You may have noticed that our narcissist-in-chief has decided that the media is the “enemy of the people”. Apparently, a component of his “Make America so Great!” agenda. He and his spin-spin-spinsters trot it out. You know the cast and crew — K.A. CONning-her-way, Spicey Spicer, et al. The regime keeps insisting that the president, himself, is our best news source.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but the repeated and blatant disregard for free speech coming from our “president” (oath of office defend the constitution, anyone?) continually stuns me. I asked a history professor friend to weigh in and he said: “Portugal’s Salazar and Spain’s Franco… and of course the Castro boys in Cuba. Manipulating and belittling ‘free’ journalism is a hallmark of dictatorial regimes that truck no criticism.“
When I allowed “school” to slowly funnel my voice and mind into a font of cult propaganda, I experienced first hand the psychological damage inflicted when free speech erodes. The book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — the go-to guide for cultic-study scholars and clinicians who work with ex-cult members — specifically addresses this: author Robert Jay Lifton wrote: “The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication … the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences and expresses), but also –in its penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself.”
Again, I shouldn’t be stunned, but when I see and hear Trump trolls and minions mindlessly repeating the latest superficial, and baseless, slogan spewing forth from the White House … well, what can I say. A fairly sizable number of Trump voters believe that George Soros paid the millions of Women’s March protesters.
Hey, George, where’s my check?