A Critique of Davis Leonhardt’s Piece  “Trump Reassures the Media (For Now)”

President-elect Donald Trump leaving the New York Times after meeting there on Tuesday.

“I think you’ll be happy, I think you’ll be happy.”

That was President-elect Donald Trump, talking to a group of Times journalists today about his views on the First Amendment.

The real issue, of course, is not whether journalists are happy. (We’re not exactly a popular bunch with most Americans.) The issue is whether the next president and his administration plan to remain faithful to the Constitution.

My Retort:

The media has lied to us and instead of telling the truth, it has been used as a weapon.  Coordinated disinformation and propaganda campaigns are not news.  They are important PsyOps weapons used as a means of defeating an enemy and destroying his morale and will to resist.  The media is owned by six major media corporations that are always for war, central banking, interventionism and the expansion of state power when it serves their needs.  The elite demand laissez faire capitalism, but then uses the media and government to delegitimize and crush mass democratic movements like Occupy Wall Street.  The election of Trump is one manifestation of a democratic mobilization against the current corrupt system. The fact is that if the media was not so one-sided, Trump would have won a lopsided popular vote too.  But, consider he won an election while being demonized 24/7 for months by every news venue controlled by the MSM.

And there are reasons to worry. During the campaign, Trump referred to the reporters covering him as “scum” and said that he wanted to “open up” libel laws to make it easier to sue media companies for unfavorable coverage.

My Retort:

Good, let the corporatized media be responsible for libel.  They have shown themselves traitors to working-class America and have lied us into wars while hiding the crimes of Wall Street and of the elite to which we Americans are victim. 

He is also part of a small group of wealthy Americans who have tried to intimidate journalists with lawsuits, as my colleague Emily Bazelon writes for The Times Magazine. “Once installed in the White House, Trump will have a wider array of tools at his disposal,” Bazelon writes, “and his record suggests that, more than his predecessors, he will try to use the press — and also control and subdue it.”

My Retort:

The media works directly for a large group of wealthy internationalists.  They destroy whoever goes against the CFR, Tri-Lateral Commission and Builderburg Group agenda of more military spending, more debt creation, more horrible trade agreements, and more government power.

All of this is alarming. No matter how good or bad any individual piece of journalism or publication is, a free press is crucial to a functioning democracy. “Our liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson said, “cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

My Retort:

In case you didn’t notice, democracy requires accurate information so that the decision-making process of legislation can function.  If the media operated in the interest of the people, that would be one thing.  It is a completely different thing when the media operates almost exclusively in the interests of oligarchs and plutocrats and kleptocrats.  What good is a media that espouses nothing by lies and propaganda directed against the American people as it tries to sway elections for those who work for and represent the interests of the elite that are many multiples wealthier than Trump and fund genocidal international war wars they lie nations into?

As it happens, Jefferson isn’t the only famous populist from an agrarian state who has eloquently made the case for a free press. There is another — named Mike Pence.

My Retort:

In the times of Jefferson there were competing interests and one was that of media trying to expose the crimes of the elite.  The media today is concentrated and hides the crimes of the elite while enlisting usful idiots who fall for the lies of media and government.  There is no comparison between yesteryear’s media and the modern Lippman, Bernays, McLuhan media that has been engineered as a means of mass manipulation, the manufacture of consent, thought control and war propaganda.  We need the freedom to be right, there is no benefit in allowing the powerful to perpetrate lies that are used to enslave and manipulate the people.  To provide false information is to make people deaf and blind to the truth; it is to enslave them through lies and in lies.  If I were to tell you that to go outside of your house would result in your certain death, and you believed me and so stayed in your house forever, would you be free because I gave you the freedom to believe me and do as I say?

In a bit of history that’s been partly forgotten, Pence — now the vice president-elect, then a member of Congress — co-sponsored a bill about a decade ago to create a so-called shield law. Had it passed, the bill would have protected journalists from being dragged into court to reveal anonymous sources. Pence decided to push the bill after reading a Times editorial criticizing the jailing of Judith Miller, a former Times reporter, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

My Retort:

Judith Miller was a key player in promoting war in Iraq.  She ought to be indicted for war crimes and the instigation of an illegal invasion.  She worked directly for the military-industrial complex, big banking and international conglomerates whose concerns are only for oil, war profiteering and funding of the military-industrial complex.  She ought to have been subjected to the torture, indefinite detention and war she supported.  Again, what good is media when all it is is nothing by lies?  At that point it ceases to be media or news, but instead a form of social control.  The media helped Bush blame 9/11 on Saddam when it was Bush’s benefactors in Saudi arabia that did this.  Then, Bush used the media who voluntarily helped him hide this fact.

Pence was quite clear that he often didn’t like what he read in the media, too. He bemoaned “bad news bias.” But he also understood that there were more important principles.

“Our founders did not put the freedom of the press in the First Amendment because they got good press — quite the opposite was true,” he said. Like them, though, he believed in “the public good that a free and independent press represents” because it allowed citizens to “make informed decisions,” he said.

My Retort:

What informed decisions can be made with misinformation, disinformation, lies and  propaganda?  How can people decide courses of action, evaluation criteria and constraints when there is nothing but garbage and ideology going into a decision-making process?  Does the media realize how ignorant and apathetic the American people are?  Add to this toxic mix media lies and what you have is a recipe for Americans to decide to surrender all their rights and liberties and engage in permanent war.  How is that freedom?  The media leaves us with the opportunity to have a pseudo-democracy so we can vote to be slaves.  Goethe said, “No people are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”   We have an illusion of democracy while true democratic movements like Occupy Wall Street are crushed while the media hides the million plus people who were in Oakland, CA.  How is it freedom to be placed in a false reality?  It is a soft dictatorship where Americans are ruled by the elite via their flunkies in the media, politics and a two-tiered law enforcement system that keeps the little people under its boot heel as it allows the wealthy and powerful to steal, commit treason, torture, engage in espionage and sell out the nation in a pay-to-play scam established the the very highest echelon of government.

It’s not clear how much of a free-press defender Pence remains. Either way, vice presidents generally yield to presidents. But he does seem to have instincts that his boss would benefit from hearing.

My Retort:

Yep, and Pence is also part of the establishment and so is not really a revolutionary or visionary.  He desires to maintain the status quo as it has served him just fine his entire career.  If the people were not so disgusted of a media made up of The View, Rachael Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanopoulos, Megyn Kelly, MSNBC and CNN, Pence would be sitting home watching Clinton continue her treason, espionage war crimes and racketeering.

 I thought of his shield-law history last weekend, after the much-hyped incident when Pence was booed by the crowd at “Hamilton.” Trump took to Twitter to demand an apology from the cast. Pence, in the moment, had a different reaction: He turned to his daughter inside the theater and said, “That’s what freedom sounds like.”

My Retort:

Actors are mostly idiots.  Very few understand history, economics, military policy, foreign policy, geo-politics, neocolonialism or domestic policy.  Most just want ObamaCare because they rarely work jobs that provide health benefits.  Most have no idea that Hillary is directly responsible for destroying an African country called Libya or a Middle Eastern country called Syria.  They want Trump dead and want anarchy as they violently attack those who have engaged in the democratic process.  They are just like Hillary and the internationalists in that they want democracy only so long as it fits their agenda, when not, they want democracy crushed either by force, destabilization or through a weapon called propaganda.