While the press tap dances around, amazed that protocol is being breached and lies being told, fascism is being instituted at 100 mph. The time is now for the fourth estate to recognize the objective signs of a looming dictatorship. In a few short days, Trump and his minions have, among other things: de-legitimized the press; imposed gag orders on departments so they can manufacture facts, and told objectively verifiable lies about such trivial things as crowd sizes. They will soon use their restriction to governmental information to fabricate data to regulate how you live. While the press is getting bolder in some quarters to call a lie what it is, they still think that if they call what is happening fascism, they are somehow unprofessional. Well, I have news for journalists, a totalitarian state has no need for you; just ask the hundreds of journalists Putin has killed. We need to get past the notion that it can’t happen here because we are somehow immune. Presenting lies as one side’s version of things do you no good when reporting from a jail cell.
We can help the fourth estate to gain the courage to save this country by hounding them on this issue and giving them a real story; the majority of Americans are resisting this nightmare in objective ways. This includes economic boycotts such as #GrabYourWallet, marches large and small, filling gerrymandered GOP offices with people asking for healthcare and protection of the environment-organizing, mobilizing and hitting the alarm bell. It would grieve me to think of those who struggled in the past for humanity would lose it to a refusal to recognize that our way of life is being lost by the minute. Others may be able to, but I could not live with myself thinking that Dr. King, John Lewis, Robert Kennedy, the freedom riders and so many others gave or risked their lives for dignity and we just gave it all away out of fear or inaction. It is a fundamental tenet of democracy that the minority can only rule over the majority by consent. I do not consent! Instead I will find a hundred things to do to resist and rectify this obscenity daily-and then come up with a hundred more, one call, letter. conversation and voter registration at a time.