What Would Nellis Say?

 

abolishing truth

By Rick Stiller​​​​​​​

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Our aspiring authoritarian regime must secure multiple powers to dismantle and replace a democracy with a dictatorship. 

 

Their first step required eliminating the opposition by castrating Congress through the election of inexperienced, unqualified, and completely subservient Mikey Johnson as Speaker of the House to fulfill Trump’s whims and wishes and block passage of any other legislation. The Republican Senate majority is terrified of his wrath and being primaried by even more radical candidates from the right, so they lack the gumption to take any action that might infuriate their vengeful leader.

 

The second part of that calculation is stuffing the judiciary with loyal MAGA justices, who will serve life terms, extending the perversion of the courts for years. Many of those judges have no judicial experience or qualifications other than sworn allegiance to protect Trump and his oligarch buddies. Our corrupt Supreme Court ignores the Constitution and decades of precedent to protect our felon-in-chief and his appalling policies.

 

The next priority is deploying the military and police forces to tamp down protests or resistance by citizens, and divide the population into us (think white supremacists) and them, which includes anyone of color and those who object to living under the oppression of a military state. 

 

With a budget of $175 billion, Homeland Security is expanding and weaponizing ICE and the Border Patrol into Trump’s private army, hiring 10,000 new recruits and purchasing thousands of new weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition, to terrorize and kill refugees and American citizens brave enough to stand in defiance. Massive warehouses and concentration camps are being acquired and secured to house up to 150,000 prisoners until they can be deported to hellholes in other countries without charges, trials, or legal representation to Make America White Again!

 

Kristi Noem’s Gestapo is using the “immigration crackdown” to normalize the presence of brigades of unidentifiable armed thugs on our city streets to disrupt and intimidate peaceful communities. Multiple federal agencies are rewriting history to eliminate and contradict the suffering, accomplishments, and contributions of our minority populations by removing exhibits and references from museums, national parks, and textbooks to deny established history and glorify “white” accomplishments.

 

As the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out in detail, white “Christian” men will receive dominion over women and minorities, dividing our culture and our society into the lords and masters vanquishing everyone else.

 

In order to accomplish those goals, Trump’s government and its corporate allies have to control not only the flow of information but also its content and substance by attacking free and fair journalism to confuse and overwhelm Americans with fake news being spewed by MAGA media empires dedicated to twisting facts and denying truth to curry favor with our would-be dictator and promote his authoritarian power.

 

In a direct attack on the First Amendment’s free speech protections, “The F.T.C.’s chairman, Andrew Ferguson, appears to be testing a novel theory: that editorial judgment can be regulated as a deceptive trade practice. In this view, a news organization’s slogan — such as “fair and balanced” or “without fear or favor” — is no longer a statement of mission but a marketing claim subject to federal prosecution if the government decides the outlet has failed to live up to it.”

 

By removing the word “independent” from its mission statement, Brendon Carr at the F.C.C. (which was established to ensure free, fair, and unbiased communications to encourage public discourse) declared his agency an extension of Trump’s presidential power. Carr has threatened to revoke broadcast licenses and suppress stories or interviews critical of Republican candidates and the administration.

 

Jeff Bezos, who made his billions with Amazon, owns the Washington Post, which laid off 300 journalists, or a third of its staff, including a substantial number of international correspondents, local news reporters, and their entire sports department.

 

When he first purchased the newspaper for $250 million in 2013, Bezos supported the traditions of the world-renowned journal, with a reputation for fairness, accuracy, and forthright honesty that fosters trust and credibility, by declaring “Democracy dies in darkness,” which became the journal’s motto…but only until that stance conflicted with his bottom line.

 

Bezos also owns New Horizons, a rocket company that survives on massive contracts with the U.S. government that depend on favorable relations with the administration, so his self-serving order forbidding the paper to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024, combined with revamping the editorial and opinion sections into pro-Trump journals – confining the content to a debate of “Free markets and personal liberties” exclusively, is no surprise. 

 

To ensure the administration's continued good graces, he ponied up $40 million to produce a documentary about Melania Trump (who received approximately $28 million) and added another $35 million for marketing. The film turned out to be a complete dud, earning $7 million on its opening weekend, with most theaters showing the film to empty auditoriums. It’s the cost of doing business with a grifter.

 

Following Paramount/Disney’s merger with David Ellison’s Skydance, traditionally middle-of-the-road CBS & 60 Minutes have been transformed from a “news organization” to a propaganda machine promoting a right-wing agenda. Former ultra-conservative Free Press editor, staunch critic of the mainstream press, and anti-Woke /DEI advocate, Bari Weiss was appointed Editor-in-Chief and answers directly to David Ellison. Corporate stars, like Anderson Cooper, quit or retired when she replaced many experienced reporters with a new lineup sympathetic to Trump and shifted the content and message to accommodate and justify his priorities.

 

As part of that purchase agreement, Stephen Colbert’s contract was not renewed because he mocks Trump and calls out his lies. Weiss and the corporate lawyers refused to allow the show to air an interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico, a ⁠Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, claiming that FCC Chair Brendan Carr was demanding equal time for Talarico’s competitors. The interview was aired on YouTube, has been viewed 6 million times, and raised $2.5 million for his campaign in 24 hours.

 

“The Republican-led FCC said last month that daytime and late-night TV talk shows are no longer considered "bona fide" news programs that are exempt from ​requirements to give equal airtime to views of opposing candidates. For decades, talk shows had been exempt from those rules.”

 

Paramount/Skydance is about to take over Warner Bros./Discovery and the prize includes the news network CNN, which will be transformed into a slightly more restrained version of Murdoch’s biased and deceitful Fox Network ( which paid $784 million to settle a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Machines for making a corporate decision to support Trump’s lies about the 2020 election on every program they aired).

 

The defunding of PBS networks and their highly respected news programs, which are the only broadcast stations in rural parts of the country, combined with the hundreds of local television stations owned by Sinclair and Nexstar Media that are forced to broadcast “must-run” political stories favorable to Trump’s agenda on their newscasts, and the thousands of newspaper publishers that have been bought up by Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Alden Global, and other extreme right-wing media companies, it becomes clear that America’s tradition of free and fair professional and unbiased journalism is being silenced by the organized and determined campaigns of a clique of the richest bigots in our society.

 

A great swath of the news network broadcast audience fled to the internet, where “news” is completely unconstrained by laws or restrictions, complaining of bias on both ends of the political spectrum. (AP and Reuters, PBS, and BBC are rated as the most “fact-based” sources for real news.)

 

Truth Social and X (Twitter) take great pride in serving red meat to a MAGA audience that demands hate speech, conspiracy theories, minority groups that can be blamed for keeping the nation from being “white” enough, and demonizing public figures on either side of the aisle who fail to support the Republican crusade to suppress voting and replace our democracy with a Trump-for-life dictatorship.

 

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is under Congressional investigation for altering the algorithms to push more radically “conservative” ads and information, and to target younger viewers’ browsing habits with more addictive content to engage "tweens" (children as young as 6) to build a "pipeline of lifetime users".

 

Our forefathers understood the importance of a free press to inform the populace and included protections in the First Amendment in hopes of fostering an American culture that thrives on a diverse smorgasbord of factual information, promoting open and honest debates about the controversies and issues we face as a nation. 

 

While we might lean one way or another as individuals, our system allowed us to believe that we all benefit from the compromises that result from those discussions…but how do we reach those decisions when our sources of information are compromised and censored by fanatical actors in our government and private corporations that own all branches of media and, subsequently, dictate our concept of truth?

 

The Heritage Foundation invested $22 million to produce Project 2025, a step-by-step plan to dismantle the government, neuter or eliminate political opposition in Congress and the courts, deploy troops and a private police force to “normalize” the invasion of Democrat governed cities and deportation of people of color to “Make America White Again”, rewrite history to support bigotry and racism, and finally to castrate the press.

 

Democracy is transformed into dictatorship when the “State” controls the content and the flow of information.  We are watching the demolition of the foundations of our society and our culture in fast-forward, and it’s accelerating.

 

Stand up! Speak Out! Make a Difference!

 

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www.rickstiller.com