Speech and the Compliant Media

Timothy Snyder, author of the wisest and clearest book for our time, On Tyranny, is leaving the US, accepting a prestigious position at the University of Toronto. His departure is part of the brain drain caused by the increasingly fascist US government’s project of stifling free speech. Our smartest commentators predict a state where all opposition speech, all dissent, is not only countered and drowned out by official state media such as FOX news, but rendered illegal. The government has already issued orders to this effect. Soon it won’t be just foreign students arrested in the street—and there have been several hundred such arrests--but anyone. And the punishment will be prison, as it happened for Victor Navalny, the Russian opposition leader poisoned, imprisoned, and finally killed by the Russian state. We can see Snyder’s departure for Canada, and the departure of other intellectuals, either as the rats leaving the sinking ship, &/or as a way for Snyder, who has written for the last decade about how tyranny arises and how it functions, to keep writing freely. One of Snyder’s key lessons is, “Do not obey in advance.” We are seeing the news media obeying in advance, self-censoring, timid about covering significant events. If everyone stopped obeying in advance, we’d be much better off.

Which leads us to the next topic—how to stay informed in a truth-poor media environment.

  It’s increasingly evident that traditional media—say, the evening TV news--cover the weather and fires and earthquakes and sports and celebrities and car crashes and airplane crashes quite thoroughly. They give us snippets of what’s happening economically and politically to create the illusion that this is journalism and it’s informing us. But there is little context provided. Even though the major networks employ some responsible journalists, those journalists are stifled by their corporate policies.  One of the first to go was a political cartoonist at the Washington Post, Ann Telnaes. When she was told in January that the paper wouldn’t be printing a terrific cartoon of hers (https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post), showing people kowtowing to the leader with bags of money, she quit that job she’d had for 17 years. The corporate media are not examining the legal and moral ramifications of the increasingly repressive executive orders and firings of thousands of workers, and shuttering of entire federal agencies that safeguard our heath, provide disaster relief, and so forth, and they are canceling every hard-won policy to fight climate disaster. They are not covering the protest movement much, the huge crowds at Bernie Sanders and AOC events. They are parroting MAGA language about protest, quoting people who call critics of Israeli aggression “antisemitic” and international students and faculty at universities “terrorists.” But we must be informed, YOU must be informed, by reading the wisest voices of the day.

Read Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Timothy Snyder, Joyce Vance, and others on Substack. As long as it still exists, get informed on MSNBC, especially Rachel Maddow at 6:00 pm weekdays on for the first 100 days of this Administration (i.e., until the end of April). As far as we know, Maddow’s program is the only source of copious information and images of mass protest across the nation.