The American media, by and large, does not practice journalism in any true sense of the word. Whether you are a corporate media consumer of broadcast and cable TV or of the large Internet providers, you are fed a steady diet of news that is designed to titillate, entertain, frighten, and enrage. There is rarely any follow up on the supposed blockbuster “Breaking News” that happens five times a day, only more “stunning,” “shocking,” “grim,” “troubling,” “bombshell,” and “disturbing” breaking news. This is true of both Democrat and Republican leaning news agencies, the major wire services, and the newspaper conglomerates.
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s impeachment saga or Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with China and Ukraine, the news media provides a steady stream of “Breaking News” and banner headlines, that one side heralds as damning evidence and the other denounces as politically motivated fake news. No major media outlet delves deeply into the details of the issue and seeks out the truth. You never see a lengthy special report into the facts that lays out a timeline, catalogs the evidence, and provides a full, unbiased picture so that citizens can make their own determination of the truth. We only get to see one senator’s face telling us about the evidence, followed by another talking head telling us that it is just partisan lies and “distractions.”
In another time not so long ago, Americans expected their political leaders to be honest, law-abiding, and of good moral character. For decades prior to the Watergate affair, Americans naïvely believed that this was the case. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, there were accusations of a partisan witch hunt, and biased media coverage, but Americans were given thorough and sound reporting of the facts and, while the media even then was dominated by Democrats, most newspapers and television news outlets adhered to the practices of sound journalism, verifying and corroborating information and following up their reports. The result was that even President Nixon’s strongest supporters on Capitol Hill ultimately accepted the truth and went to the White House to tell him that he faced certain impeachment and removal from office. Nixon announced his resignation from office the following day.
America was shaken to its very core by Watergate and the revelation of so much dirty trickery and criminal behavior by the executive. Yet today our presidents of both parties routinely engage in unconstitutional, immoral, and criminal behavior. Most Americans are totally uninterested, and the rest will defend “their” guy in face of incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing and condemn the “other” guy based on any unverified accusation whatsoever. Combine this massive apathy and rabid partisanship with news and social media outlets that cater to your particular political leanings, and you wind up where we find ourselves today – what I call the Post-Truth World.
By the time President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and suborning perjury of others in an effort to cover up his sexual affair with a young White House intern, Americans had moved on from caring about such behavior. The charges were brought entirely along a party-line vote, and Clinton was found not guilty by a similar party-line vote in the senate trial. Regardless of what one thinks of the propriety of the investigation or the seriousness of lying about sexual liaisons, the reaction of the political class, media, and the citizenry were telling. Supporters of Clinton and his policies denied the incontrovertible evidence that the president had committed perjury and encouraged others to lie under oath. Simultaneously, Clinton’s opponents never acknowledged the possibility that, while the president’s behavior in the matter was improper, immoral, and criminal; lying about a sexual liaison might not rise to the level worthy of bringing down a presidential administration.
Since 1998, it seems as though Americans no longer care whether “their” guy is a criminal, liar, or sexual deviant and abuser. They don’t care if he violates the constitution on a regular basis, commits acts of war against countries around the world, or has used his past positions of power to enrich himself and his relatives. We have devolved into a nation split into three camps; the apathetic and ignorant, the socialist left, and the conservative right. The apathetic and ignorant are by far the largest group, and is composed of the majority of Americans who are fiercely anti-intellectual and proud of their ignorance, those who simply don’t care about politics because they believe it somehow does not affect them, and those who used to care but have simply given up because of the stupefying fog of the Post-Truth World and the apparent inability of the people to influence their government.
Meanwhile, our government conducts nearly all its activities in complete secrecy by classifying nearly everything it does and all associated documents as secret under absurd claims of “national security.” Having worked in intelligence, I can state truthfully that the vast majority of highly classified material I saw, much of it classified far above Top Secret, could be obtained by most anyone with a few Google searches. Back in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, revealing that the government had been lying to the American people for decades about the Vietnam War and had known for years that the war could not be won, and still continued to send thousands of soldiers to their deaths. When President Nixon got a federal court to place an injunction against further publication by the Times, The Washington Post and then other papers around the country began publishing excerpts, risking arrest by federal officials and financial ruin. Today, when someone exposes our government’s crimes and dirty secrets, the media is outraged – not by the government’s immorality and criminal conduct, but with how such precious secrets got loose and what the government is going to do to see that the leaker is severely punished. The media does not investigate the crimes revealed by leaks, but merely reports that the leak occurred and reassures viewers that measures are being taken to ensure they never again find out what their government is doing.
You don’t have to work in the intelligence business to know that there are very few legitimate government activities that truly need to be kept secret. The identity of a highly placed spy, the locations of nuclear submarines, and vulnerabilities of our military forces or national infrastructure may be legitimate secrets, but the vast majority of information is kept secret simply to shield bureaucrats from accountability for their wasteful spending, incompetence, and criminality. Ellsberg, who was arrested under the draconian Espionage Act of 1917, and later had his charges dropped, was supported by the media for his courage, and they published and investigated the dirty lies and secrets he had revealed, helping to shield him from prosecution in obscurity by the federal juggernaut. In our times, when Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden exposed illegal government surveillance on tens of thousands of Americans, intercepting and storing of Americans’ text messages, US war crimes, the treatment of prisoners held by our military and CIA, as well as the Democratic National Committee’s tampering with the presidential primary process, they were vilified as traitors and spies and pronounced worthy of nothing more than a lifetime in prison. Some 59 percent of Republicans and Democrats, and 54 percent of Americans as a whole thought Edward Snowden should be charged as a criminal for revealing the crimes being committed by their government.[i]
Fully 90 percent of the media outlets in the United States are controlled by just six giant corporations (Comcast/NBC Universal, Disney, CBS, Viacom, News Corporation, and AT&T). These corporations exist to generate money for themselves and their stockholders, not to safeguard our republic from corrupt politicians. Our country’s so-called journalists have embraced their role as providers of the information the government wants disseminated. Journalists are not immune from the growing trend in American society, where people have become lazy in the extreme and no longer take pride in doing their jobs with skill and integrity. It is far easier for a journalist to simply cut and paste his reports from a government official’s email than to go out and pound the pavement with a notebook finding sources or spending hours researching the Internet to seek out the truth or uncover corruption.
Many journalists are now highly paid celebrities. Those who don’t make too many waves get entrée to the Washington or state capital socialite crowd, with its cocktail parties, fundraisers, and self-congratulatory awards dinners. Our journalistic class have been thoroughly co-opted by political elites; a journalist who steps too far out of line will find themselves shut out of the glittering world of the inner circle, and likely be shut down by their corporate bosses. This is the reason why you are fed a steady diet of “Breaking News” designed to make you afraid and angry but never fully informed of the truth about what your government is doing.
With the notable exception of the Vietnam War, America’s journalists have contented themselves with reporting only what the government wishes the American people to know. They simply parrot the lines fed to them by government officials, content to be getting gruesome video and press copy to fill up the 24-hour news cycle. The result has been that, right under the noses of the American people, our government has amassed for itself a global military empire, covering every continent save Antarctica. The American people, meanwhile, were never told much about our government’s acquisition of empire and were dutifully informed by the media that this empire was not really an empire, but rather a series of actions absolutely vital to our freedom, first to contain communism, then to “maintain stability,” then to fight the war on terrorism. No mainstream media company has ever seriously challenged any of these excuses for maintaining our empire and spending more on the military than the next largest nine countries combined.
Because America’s journalists are essentially government spokesmen, we get very little news from the empire. The only news comes when our imperial troops are killed or if a natural disaster abroad kills a lot of people. Americans only learned that we had soldiers involved in the Syrian civil war when their base was attacked in 2019, killing several servicemen. Why they were operating inside a country that we are not at war with was not even addressed, because the media have accepted the premise that America’s actions abroad are, by definition, proper, decent, and existentially imperative. You may hear a report about a military helicopter crash in the Philippines, but no reporter will ever question why our troops are operating six thousand miles from home in the midst of someone else’s country. We are permitted to hear nothing about the politics of the nations under our sway, nor what their leaders or people think and say about us. When have you ever seen a major story about the election of a leader in any foreign country, or what issues are being debated? There is also no coverage of the resentment and hatred that is bred by the presence of our legions in foreign countries. The noise and environmental damage caused by our military bases, the bars and brothels that sprout outside their gates, the sexual violence perpetrated by our legionnaires, and the accidental deaths caused by operations, fosters anger toward the United States across the globe. Such things are never reported upon by our media.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans were told that the terrorists ‘hate us because of our freedom.’ Nearly the entire country took this nonsense at face value and the media did very little to discover or report about the true motivation of the killers. A clear-headed journalist (or any good citizen for that matter) would, in the first place, immediately question any pronouncement made by the government. Second, they would dispassionately examine the plausibility of people killing themselves and thousands of innocents just because Americans, on the other side of the planet, are shopping online and going to the movies and Disney World. Very little work would have been involved to discover that bin-Laden had declared jihad against the United States years earlier because of the thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia –home of Mecca, holiest site in the Muslim world, US support for Israel and numerous repressive regimes in Arab countries, and sanctions against Iraq that had killed half a million Iraqi children; of which US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “…we think the price is worth it.” None of these reasons justify the attacks in any way, but a competent media would have informed Americans – years before 9/11 – about the declaration of war against them by bin-Laden, and questioned our continued presence in Saudi Arabia, given the resentment it generated among the Saudi people, the moral bankruptcy of that country’s ruling family, its brutal repression of dissidents, and its support for radical Islamism around the world. This in turn might have led, in an educated and engaged society, to a broader discussion of our continued military presence around the middle east and our support of repressive governments in the region.
Occasionally, little bits of news may trickle in from the far reaches of our empire, but the basic premise; the propriety and even the necessity of maintaining our empire is never questioned. A recent CNN story[ii] posted online gives a fine example. The headline, “US troops set to withdraw from Niger, State Department official says” was followed by a very short, 360-word story that informed readers that the north African nation had demanded that the US military leave the country and that talks were underway to establish a timeline for withdrawal. Having no polling data, I’m nonetheless confident in asserting that not one in ten Americans have any idea that their military was operating there. Not one word in the story was devoted to covering the very basics of journalism. WHO? What branch(es) of military are there and how many servicemen are present or have been killed or injured? Who approved the funding? WHAT? What operations are they engaged in? What types of bases are there? What are the goals they were sent to achieve? WHERE? Where are the forces located? Where have they been operating? WHEN? When did our military set up operations in Niger? WHY? Why were our troops sent there in the first place? Why does the US have more than 750 military bases on six continents? HOW? On whose authority were American soldiers deployed into a foreign country? Did congress authorize the deployment? How many Americans are aware that military operations are being conducted in their name from bases in a landlocked desert nation in north Africa, or can find Niger (or Africa for that matter) on a world map?
On the conservative side of the media, Fox News devoted 621 words to the story.[iii] This slightly more expansive report answered some of the questions not addressed by the CNN story, explaining that the US was operating “air bases,” giving the location of one, and that that they are in Niger because “Washington is concerned about the spread of jihadi violence.” The report also stated that our military was there to conduct operations in the “Sahel” region, but never explained what that was. All the important questions, concerning the propriety, legality, morality, responsibility, accountability, wisdom, efficacy, and specific goals of the operation still remained unanswered.
America’s journalists have accepted a worldview that America runs the world by right, garrisons the entire globe with its armed forces, conducts military operations, and carries out acts of war and assassination without consultation with the people’s representatives, and does so in a manner not consistent with our constitution. That politicians and bureaucrats are always acting in a selfless and benevolent manner is taken as gospel. With this premise accepted without question, and with Americans’ attention spans only as long as a Tik-Tok video, there is no need to delve into the unanswered questions outlined above. The story is simply that the empire is losing a base, used for the (obviously) righteous cause of conducting unknown operations against an unknown enemy in an undefined region, and is looking for a new location for its cantonment.
America no longer has a media establishment that aggressively seeks out truth, nor a citizenry properly distrustful of government and which is prepared to examine evidence that might challenge their assumptions. While the government and their corporate sponsors placate us with the bread and circuses of comic book motion pictures, video games, Applebee’s, Instagram, and the ultra-violence of movies, television, and MMA brawlers, we citizens, who have already lost our republic by allowing it to be corrupted into an empire, are rapidly losing our prosperity and our way of life.
---------------------------------------------
[i] Geiger, A. (2024, April 14). How Americans have viewed government surveillance and privacy since Snowden leaks. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/06/04/how-americans-have-viewed-government-surveillance-and-privacy-since-snowden-leaks/
[ii] Atwood, K. (2024, April 19). US troops set to withdraw from Niger, State Department official says. CNN.com. Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/politics/us-troops-to-withdraw-from-niger/index.html
[iii] Morris, K. (2024, April 20). US military begins process to remove troops from troubled African nation. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-begins-process-remove-troops-niger
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s impeachment saga or Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with China and Ukraine, the news media provides a steady stream of “Breaking News” and banner headlines, that one side heralds as damning evidence and the other denounces as politically motivated fake news. No major media outlet delves deeply into the details of the issue and seeks out the truth. You never see a lengthy special report into the facts that lays out a timeline, catalogs the evidence, and provides a full, unbiased picture so that citizens can make their own determination of the truth. We only get to see one senator’s face telling us about the evidence, followed by another talking head telling us that it is just partisan lies and “distractions.”
In another time not so long ago, Americans expected their political leaders to be honest, law-abiding, and of good moral character. For decades prior to the Watergate affair, Americans naïvely believed that this was the case. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, there were accusations of a partisan witch hunt, and biased media coverage, but Americans were given thorough and sound reporting of the facts and, while the media even then was dominated by Democrats, most newspapers and television news outlets adhered to the practices of sound journalism, verifying and corroborating information and following up their reports. The result was that even President Nixon’s strongest supporters on Capitol Hill ultimately accepted the truth and went to the White House to tell him that he faced certain impeachment and removal from office. Nixon announced his resignation from office the following day.
America was shaken to its very core by Watergate and the revelation of so much dirty trickery and criminal behavior by the executive. Yet today our presidents of both parties routinely engage in unconstitutional, immoral, and criminal behavior. Most Americans are totally uninterested, and the rest will defend “their” guy in face of incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing and condemn the “other” guy based on any unverified accusation whatsoever. Combine this massive apathy and rabid partisanship with news and social media outlets that cater to your particular political leanings, and you wind up where we find ourselves today – what I call the Post-Truth World.
By the time President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and suborning perjury of others in an effort to cover up his sexual affair with a young White House intern, Americans had moved on from caring about such behavior. The charges were brought entirely along a party-line vote, and Clinton was found not guilty by a similar party-line vote in the senate trial. Regardless of what one thinks of the propriety of the investigation or the seriousness of lying about sexual liaisons, the reaction of the political class, media, and the citizenry were telling. Supporters of Clinton and his policies denied the incontrovertible evidence that the president had committed perjury and encouraged others to lie under oath. Simultaneously, Clinton’s opponents never acknowledged the possibility that, while the president’s behavior in the matter was improper, immoral, and criminal; lying about a sexual liaison might not rise to the level worthy of bringing down a presidential administration.
Since 1998, it seems as though Americans no longer care whether “their” guy is a criminal, liar, or sexual deviant and abuser. They don’t care if he violates the constitution on a regular basis, commits acts of war against countries around the world, or has used his past positions of power to enrich himself and his relatives. We have devolved into a nation split into three camps; the apathetic and ignorant, the socialist left, and the conservative right. The apathetic and ignorant are by far the largest group, and is composed of the majority of Americans who are fiercely anti-intellectual and proud of their ignorance, those who simply don’t care about politics because they believe it somehow does not affect them, and those who used to care but have simply given up because of the stupefying fog of the Post-Truth World and the apparent inability of the people to influence their government.
Meanwhile, our government conducts nearly all its activities in complete secrecy by classifying nearly everything it does and all associated documents as secret under absurd claims of “national security.” Having worked in intelligence, I can state truthfully that the vast majority of highly classified material I saw, much of it classified far above Top Secret, could be obtained by most anyone with a few Google searches. Back in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, revealing that the government had been lying to the American people for decades about the Vietnam War and had known for years that the war could not be won, and still continued to send thousands of soldiers to their deaths. When President Nixon got a federal court to place an injunction against further publication by the Times, The Washington Post and then other papers around the country began publishing excerpts, risking arrest by federal officials and financial ruin. Today, when someone exposes our government’s crimes and dirty secrets, the media is outraged – not by the government’s immorality and criminal conduct, but with how such precious secrets got loose and what the government is going to do to see that the leaker is severely punished. The media does not investigate the crimes revealed by leaks, but merely reports that the leak occurred and reassures viewers that measures are being taken to ensure they never again find out what their government is doing.
You don’t have to work in the intelligence business to know that there are very few legitimate government activities that truly need to be kept secret. The identity of a highly placed spy, the locations of nuclear submarines, and vulnerabilities of our military forces or national infrastructure may be legitimate secrets, but the vast majority of information is kept secret simply to shield bureaucrats from accountability for their wasteful spending, incompetence, and criminality. Ellsberg, who was arrested under the draconian Espionage Act of 1917, and later had his charges dropped, was supported by the media for his courage, and they published and investigated the dirty lies and secrets he had revealed, helping to shield him from prosecution in obscurity by the federal juggernaut. In our times, when Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden exposed illegal government surveillance on tens of thousands of Americans, intercepting and storing of Americans’ text messages, US war crimes, the treatment of prisoners held by our military and CIA, as well as the Democratic National Committee’s tampering with the presidential primary process, they were vilified as traitors and spies and pronounced worthy of nothing more than a lifetime in prison. Some 59 percent of Republicans and Democrats, and 54 percent of Americans as a whole thought Edward Snowden should be charged as a criminal for revealing the crimes being committed by their government.[i]
Fully 90 percent of the media outlets in the United States are controlled by just six giant corporations (Comcast/NBC Universal, Disney, CBS, Viacom, News Corporation, and AT&T). These corporations exist to generate money for themselves and their stockholders, not to safeguard our republic from corrupt politicians. Our country’s so-called journalists have embraced their role as providers of the information the government wants disseminated. Journalists are not immune from the growing trend in American society, where people have become lazy in the extreme and no longer take pride in doing their jobs with skill and integrity. It is far easier for a journalist to simply cut and paste his reports from a government official’s email than to go out and pound the pavement with a notebook finding sources or spending hours researching the Internet to seek out the truth or uncover corruption.
Many journalists are now highly paid celebrities. Those who don’t make too many waves get entrée to the Washington or state capital socialite crowd, with its cocktail parties, fundraisers, and self-congratulatory awards dinners. Our journalistic class have been thoroughly co-opted by political elites; a journalist who steps too far out of line will find themselves shut out of the glittering world of the inner circle, and likely be shut down by their corporate bosses. This is the reason why you are fed a steady diet of “Breaking News” designed to make you afraid and angry but never fully informed of the truth about what your government is doing.
With the notable exception of the Vietnam War, America’s journalists have contented themselves with reporting only what the government wishes the American people to know. They simply parrot the lines fed to them by government officials, content to be getting gruesome video and press copy to fill up the 24-hour news cycle. The result has been that, right under the noses of the American people, our government has amassed for itself a global military empire, covering every continent save Antarctica. The American people, meanwhile, were never told much about our government’s acquisition of empire and were dutifully informed by the media that this empire was not really an empire, but rather a series of actions absolutely vital to our freedom, first to contain communism, then to “maintain stability,” then to fight the war on terrorism. No mainstream media company has ever seriously challenged any of these excuses for maintaining our empire and spending more on the military than the next largest nine countries combined.
Because America’s journalists are essentially government spokesmen, we get very little news from the empire. The only news comes when our imperial troops are killed or if a natural disaster abroad kills a lot of people. Americans only learned that we had soldiers involved in the Syrian civil war when their base was attacked in 2019, killing several servicemen. Why they were operating inside a country that we are not at war with was not even addressed, because the media have accepted the premise that America’s actions abroad are, by definition, proper, decent, and existentially imperative. You may hear a report about a military helicopter crash in the Philippines, but no reporter will ever question why our troops are operating six thousand miles from home in the midst of someone else’s country. We are permitted to hear nothing about the politics of the nations under our sway, nor what their leaders or people think and say about us. When have you ever seen a major story about the election of a leader in any foreign country, or what issues are being debated? There is also no coverage of the resentment and hatred that is bred by the presence of our legions in foreign countries. The noise and environmental damage caused by our military bases, the bars and brothels that sprout outside their gates, the sexual violence perpetrated by our legionnaires, and the accidental deaths caused by operations, fosters anger toward the United States across the globe. Such things are never reported upon by our media.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans were told that the terrorists ‘hate us because of our freedom.’ Nearly the entire country took this nonsense at face value and the media did very little to discover or report about the true motivation of the killers. A clear-headed journalist (or any good citizen for that matter) would, in the first place, immediately question any pronouncement made by the government. Second, they would dispassionately examine the plausibility of people killing themselves and thousands of innocents just because Americans, on the other side of the planet, are shopping online and going to the movies and Disney World. Very little work would have been involved to discover that bin-Laden had declared jihad against the United States years earlier because of the thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia –home of Mecca, holiest site in the Muslim world, US support for Israel and numerous repressive regimes in Arab countries, and sanctions against Iraq that had killed half a million Iraqi children; of which US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “…we think the price is worth it.” None of these reasons justify the attacks in any way, but a competent media would have informed Americans – years before 9/11 – about the declaration of war against them by bin-Laden, and questioned our continued presence in Saudi Arabia, given the resentment it generated among the Saudi people, the moral bankruptcy of that country’s ruling family, its brutal repression of dissidents, and its support for radical Islamism around the world. This in turn might have led, in an educated and engaged society, to a broader discussion of our continued military presence around the middle east and our support of repressive governments in the region.
Occasionally, little bits of news may trickle in from the far reaches of our empire, but the basic premise; the propriety and even the necessity of maintaining our empire is never questioned. A recent CNN story[ii] posted online gives a fine example. The headline, “US troops set to withdraw from Niger, State Department official says” was followed by a very short, 360-word story that informed readers that the north African nation had demanded that the US military leave the country and that talks were underway to establish a timeline for withdrawal. Having no polling data, I’m nonetheless confident in asserting that not one in ten Americans have any idea that their military was operating there. Not one word in the story was devoted to covering the very basics of journalism. WHO? What branch(es) of military are there and how many servicemen are present or have been killed or injured? Who approved the funding? WHAT? What operations are they engaged in? What types of bases are there? What are the goals they were sent to achieve? WHERE? Where are the forces located? Where have they been operating? WHEN? When did our military set up operations in Niger? WHY? Why were our troops sent there in the first place? Why does the US have more than 750 military bases on six continents? HOW? On whose authority were American soldiers deployed into a foreign country? Did congress authorize the deployment? How many Americans are aware that military operations are being conducted in their name from bases in a landlocked desert nation in north Africa, or can find Niger (or Africa for that matter) on a world map?
On the conservative side of the media, Fox News devoted 621 words to the story.[iii] This slightly more expansive report answered some of the questions not addressed by the CNN story, explaining that the US was operating “air bases,” giving the location of one, and that that they are in Niger because “Washington is concerned about the spread of jihadi violence.” The report also stated that our military was there to conduct operations in the “Sahel” region, but never explained what that was. All the important questions, concerning the propriety, legality, morality, responsibility, accountability, wisdom, efficacy, and specific goals of the operation still remained unanswered.
America’s journalists have accepted a worldview that America runs the world by right, garrisons the entire globe with its armed forces, conducts military operations, and carries out acts of war and assassination without consultation with the people’s representatives, and does so in a manner not consistent with our constitution. That politicians and bureaucrats are always acting in a selfless and benevolent manner is taken as gospel. With this premise accepted without question, and with Americans’ attention spans only as long as a Tik-Tok video, there is no need to delve into the unanswered questions outlined above. The story is simply that the empire is losing a base, used for the (obviously) righteous cause of conducting unknown operations against an unknown enemy in an undefined region, and is looking for a new location for its cantonment.
America no longer has a media establishment that aggressively seeks out truth, nor a citizenry properly distrustful of government and which is prepared to examine evidence that might challenge their assumptions. While the government and their corporate sponsors placate us with the bread and circuses of comic book motion pictures, video games, Applebee’s, Instagram, and the ultra-violence of movies, television, and MMA brawlers, we citizens, who have already lost our republic by allowing it to be corrupted into an empire, are rapidly losing our prosperity and our way of life.
---------------------------------------------
[i] Geiger, A. (2024, April 14). How Americans have viewed government surveillance and privacy since Snowden leaks. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/06/04/how-americans-have-viewed-government-surveillance-and-privacy-since-snowden-leaks/
[ii] Atwood, K. (2024, April 19). US troops set to withdraw from Niger, State Department official says. CNN.com. Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/politics/us-troops-to-withdraw-from-niger/index.html
[iii] Morris, K. (2024, April 20). US military begins process to remove troops from troubled African nation. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-begins-process-remove-troops-niger
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