I was napping when they broke into the Capitol. My wife, Martha, woke me to tell me the news. At that point, the riot (or “insurrection,” if you prefer, although I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms at the time) was a couple hours old; it appeared that Congress was safe, our representatives tweeting and cuddling each other in their undisclosed safety bunkers. Ok, I don’t remember any reports of “cuddling,” but I like to think of Susan Collins and Chuck Schumer holding each other tight.
Martha said she thought we were watching an important moment in American history. I said I didn’t think so; there’d already been so much insanity during Trump’s four years in office that the scene struck me as just another example–though a particularly dramatic one–of MAGA’s criminal exuberance. It was, I thought, Trump’s political death knell.
Five years after the fact, with our criminal president reinstated for a second term, I understand that day—and especially its aftermath—differently. January 6, 2021 was the day America broke.
Archive: http://archive.today/L3hAL
At some point the US needs to just accept that it’s always been broken. Every time something happens media comes out acting like everything was perfectly fine until this very recent thing happened.
That shithole country is a never-ending slog of pain and suffering.
I called it our beer hall putsch at the time and was unfortunately correct
Republicans broke America. It’s been the plan since Reagan.
Those of us old enough to remember consider Dubya signing the USA Patriot Act into law what broke America.
You know, Dubya… The creation of the
American GestapoDHS, “enemy combatants” and rendition of prisoners to foreign countries to get waterboarded while dodging the Geneva Convention, Gitmo prisoners denied due process and locked up there for decades, extra-judicial killings abroad, labeling people terrorists to strip them of their constitutional rights, secret courts… All that shit started with Dubya.That’s when America went fully fascist for the first time. I mean it’s always kinda sorta reeked of fascism since the end of WW2, but Dubya took it all the way to the other side of the fence.
That’s also when I left and renounced my citizenship. Fuck fascism. Members of my family had to deal with the original fascists and some lived to tell us kids what they went through. So you know what? I really, REALLY, R.E.A.L.L.Y. can’t stand fascists.
It shits me to tears seeing Bush’s reputation being rehabilitated. He was and is a fascist. In November 2004 I decided to leave America when I could. Happily living in a more decent society now.
Those of us possibly even older may point to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in '87. From Wikipedia, the fairness doctrine “required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.” In short, it’s repeal paved the way for Fox News and led all the way to CBS under Weiss.
But to your point, there are 3 things on my platform that I tell anyone who wants to hear it. 3 actionable items:
- Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.
- Repeal the Patriot Act.
- Overturn Citizens United.
I didn’t say it would be easy.
Fairness doctrine never applied to newspapers, magazines, cable television, podcasts, youtube channels, twitch streamers, and so on.
It literally only ever applied to broadcast television and broadcast radio. In other words, anyone using radio spectrum to broadcast their message. It applied exclusively to broadcast because businesses pay licensing fees for exclusive use of specific bands of the publicly available radio spectrum (naturally public I might add, literally anyone with the knowledge and tools can set up a radio tower which is why the spectrum is tightly controlled). Cable Internet is private infrastructure, the internet in general is hosted on private infrastructure, newspapers are built on private infrastructure, and so on. Under what arguments could we even use to regulate modern media in the same way?
It was abolished 9 years before FOX News (a cable tv station) existed.
I’m sorry but I get tired of this canard that if only we had kept it somehow things would be better. We live in a world where it got repealed, so I have a hard time believing that if it had been kept around that it would have been sufficiently updated to cover other forms of media. I mean look at the fight over Net Neutrality, it’s a similar idea as the Fairness Doctrine, that all data should be treated neutrally and equally, ISPs shouldn’t have the ability to pick winners and losers in media reach and access. It has been gutted and no longer exists.
With all that in mind I find it so hard to believe it being kept around would have changed much about what is happening now. Hardly anybody even watches antenna driven over the air television anymore.
I watched the supreme court pick who won the 2000 election and knew I was seeing an ending
