Crackdown On A Free Press Is A Symptom Of Fascism-- And Brazil Has Just Filed A Criminal Complaint Against Glenn Greenwald For Exposing Government Corruption

Roland is always suggesting countries with shady right-wing governments as place for us to visit, like Egypt (Abdel el-Sisi), Poland (Mateusz Morawiecki), China (Xi Jinping), Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro), Austria (Brigitte Bierlein), Hungary (Viktor Orbбn,)... and I always explain I don't want to go to fascist-ruled countries. Still... here I am living in Trumpland. But we haven't gone to Brazil, one of the ones on my bucket list and where I have lots of relatives. A good example of why came Tuesday when the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against an old friend, Glenn Greenwald, who lives there now. Glenn, an attorney, civil libertarian, author and journalist, as well as the co-founder of The Intercept has exposed widespread misconduct and corruption among Brazilian prosecutors and a former judge. This is one of several tweets sent out by Ro Khanna (D-CA) today.

Progressive congressional candidates were quick to defend freedom of the press in this regard as well. Iowa's J.D. Scholten understood exactly how far right authoritarians target the press-- primarily because he's running against one of them. "Steve King," he said, "routinely rails against the press, discrediting their accurate work, and demanding apologies for his own actions. His words and his actions have deep ramifications-- they work to undermine the freedom of the press and encourage violence against journalists here at home and around the world. He believes the press should be beholden to him, but that’s wrong. The press has an incredibly important job to shine a light on our public officials (whether it’s flattering or not), inform our citizens, and keep us safe. An attack on the press is an attack on all of us and our Constitution, which King claims to care deeply about. I support our journalists here and abroad, especially those like Glenn who put their lives on the line for the truth, and will always stand up for the freedom of the press."

Mike Siegel, a Texas attorney who is best known for his epic battles against right-wing Texas government officials on behalf of the city of Austin wrote this morning that "We must condemn the Brazilian government’s attack on journalist Glenn Greenwald, which is an attack on democracy itself. We need press freedom to shine a light on government corruption, at home and abroad. I’m ashamed that my Republican opponent, Rep. McCaul, has supported Bolsonaro’s push towards fascism. We must do everything we can to protect civil society in Brazil, and to stop authoritarian regimes whenever they arise."

Tom Winter, a state legislator in Montana, running for Congress now, explained to voters in his state that "Freedom of the press isn't optional-- it's in the First Amendment. I'm running to replace a Congressman that would rather body slam a journalist than answer his questions. This should not be a partisan issue. What's happening in Brazil is troubling, anything less than our government's full support for Mr. Greenwald's rights is shirking our oaths to defend the Constitution. We can not allow a vacuum of leadership to embolden further attacks on our free press, at home and abroad."

Eva Putzova, and immigrant to Arizona from Eastern Europe, which has seen its share of tyrannical rule, said "I am appalled at the Bolsonaro government’s attempt to silence Glenn Geeenwald by filing a criminal complaint against him for his reporting in government corruption. This is a threat to freedom of the press everywhere. Bolsonaro is an ally of Trump so this effort to bully a reporter shouldn’t surprise anyone. All members of Congress should stand with Greenwald and the freedom of the press. Period."

No one doubts that this is an assault on both journalism and free speech. A friend of mine asked that we remember the quote attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" and asserted, correctly that there is no chance that it is virtually impossible that the Brazilian government would have moved this way against an American citizen without first clearing it with the Trump regime.

Michael Franken, a retired admiral running for the Iowa Senate seat occupied by Trump puppet Joni Ernst noted that it is "strange that President Bolsonaro would investigate, try, convict, and sentence a U.S. citizen with his statement, 'may do jail time.' May as well toss a dead goat down the well of jurisprudence."

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon, is running for Congress now. He told us, "A free and independent press dedicated to informing the public with in-depth factual reporting is the third leg that democracy stands on. Without it democracy is doomed. Ronald Regan began the process of the erosion of this critical institution when he vetoed a bill that protected it from a bad FCC decision. As a former photojournalist for National Geographic I have a deep and abiding belief that the institution of journalism must be protected at all costs and the journalists themselves allowed to do their jobs without fear of prosecution. As a congressman I will work to restore journalism to its former glory and thereby forestall our continuing slide into dysfunctional polarization."

The Trump-Media Logrolling

-by Sam Husseini

A couple of days ago, hundreds of newspapers, at the initiative of the Boston Globe, are purporting to stand up for a free press against Trump's rhetoric.

Today also marks exactly one month since I was dragged out of the July 16 Trump-Putin news conference in Helsinki and locked up until the middle of the night.

As laid in my cell, I chuckled at the notion that the city was full of billboards proclaiming Finland was the "land of free press."

So, I've grown an especially high sensitivity to both goonish behavior toward journalists trying to ask tough questions-- and to those professing they are defending a free press when they are actually engaging in a marketing exercise.

As some have noted, the editorials today will likely help Trump whip up support among his base against a monolithic media. But, just as clearly, the establishment media can draw attention away from their own failures, corruptions and falsehoods simply by focusing on Trump's.

Big media outlets need not actually report news that affects your life and point to serious solutions for social ills. They can just bad mouth Trump. And Trump need not deliver on campaign promises that tapped into populist and isolationist tendencies in the U.S. public that have grown in reaction to years of elite rule. He need only deride the major media.

They are at worst frenemies. More likely, at times, Trump and the establishment media log roll with each other. The major media built up Trump. Trump's attacks effectively elevate a select few media celebrities.

My case is a small but telling one. Major media outlets were more likely to disinform about the manhandling I received in my attempt to ask about U.S., Russian and Israeli nuclear threats to humanity-- I'll soon give a detailed rebuttal to the torrent of falsehoods, some of which I've already noted on social media-- than to crusade against it.

Other obvious cases: None of the newspaper editorials I've seen published today mention the likely prosecution of Wikileaks. If there were solidarity among media, the prospect of Julian Assange being imprisoned for publishing U.S. government documents should be front and center today.

Neither did I see a mention of RT or, as of this week, Al Jazeera, being compelled to register as foreign agents. State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert has openly refused to take questions from reporters working for Russian outlets. Virtual silence-- in part because Russia is widely depicted as the great enemy, letting U.S. government policy around the world off the hook.

The above are actual policies that the Trump administration has pursued targeting media-- not rhetoric that dominates so much establishment coverage of Trump.

Then there's the threat of social media.

My day job is with the Institute for Public Accuracy. Yesterday, I put out a news release titled "Following Assassination Attempt, Facebook Pulled Venezuela Content." Tech giants can decide-- possibly in coordination with the U.S. government-- to pull the plug on content at a time and manner of their choosing.

You would think newspaper people might be keen to highlight the threat that such massive corporations thus pose, not least of all because they have eaten up their ad revenue.

The sad truth is that this is what much of the media have long done: Counter to the lofty rhetoric of many of today's editorials, the promise of an independent and truth-seeking press has frequently been subservient to propaganda, pushing for war or narrow economic and other interests.

The other major story of the day-- quite related to this-- is that of Trump pulling former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance. NPR tells me this is an attempt to "silence a critic." But Brennan has an op-ed in today's New York Times and is frequently on major media. He oversaw criminal policies during the Obama administration, including drone assassinations. If anything, this has elevated Brennan's major media status.

Those who have been truly silenced in the "Trump era" are those who were critical of the seemingly perpetual U.S. government war machine since the invasion of Iraq.

Trump attacks on the establishment media-- like many media attacks on him-- are frequently devoid of substance. But recently one of his rhetorically tweets stated that media "cause wars." I would say "push for war," but that's quibbling.

Trump is technically right on that point, but it's totally disingenuous coming from him. He's actually been the beneficiary of the media compulsion he claims to deride. When he exalts U.S. bombing strikes in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, CNN calls him "presidential."

Many consider "Russiagate" critical to scrutinizing the Trump administration, but the two reporters, apparently picked by the White House, during the Helsinki news conference focused on "Russiagate"-- which eventually led to Brennan and others attacking Trump as "treasonous." Meanwhile, much more meaningful collusion that can be termed Israelgate is being ignored as the U.S. and Israeli governments attempt to further mold the Mideast.

The need for genuinely free sources of information is greater than ever. It is unclear to me if traditional newspapers can be part of the equation. Quite likely, the institutions desperately needed to carry out that critical mission are yet to be born.

We Still Have Freedom Of Speech And A Free Press... Right? Will We A Couple Of Years From Now?

Are you mad at people who voted for Trump? Do you know any? Would you like to see them all forced to go back to second grade and start all over again, like Keith Olbermann suggested? How about killed? Too rough? How about deprived of the right to own a gun? Deprived of their right to vote again until they pass a series of courses in civics and history?

Nixon was elected in November, 1968. I was mortified, not just by his policies and agenda, but by the man. He was sworn in in January, 1969. Less than 4 months later I was in Europe, the beginning of a nearly 7 year self-imposed exile or... seeing the world. The exile part was silly. The seeing the world part was the best thing that ever happened to be and worked out better than graduate school probably would have. When TimeWarner wanted a new president with international experience for one of their divisions... there I was, skipping ahead of two dozen executives with far more seniority. That sure changed my life! Trump-inspired self-exile isn't something I'd recommend (yet)... seeing the world, though, is always a good idea.

Over the weekend Bill Moyers published an essay by author Neal Gabler, who teaches at Stony Brook, where I went to school and from where I left for my self-exile. I think his best known book is An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood but he's probably better known for his columns in the NY Times, Esquire, New York, The Atlantic, and the New Republic, and for his work on Fox and PBS. The new essay, Farewell, America, isn't about a decision to go into self-exile or even to see the world. "No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7," he wrote, "they will now look at us differently." And not in a good way.

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity-- all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation-- a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth-- the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information-- a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized-- a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies-- they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism-- if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.



What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.

This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.

For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.