Donald Trump is the laziest and stupidest man to ever hold public office, let alone our nation’s highest one. He does not do anything without a basic and simplistic reason. While the rest of us wring our hands and fret, “Why is he ignoring the Constitution, not to mention simple common sense and decency?” there is a reason. It is the same reason that Trump does everything. Ratings. I am not joking. The horrifying fact is that this past week, when Trump has been milking the Los Angeles demonstrations for all that they’re worth, his approval rating on the topic of immigration has soared.
Trump understands television and how people process life through television. That’s the only thing about politics that he understands and so far it has been enough. Plus there’s another layer to this awfulness, and that is that right-wing media has a huge presence and a lot of people are only getting their information there — so they’re being lied to.
If you put accounts of the Los Angeles protests side by side, Breitbart, RSBN, Fox News, Newsmax, the lot of them, are reporting one version of reality and the Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, etc., are reporting another one. In the right-wing version, Los Angeles is burning to the ground. And a lot of Republicans are jumping right onboard that myth.
Apparently the city of LA has been burned to the ground. pic.twitter.com/5p6r7RCynC
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 9, 2025
We cannot have two versions of reality. Watergate would never have been a scandal if Richard Nixon had right-wing media at his disposal. Or, it would have been a minor one, but certainly not one that toppled his administration and sent him packing. Whatever side of the aisle people were on in the 70’s, we all stipulated to the same basic facts.
No more. Now we have Trump manipulating an information silo for the purposes of his own popularity and it is working. That is the tragedy of all this.
We have to see a change in corporate media because the First Amendment and democracy depend upon it. That is the source of the problem. Ronald Reagan put us here when he abrogated the Fairness In Broadcasting Doctrine. If we still had that in effect, when Fox News ran some whacky opinion piece, somebody else could jump in and counter it. That would in fact be fair and balanced reporting, as Roger Ailes used to claim Fox News was.
But we don’t have that luxury anymore. The First Amendment allows the kinds of lies and distortions that go on regularly in this day and age and that is why we have Trump. And what is Trump saying? Things like, “Gonna be troops everywhere,” and “the bar is what I say it is.”
The man is planning a coup d’etat. Or shall I say another coup d’etat. It’s just a question of when he makes his move and what his particular version of the Reichstag Fire looks like. All that we know is that it will be immigrant related, race war related, because that is what the Republicans are looking to foment. Look who crawled out of the woodwork to give us her two cents.
The whole thing started when ICE agents jumped out of vans at a Home Depot in tactical gear and charged at a group of day laborers. pic.twitter.com/IfG3hW01ry
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 9, 2025
That’s the Trump/Republican playbook, friends. And will democracy be left standing? I guess we’re going to find out. We have not been in an hour this dark, this much of a threat to our way of life, since WWII.
So those dastardly immigrants have graduated from eating domestic pets to burning whole cities?!
I think it’s more like the left wing thugs that are protesting ICE and immigrant’s removal.
Grow up and learn to think. There are enough parrots flying around.
Not to mention monkeys and in this day and age, pigs. RSBN should do a documentary on the Flying Pigs Of Florida and the MAGAs will believe it.
As I’ve been saying for years, the problem in this country is that right-wing media is lying to people and they believe it. We may lose democracy to propaganda.
The part of the Reagan Revolution that’s never gotten the attention it should is it implementing a broad strategy to gut public education and ‘dumb down’ America. When you think about eliminating the Fairness Doctrine remember the seeds of the gutting of public education (from grade school through college/universities) had taken root. Add in cable news and the move to 24/7 “news” channels and again I say this was carefully planned. I was talking with an old high school coach earlier and he says we’ve gotten what we deserve for allowing all this to happen. He attributes it to selfishness and he’s right, but I think it goes deeper than that.
Not just lying, but lying that anyone who disagrees with them are the ones lying.