It's Always The Media

 

NOTE: People more intelligent than I have posted 2024 will be a significant year in human history, especially American history. While some say the foreboding evidence is merely circumstantial, I haven’t seen a position with comforting substance. Irrespective of whatever our opinions may be, accept my appreciation for being part of our growing gang of rabble-rousers, trouble makers and blossoming Paul Reveres here Brianwilsonwrites@ Substack.com. Your sharing these paragraphs with friends, acquaintances and outright enemies is both appreciated and responsible for our ginormous growth! Special thanks to you who have deemed the content worthy of your financial support. Hopefully, this space will not disappoint as we high-dive into whatever cauldron of events waiting in the months to come. Doing my best to bring you the best I have, may we all enjoy a Happy New Year’s Eve, excellent libations, great company - and some decent football!

Now this…

In this Age of Finger Pointing, Blame is the most popular pastime. From Elementary School to the Board Room to the White House, Personal Responsibility is following the Do-Do Bird, Hula-Hoop, 8-Track and Floppy Disc into extinction.

The root cause is Aggressive Ignorance, a real national pandemic. Public Education has been rightly cited as a Carrier but a lackluster education which so many fellow citizens have been burdened has a simple solution: Curiosity. Rather than struggle with the Dewey Decimal System and rummage through musty stacks of dead-tree books, a simple Google or YouTube search instantly brings a tsunami of articles, references, videos explaining Everything about Everything.

So why does Aggressive Ignorance persist?

Because Google, YouTube, X, Drudge etc., are News Aggregators, not Reporters or Networks initiating  stories we call the “News”. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NPR are the media suppliers. And if the Media doesn’t report it, citizens don’t – and most often won’t - know it. When diagnosing the Aggressive Ignorance infecting the public, the Media is always to blame.

What about politicians?

It wasn’t National Geographic that observed “Leopards don’t change their spots”. Going back to the Founding Dads, one would be hard pressed to find a politician with his integrity intact. The romanced versions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson & Co. gloss over their hypocrisy in violating their own vaunted principles. However, compared with those who populate the DC Swamp of Government today, the signers of the Declaration were damn near saints. But they were still politicians and, in this analogy, politicians are just like leopards.

Back in the day, the media pulled no punches. Newspapers and periodicals fulfilled their role as ‘watchdogs at the gate’, to inform, educate and occasionally entertain the public.

Around the beginning of the 20^th century, that began to change. Newspapers, then radio, then television, then cable and satellite TV “news” conglomerates morphed from ‘watchdog’ to ‘lap dog’; from serving the interests of the public by revealing scurrilous skullduggery of politicians against “Liberty and Justice for all”, to creating smoke screens of Fake News to hide the crimes committed against the same people the media was to protect having as their own protection: the First Amendment. Citizens continue to suffer increasingly with Aggressive Ignorance and the cause is always comes back to the Media.

The greater danger is Aggressive Ignorance leads to lost freedom, lost rights.

In the concluding chapter of “Last Rights; The Death of American Liberty”, author Jim Bovard explains how it happens:

“Each lost freedom becomes a domino falling against all the remaining rights and liberties. Secrecy and censorship spur a deadly political spiral. If the media is cowed into silence or turned into political accomplices, citizens are unlikely to learn of proliferating abuses. If there is no freedom of information, government officials can fabricate perils to frighten people into ever greater submission. It then becomes easier to justify expanding surveillance, thereby deterring people from voicing criticism or even expressing wayward thoughts in emails. Once dissent is stifled, rulers can contrive pretexts to restrict or prohibit protests. Suppressing evidence of rising discontent enables politicians to further aggrandize their power. Citizens may not recognize the totality of their oppression until it is too late to resist.”

Secrecy and Censorship cannot exist without Media accomplices.

You wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t love Freedom and your “inalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Ignorance is your most lethal enemy. It exists through the culpability of the Media.

“'In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.' Baba Dioum

The Media is our ubiquitous teacher. Censoring the challenges to our freedom, the Media is teaching us to hate the things we love; to misunderstand them, to ensure they will not be conserved, but eradicated.

Do you “recognize the totality of [your] oppression”? Is it “too late to resist”?

Well?