Friday, February 24, 2017

Authoritarian White House bars selected news organizations

Trump today at the CPAC conference once again attacked the media, calling it fake news.  His spokesman followed up by banning the New York Times, CNN, Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, and Politico from a question and answer session with the press secretary.

Admitted were right wing media - Washington Times, One America News Network, and of course Breitbart, Steve Bannon's news organization.

As I wrote earlier, Authoritarianism 101 is to control the news.  Here is an action demonstrating that. The way democracy is killed is to take away the ability of the people to be informed.  This is absolutely disgusting.

So, where are my conservative friends?  Where is the Republican Congress?  Do they just cheer this move toward authoritarian rule?  Don't they find this appalling?  Isn't a free press one of the guarantees of the first amendment?  Where are the "Constitutional Conservatives"?


At a minimum, this is Trump signalling his base who not to get information from. 
  
I believe that the banned news organizations are quite experienced in covering authoritarian regimes around the world, and I expect that they are energized by this in a way that they haven't been energized for decades. 

Bannon and Trump have declared war on the news, I believe Mr Nixon did that a while back and it didn't work out too well for him.  

Trump serves at the pleasure of the Republican Congress, who do have the power of impeachment.  The question is how far will they let themselves be pushed?