used to be based on vetted facts gathered by credible professionals, who are being replaced with propagandists and bigoted talk-show hosts. 

 

Media owners are directing their empires to tailor information to manipulate public opinion to suit their goals and enhance profits through omission and diversion. The objective is to divide our country into tribes – white, black, brown, Asian, education, wealth, class, and on and on - and then provide preposterous excuses for all those groups to see each other as enemies rather than neighbors. 

 

(Fox paid a $784 million settlement for making a corporate decision to support Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, knowing it was all a scam, because it dramatically increased their profits. They continue to lie and pedal outrage every hour of every day because that’s what the audience demands, and feeding false narratives to those viewers increases advertising dollars.) Truth be damned!

 

Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, refused to allow the publication of an editorial supporting Kamala Harris before the election (as did Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong). He also nixed an Ann Telnaes political cartoon (the banner for this article that I’ve renamed Truth)  showing four of these titans bowing and offering bags of cash to a statue of Trump, referencing the mad dash to Mar-A-Logo to bend a knee and kiss the ring of the rapist/convicted felon/traitor-in-chief to protect their massive contracts with the US government. It has been estimated that the pooled fortunes of Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg totals more than the combined wealth of the 75 million citizens who voted for Joe Biden.

 

Think Amazon, Twitter-X, Space X, Blue Horizon, Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAi, etc. The list is long, but these titans are ensuring their staggering and corrupt billion/trillion dollar deals with open and shameless bribery.

 

Trump has brought Elon Musk, the world’s richest man (who owns X, Space X, Tesla, Starlink, and many other ventures that have massive contracts with the US government. He contributed $125 million during the last weeks of the campaign to tip the vote to Trump in the seven battleground states) into the government as an unpaid advisor in charge of reining in government spending, a blatant conflict of interest. Musk will have an office in the Executive Office Building with direct access to the president, and rest assured that none of the belt-tightening will affect his government subsidies.           

 

The Fourth Estate, a free, responsible, and unbiased press, has always been essential in curbing the excesses of power in politics, revealing trends, and constraining the prejudices that shape public opinion and social norms. Trump has openly expressed his intention to subject genuine journalists to lawsuits and investigations if their work ever questioned his policies, exposed his numerous crimes, or supported his adversaries. 

 

Controlling the public’s perception of facts and truth (remember “alternative facts”? They’re back.) and casting doubt on legitimate journalism is crucial to securing absolute power. Reporters and editors are fleeing these corrupted institutions as the very essence of journalism, the dedication to truth and facts, the foundation of our national consciousness, is being dismantled from within, leaving our citizens with no reliable sources of accurate information and a fountain of corrupted websites spewing lies and conspiracies. 

 

Uninformed people will believe the future president when he instructs his audience, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening. It’s fake news!” Every word that escapes his lips comprises fake news as guidance for his surrogates in government and sympathetic media.

 

The second necessity for complete political domination is packing the judiciary with loyalists willing to bend the law or ignore Constitutional precepts to insulate the power and authority of the wealthiest few. During his first term, surrogates in the Senate confirmed hundreds of unqualified and biased Trump partisans to lifetime terms on the Federal Bench. Many had never been inside a Federal Courtroom, let alone tried a case in Federal Court.

 

Three extremist MAGA nominees, who had been carefully vetted and promoted by the “ultra-conservative” Federalist Society, took seats on the Supreme Court after blatantly lying to the confirmation committees. After claiming that it was “established precedent,” they wasted no time overturning Roe vs Wade and ending 70 years of women’s access to accepted medical treatment. In addition, they mandated that taxpayer funds be used to support “religious” schools, supported public prayer at school functions, loosened restrictions on weapons, tightened criminal defendants’ rights, voting rights, and free speech, and granted our criminal president complete immunity to charges for crimes that might be construed as “official” duties. The other three radical justices are mired in outrageous corruption scandals that would result in their dismissal were it not for Constitutional protections.

 

Third is gaining control of the legislature, which writes, passes, and funds laws that affect every aspect of government, economic, and social functions.  (In 1933, Hitler and the Nazis burned down the Reichstag to eliminate political opposition. He blamed rival Communists, suspended Parliament, and rescinded constitutional protections, which set the stage for enacting dictatorial powers.)

 

The balance of our current Senate and Congress was toppled by a massive infusion of “corporate” dark money contributions that defeated moderate Republicans in the primaries and elected radical MAGA candidates (whose principal qualification was a loyalty pledge) starting with the Tea Party in 2010. 

 

There are few, if any, Republicans who will have the guts to oppose any legislation proposed by right-wing extremists in the coming session. Trump will wave his magic wand, his darkest fantasies and national nightmares will become law, and MAGA courts will uphold it.

 

Fourth is rewriting history to glorify the “accomplishments” of the white “Christian” conquerors by erasing their cruelty, crimes, and sins against humanity. Under the banner of “historical revisionism,” the attacks on our educational system have been persistent and pervasive since the original Dark Money oligarchs (Fred Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and many others) of the 1960s organized the John Birch Society. Part of their campaign included helping to elect legislative candidates to defund the budgets for public schools in favor of “private/religious” institutions that are not subject to the mandates of our laws or the expectations of most citizens. (Subtract 2% from state budgets for education every year for twenty or thirty years, and the system will collapse.) Illiterate and destitute citizens are easier to manipulate than an educated electorate.

 

Brutally edited textbooks in many “red” states claim that Christopher Columbus was a hero rather than a brutal conqueror who slaughtered natives living on the islands he discovered and stole their riches; that tens of thousands Native Americans were not murdered, driven from their homelands, and marched across the Trail of Tears to desolate lands in the west when the white settlers arrived on the continent; that the Civil War was fought for “states’ rights” as opposed to ending slavery, and that slaves benefitted from being kidnapped from Africa, sold at auction, beaten, raped, murdered or worked to death: that the Holocaust never happened and the millions of corpses found in the concentration camps did not exist; dismissing or ignoring the accomplishments of women and minorities; and deleting references to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the 1619 project, books by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, or Kurt Vonnegut; or the racial massacre of hundreds of black citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and so many other southern cities to expunge history and responsibility that might tarnish their glorified version of the past.

 

Twisting history is crucial to brainwashing the next generation to lionize white “Christian” men “who built this country and made the world great” to convince students that everyone else in our society should be subservient to their rule. Erasing the past is vital to ensuring the power and position of the white ruling class…which is being dominated and manipulated by those few hundred ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

 

If the Right is allowed to succeed in dismantling education based on truth and facts, the fundamentals of science, incontestable history, and creative, original thought, then the educated wealthy will dictate a new belief system to submissive, ignorant masses, glorifying the oligarchs and subjugating the rest of society.

 

Fifth is allowing the oligarchs to manipulate the economy to pad their profits at the expense of the working class, as the robber barons did in the early 1900s, which led to economic collapse and the Great Depression. Trump has surrounded himself with contemporary billionaires, magnates of their industries, who have donated millions to his election and inauguration.

 

Trump is determined to follow Project 2025’s mandate to eliminate the Department of Commerce, which “promotes job creation and economic growth by ensuring fair trade, providing the data necessary to support commerce and constitutional democracy, and fostering innovation by setting standards and conducting foundational research and development.”

 

Fair trade is the great equalizer and source of vitality and genuine competition within every industry in the country. During the 1910-20s, the infamous “Robber Barons” owned the largest, most powerful corporations in oil, steel, railroads, liquor, cotton, textiles, banks, and manufacturing and gobbled up their competition, which allowed them to generate enormous profits and control the economy through trust funds, unethical business practices, and exploiting their workers.

 

When fair trade rules and restrictions are repealed, every industry will contract under massive consolidation, resulting in ultimate wealth and power for the richest few. The objective will become producing profits for the owners, investors, and stockholders at the expense of the workers and the consumers. Wages will drop as unemployment increases and inflation will soar. The middle class will contract, and the working class will become desolate and desperate…but the rich will get richer.

 

Donald Trump and the MAGA maggots do not care about the price of eggs. They do not care about all the people who were taken in by his boasts and promises. Donald Trump is a liar and a grifter who ran for office to avoid being convicted and jailed for his crimes. Besides massaging his bloated ego, that was his motivation, and We The People are about to pay the price for his gluttony and greed.

 

Establishing each of the steps to install a dictatorship beholden to the oligarchs is the result of decades of persistent planning and execution by the radical elite to sabotage our democracy and dismantle the functions of government by buying and bribing the system to support their ambitions of ultimate power on the world stage.

 

This is not unique to the United States. Similar campaigns have toppled governments in Brazil, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and India, to name just a few. These stalwart defenders of democracy and freedom are besieged with political upheaval and a hard turn to the radical right, not seen since the rise of fascism in 1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany.

 

We are the only nation on the planet with the economic and political power to defend democracy before it disappears into history. If not the United States, who else has the capacity, will, or respect of other nations to alter the destruction and save this most precious experiment in humanity?

 

The only people who benefit from this political transformation are the elites who planned and paid for it. The only people who can stop the obliteration of democratic ideals are the citizens of this country, those brave enough to seek and share real facts and information, those willing to stand up, speak out, and make a difference before there is nothing left to defend. 

 

Do not surrender before the battle begins, and do not wait until Trump’s most egregious intentions become real. The time is now. Make your voice heard.

 

Share this with your friends and boycott the coronation of the orange pig.

Rick Stiller 2024

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