THEY ARE COMING FOR THE TRUTH-TELLERS
Thom Hartman's Warning on a Free Press May Be the Last Match in the Box
“The time for polite disagreement or ‘strongly worded letters’ is over. The time for waiting to see what happens next is over,” or is it too little, too late, no matter what we do?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162646329
Thom Hartmann’s latest warnings on the assault on the freedom of the press brings to our attention the most dangerous weapon an autocrat has in his arsenal for establishing and maintaining their autocracy. It stands before any of the specific acts the tyrant takes in the exercise of their control over their domains, be it a nation or an empire. Nothing, not the dismantling of the government, firing employees and its replacement with the absolute reign of a king; not in ending the rule of law and the dissolution of the Constitution; not by rescinding and abrogating the fundamental rights of a sovereign people; not through the targeted retribution or disappearing of people who dissent or displease the tyrant. Not any of those myriad details of operating a tyranny outweighs the agenda of tyrants to shut down the press, the media and any other source from which dissent or opposition might flow. It is the total control of information, the establishment of a Kingdom of Lies, that permits a tyrant to remain in power and sustain their tyranny. If the public doesn’t know, or only knows what the autocrat wants them to know, then tyranny flourishes in the sea of silence that surrounds it, and the succession of lies that poison any truth that attempts to rise above it. In that world, autocracies are guaranteed indefinite self-perpetuation.
That is where tyranny begins, and it begins long before the tyrant appears. In his recent article on freedom of the press, Hartman give a pretty clear picture of the dismantling of our free press and steps already taken by our Mad King to gain total control over what the American people will be allowed to know and hear in the future. It’s recent history began during the Mad King’s first test of what turning the American presidency into a monarchy might look like. During his first term, tailoring America for the throne of tyranny took measure of the press and sized it up as “The enemy of the state.” By ‘state’, our would be king, of course, meant the fascist autocracy that he had in mind to govern his Kingdom of Lies. He knew that the First Amendment freedom of the press was a major obstacle he would need to overcome. An informed public is the greatest threat to tyranny, and it could only mean a constant barrage of We the People, torches and pitchforks in hand, at his door.
And so, the Mad King’s attacks on the media and the press begin, ultimately rising to the crescendo it has become with calls for his newly weaponized Department of Justice calling for the execution of reporters and the closure of media and newspapers who dare displease our Mad King, as was detailed in Hartmann’s report.
The signs and warnings of all this did not magically appear with the accidentals of two elections demonstrating that democracy cannot protect itself against democracy. Its history reaches back a lot further than that. It includes the right-wing capture of newspapers such as the Hearst Corporation buying the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999; previous attempts to capture the Board of Directors of our Public Broadcasting networks; the stuffing every radio frequency it could with right-wing ‘liberal bashing’ hosts under the flag of Rush Limbaugh; crypto-religious stations filling every niche on the airwaves till one can’t even pass from CSPAN to CSPAN 2 without passing over a bible-thumping channel; bringing Air America to an end as the only national, liberal, truth-speaking radio station in the country; the use of obscenity laws to suppress some of the most important literature in the English language, from Joyce to Miller, now echoed in the attacks on our libraries and schools, looking to ban any histories or literature that might vary from the King’s anti-Woke agenda; attempts of the government to thwart publication and distribution of such classic historical materials such as William Hinton’s “Fanshen”; it’s application of laws that allow it to stamp any materials coming from outside the country as “foreign propaganda”, if it disapproves of their content. So many signs and warnings we have had, reaching far back into our history, all of them ignored, or weakly resisted.
Even when resistance was successful, the attacks from the right on freedom of the press went on, unabated and undaunted, chipping away at this pillar of American democracy. As Thom Hartmann put it, “The Founders understood that a democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry.” The extreme, radical right-wing of the Destructionists has yelled for years about “overwhelming Liberal left control of the press”. But, if one examines the numbers, the left has barely managed to reserve a seat in a lifeboat for truth-telling. The airwaves and print media are so glutted with right-wing misinformation, conspiracy theories and outright lies, there is hardly a frequency that the Destructionists or their crypto-religious idelological broadcasts have not managed to occupy. Screaming about “WOKE!” and “Liberal Bias!”, is like their “Stop The Steal!” mantra, used when it is the thieves who are yelling as they go about their business of looting and stealing everything in sight.
Ending freedom of the press and the free flow of information has a very long history, and a grimmer prognoses unless a way to actually stop these assaults is found, and soon. Hartman advises several things that should be done:
— demand Congress pass protective federal shield laws for journalists.
— support independent journalism and its outlets.d
— engage public officials and insist freedom of the press is a top priority.
— public demonstration and outrage if the Justice Department goes ahead with it’s threats to persecute and prosecute journalists (Hartmann narrowed his call to instances of DOJ charging journalists with “treason”, but it is just as applicable in any case where journalists, or their papers are charged for reporting the truth or expressing their opinions.)
—The last of Thom Hartman’s admonitions admits that “press isn’t perfect…but it’s essential.” I couldn’t agree more, adding that the only allowance for government investigation or other interference with the conduct of a free press should be restricted only to those cases where there is clear and provable evidence that malicious and deliberate intent to lie, defame and abrogate the rights of others has occurred. Beyond that, the government should be forbidden to interfere in any way with the free flow and conveyance of information a free press provides.
Hartmann’s call for responses to the threats this autocracy is making to our press and media freedoms is, without question, essential if we are to have any hope of even slowing down this autocracy on its way to total control of our nation and the likelihood of entrenching itself on the throne of America for many generations to come. As I have written in a number of my previous essays, these actions, important as they may be, are unlikely to hold against a tyranny as advanced as we have allowed this one to become. All of Hartmann’s advisories are drawn from what is commonly referred to as ‘the normal-times’ playbook; tactics that have been used with the expectation that traditional norms of debate and consideration would be observed and some version of the truth of matters would prevail. In practice, that has never completely been the case, but it was reasonable to expect it. We are no longer operating in a world of normal-times playbooks—they are obsolete and the extreme-right Destructionists have seen to it that will be the case for some time to come.
As I’ve suggested before, we need to recognize and devise a wholly new strategic and tactical approach to responding to the despots and their autocracies. Holding the line on freedom of the press is going to be one of the most important challenges of this threshold of the Dark Ages into which we have crossed. It calls for a heightened sense of imagination and entirely new strategies we must devise meet those challenges. We should expect severe curtailment on the use of the internet and social media, weaponized as a tool of surveillence, to express opinions and critique about what is happening. Facebook and other platforms have already been imposing restrictions on free expression and the press, with its often arbitrary and capricious, subjective, content-based “community standards” constraints, some of which may sound enlightened and reasonable on the surface, but are actually portals to the suppression of information and speech in the hands of corporate interests appeasing despotic authorities of the government.
The right-wing typically uses such avenues to breech our freedoms of press and information under the distorted and restrictive logic of its “family values”, or its reach into liberal sources and expressions which it claims reveal bias, but in fact are enclaves which mind their own business showing little evidence of reaching into right-wing enclaves, while the right persistently attempts to reach into theirs. It is the same logic which the right has used to criminalize women and their sovereign rights to manage their own reproductive choices, though the ‘Me body, me boss’ agenda has no impact on anyone’s religious or moral position and says nothing about what others who do not approve of abortions should or should not do. Who, of these two groups, are the real ‘judicial activists’? In all such matters, whether it it is Destructionists persistently telling Progressives how they should behave, or using force and law to compel them to do things that have nothing to do with themselves, it is only the MAGA right that reach into someone else’s business and tell them what to do. It is not Progressives who are telling the Destructionists what they can do with their own bodies, or what their children should be allowed to read, or what group of people should not be accorded the fundamental right of due process. It is only the radical right-wing extremists who are doing that. Press freedom is no different. Liberals occupy a tiny fraction of media outlets, yet the right will not be satisfied until it shuts all of them down, and becomes the only voice left that anyone is permitted to hear. That is what autocracy looks like.
We must come up with entirely new ways to counter this naked assault on our freedom of the press, speech and thought. For example, this tactic considers the trajectory of autocracies to control all press and media sources, culminating in a condition of state-run media as we see in other autocratic societies:
—we should be thinking and acting now on the prospect of needing a fully operational ‘Radio Free America’ with broadcasts beamed to the United States from foreign sources such as Canada. We should be encouraging Canada and Canadians to build a network which will broadcast the unfiltered news and truth to Americans during the dark age of silence that may well be ahead. Americans can also act now by writing and encouraging the wealthy among their more progressive ranks, to help underwrite the building of such networks.
All of this may seem dire and unnecessarily grim. My observations since 2000 have been tracking a trajectory towards autocracy, and my research has noted the same has been going on since 1886 when the first breach of the Constitution was made on the path of the corporate capture of rights never intended for them and their “artificial personhoods”. The slide of CNN to the right where “Fair and Ubalanced, Fox Lite” might now describe that station; the appeasements of the Washington Post and LA Times to our Mad King; The buyouts of more small and medium sized papers, the current attacks on NPR and CPB, 60 Minutes and the like that all seem to lead to the unmistakable conclusion that the road signs to autocracy were all correct.
We have been on the path to the end of freedom of the press as a dependable agent of helping democracy to protect itself from democracy. Mary Trump said it in a recent report on Substack and in her ‘Good In Us’ Network where she put ‘Witnessing’ at the top of her list of things we must do. If those we most rely upon to do that witnessing on our behalf, our reporters and trusted news sources, are rendered blind and deaf to the Mad King’s lies, the collapse of everything else is sure to follow.
Certainly, if we don’t arm ourselves with new strategies and tactics, the old ones will not be sufficient and there will be nothing standing in the way of a very long and painful Dark Ages, about which we will know very little until all the lights of enlightenment are extinguished. To not be prepared for that is to invite it to happen. We are rapidly approaching that time when, whatever small candles we had for future generations to find their way out of these dark times, they will be blown out and no one will know how to light them again.
rs, May 4, 2025
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Related Materials:
’On The Other Side of ‘America is Over’ — https://substack.com/home/post/p-158666692
’Mad King — Lies’, by Sadie and Jerome Rothenberg, Dark Ages Museum;
www.poems4change.org/madking/mk-gallery.html
’Let’s Get Tactical’ — www.poems4change.org/public/lets-get-tactical.html
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