It's Sunday, which means the new American administration is overtly lying to the public on television again. Today's propaganda effort was devoted to assuring American citizens that our national elections are, in fact, almost unimaginably corrupted. This is being done, by members of the new leader's team, for two reasons. The first is because their boss lost the popular vote and, because he is an unstable and easily infuriated little man-child, will tolerate no explanation other than invisible foul play. The second is as propaganda effort; the white nationalist elements of Trump's staffers and cabinet have a plan to widely roll back the rights of non-white voters in this nation.
If that requires falsely telling Americans that their own election system has been, all this time, so corrupt that they were foolish to ever trust the results then that is what rat-faced traitor to his nation Stephen Miller will appear on television to do.
During a tense interview Sunday on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopolous asked Miller to provide evidence of voter fraud after Trump falsely alleged last week that he would have won New Hampshire during the election if "thousands of people hadn't been bused in to illegally vote."
“Anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics is aware of this," Miller said, who insisted that the White House has provided "enormous evidence" of voter fraud, citing the “massive numbers of non-citizens in this country who are registered to vote.”
The White House has provided no evidence of voter fraud whatsoever. It is a lie. The White House pointed to studies which showed no such thing. The White House claimed that somehow thousands of invisible people travelled on invisible buses to out-of-state polling places where compliant polling workers for some reason allowed them all to vote despite their names not being on the rolls to begin with and that even as "three to five million" similarly nation-breaking scams flooded over the country on election day, not one official anywhere in America was able to discover the scheme or catch even so much as one person involved with it.
It is a blatant lie. It is designed by those spreading it to benefit themselves even while undermining faith in American democracy, and is therefore a traitorous act.
Stephanopolous repeatedly asked Miller to justify his claims. Miller would not. Stephanopolous repeatedly pressed Miller with the gravity of the claims Miller was alleging; Miller was unconcerned.
The interview ended with the Sunday show equivalent of a dry heave. Stephanopolous was clearly nauseated by the propagandist; he may have even begun to fathom, a little, what damage his own program had just inflicted upon the nation. But he would not take that last step.
"For the record, you have provided zero evidence that the president was the victim of massive voter fraud in New Hampshire," Stephanopoulos said at the end of the interview. "You have provided zero evidence of the president's claim that he would have won the popular vote if 3-to-5 million illegal immigrants hadn't voted. Zero evidence for either one of those claims. Thanks a lot of joining us this morning."
The next step is obvious. Stephen Miller may be an adviser to the president, but Stephen Miller is a liar. A propagandist. A spreader of disinformation for personal and party gain. He should not be put on television to peddle lies to viewers; any program that does so is actively harming their own viewers. There is no thanks a lot to be dispensed here, any more than you would thank a guest for pulling down his pants and mooning American watchers. A better closer would have been and we should all hold you in the deepest contempt; a still better one would close out the interview with an apology to program viewers for what they just saw.
That would seem, in fact, the only credible response a supposedly upstanding political program should have, in the face of propaganda designed to cause harm their own viewers or nation. If a guest openly and brazenly lies during an interview, the interview must conclude with an apology by the program for broadcasting those specific lies and the promise that the guest will not be booked again unless amends are made.
Providing an outlet for an administration official to lie to the public is not a legitimate duty of the press; it is acting as willing co-conspirator. There has to be a limit. Nothing separates the United States from the corrupt faux-democracies and one-party states of the world other than our own history of wary revulsion at those here that would gladly send us down that path. If the revulsion itself is normalized away, the dam breaks.
There has to be a limit.