Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 23, 2026 at 12:13 am
Reputable news organizations believe they’re hurt when a reporter gets his facts wrong—or, worse, invents a story for sensationalistic attention.
For Fox News Network, getting hurt means that some of its own reporters have told the truth. And, as a result, many of its viewers are turning to other Right-wing propaganda outlets.
In a series of email exchanges, Fox Network executives revealed they were not simply loyal to President Donald Trump but mortally afraid of him.
Star Host Tucker Carlson said that Trump was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Nor was Carlson the only one. The fear started at the very top—with Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch: “Nobody wants Trump as an enemy. We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.”
Up to January 26, 2021, Murdoch allowed Fox advertiser Mike “My Pillow” Lindell to appear on the Tucker Carlson Tonight Show to lie that Trump had been cheated of victory by massive voter fraud.
Questioned as to why he allowed it, Murdoch agreed with the statement, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
Rupert Murdoch
In short: Lust for money, not ideology, motivated Fox’s slant on politics.
And, as with all Fox News commentary, truth played no role in the decision to air it.
With unapologetic hypocrisy, Fox stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked the lies being peddled by Trump—and their own network.
In a text to Ingraham, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, an attorney who was representing the Trump campaign, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so.
Ingraham: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
Hannity said Giuliani was “acting like an insane person” and Ingraham described him as “an idiot.”
And Hannity said: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
Sean Hannity
How do we know all this? Certainly not because some outraged Fox whistleblower made these exchanges public.
It’s because Fox’s chief victim, Dominion Voting Systems, decided to strike back.
The Denver-based company produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States.
Dominion, claimed Fox, had criminally enabled Democrats to steal the election for Joe Biden by programming its machines to throw out votes meant for Trump.
Its reputation unfairly tarnished, its employees threatened with violence by Trump’s Fascistic supporters, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in March, 2021.
Dominion charged Fox News with pushing false conspiracy theories about the company to win back dissatisfied viewers upset with its coverage of Trump’s defeat.
Libel lawsuits are typically centered around one falsehood. But Dominion cites a lengthy list of Fox hosts making false claims even though they were known to be untrue.
According to an almost 200–page document Dominion filed in the lawsuit:
“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS.’ Yet despite knowing the truth—or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth—Fox spread and endorsed these ‘outlandish voter fraud claims’ about Dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as ‘crazy,’ ‘absurd,’ and ‘shockingly reckless.’
“As a result of the false accusations broadcast by Fox into millions of American homes, Dominion has suffered unprecedented harm and its employees’ lives have been put in danger,” Dominion’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
Backing up its assertions: A treasury of emails, texts, testimony, and other private communications from Fox News personnel contradicting the network’s claims that Dominion’s voting machines had rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor.
These had all been obtained through the discovery process.
While Fox was echoing Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud,” its executives and commentators knew that he—and they themselves—were lying.
In mid-November 2020, Carlson texted one of his producers that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election.
Later, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s attorneys and a prominent accuser of election fraud, “is lying.”
Dana Perino, an anchor, called allegations of voter fraud against Dominion “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense.”
Murdoch told an executive on November 6, 2020 that “if Trump becomes a sore loser we should watch Sean [Hannity] especially and others don’t sound the same.”
And on January 5, 2021, Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott:
“It’s been suggested our prime time three [Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham] should independently or together say something like, ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won.’ It would “go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen.”
But Fox never aired such a statement.
Fox has repeatedly tried to get the case dismissed, but Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has refused to do so. A trial is slated to begin on April 17.
There is a difference between journalism and Fascistic propaganda. And Fox News Network routinely provides examples of the latter.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 22, 2026 at 12:49 am
For the administration of Adolf Hitler, the Number One enemy was the Jews. Enforcement of antisemitic laws was entrusted to the local police and Hitler’s paramilitary police forces, the S.A. (“Brownshirts”) and SS (“Schutzstaffel”).
To facilitate this all-out war on Jewry, the Reich operated 23 main concentration camps with over 1,000 satellite camps, along with a massive network of at least 44,000 total sites, including forced-labor camps, transit camps, ghettos, and extermination camps.
The result: An estimated slaughter of six million Jews, mostly throughout Eastern Europe and Russia.
For the administration of Donald Trump, the Number One enemy is Hispanics. Trump made attacking illegal immigration the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
And since taking office a second time, Trump has turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into his private army. Its size and budget dwarf those of every other federal law enforcement agency.
By July 21, 2026, according to ICE:
- The total number of deportations this fiscal year is 356,389.
- ICE currently holds 65,765 people in detention facilities.
- By June, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had arrested just over 43,000 people.
- That amounts to 1,438 arrests per day in June.
ICE operates roughly 212 to 225 active primary detention centers in the United States. Immigrants’ rights groups estimate a network of over 270 to 400 total facilities.
The United States has deported more than 25,000 people under secretive agreements with 35 countries to take migrants whose nation of origin refuse to take them.
In Nazi Germany, joking about Hitler or other high-ranking Nazis could result in arrest and imprisonment.
A merchant named Erich Kaiser found himself in “protective custody” for telling a joke: “Back in the day we used to have a Kaiser sent from heaven above. Today we have some arsehole from Berchtesgaden [Hitler’s mountain retreat].”
In Trump’s America, comedians who displease the President find themselves viciously attacked, even fired.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pressured ABC to fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. This followed on-air comments Kimmel had made after the September 10, 2025 shooting of Right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk.
Carr accused Kimmel of speaking disparagingly about Kirk. In fact, Kimmel had criticized Trump for showing more concern about building a White House ballroom than the loss of his alleged friend, Kirk.
Jimmy Kimmel
Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended, but a mass protest by viewers led the network to quickly reinstate him.
After Kirk’s death, Trump and his Republican allies threatened retribution (“consequences”) for people who spoke unflatteringly about him.
On September 15—five days after Kirk’s death—Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast: “So, when you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out and, hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed to use law enforcement to target Americans who mocked Kirk’s death, calling that domestic terrorism:
“We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law to take away your freedom.”
Stephen Colbert had hosted CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert since 2015. Since then, he had humorously mocked Trump’s outlandish and often illegal behavior.
On July 14, 2025, he made this joke:
“While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”
Stephen Colbert
Meanwhile, Paramount, the owner of CBS, was in the midst of an $8 billion sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media. For this, it needed the regulatory permission of the FCC of the Trump administration.
Trump had long made clear his desire to see Colbert removed from the airways. After CBS cancelled The Late Show, the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media was quickly approved by the FCC.
In 1938, using threats of overwhelming force, Adolf Hitler successfully annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Similarly, Donald Trump began making threats against Canada, Mexico and Greenland even before his second inauguration.
He threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the United States from Canada and Mexico unless they stopped the flow of drugs (which Americans crave) and illegal aliens (which employers crave).
And he continued to assault Canada with a seemingly endless series of tariffs. To which Canadians retaliated with counter-tariffs of 15% to 50% on $27.6 billion worth of U.S. goods.
Flag of Canada
Worse, he began insulting Canada’s leaders and making threats of using military force to make Canada—a staunch American ally for over 200 years—America’s “51st state.”
Next, he targeted Greenland—which is strategically significant to the United States for two reasons:
- It’s home to America’s Pituffik Space Base. This “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to the base’s website; and
- It sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 22, 2026 at 12:05 am
In the beginning was the audience. And the audience was filled with Fascistic hate and prejudice, and sought always to have its beliefs confirmed.
And then came Fox News Network, which sought to capture that audience—and, with it, huge ratings and profits.
At the center of both Fox and its audience stood Donald Trump—first as a Presidential candidate, then as President.
In him, Right-wingers found their ideal representative: He promised to destroy all those groups they hated.
Among these: Blacks, Asians, “uppity” women, Muslims, liberals, Hispanics, Democrats.
Donald Trump
So when Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election—by 81,284,666 votes for former Vice President Joe Biden versus 74,224,319 for Trump-–the Right was devastated. And furious.
Unlike its defeats in past Presidential elections, this time the Right refused to accept the will of the electorate.
Trump had often “joked” about how wonderful it would be for the United States to have a “President-for-Life”—as was the case in China.
This time the Right intended to make that a reality.
Central to making that happen was the Fox News Network.
In 2022, for its seventh consecutive year, Fox News stood as the top-rated cable news network in the United States. Fox averaged 1.4 million total day viewers.
By contrast, 733,000 watched MSNBC and 568,000 watched CNN.
In prime time, Fox came in first with an average of 2.3 million viewers in 2022.
MSNBC came in second with 1.2 million and CNN ranked third with an average of 730,000.
As for profits: Fox’s net income for the twelve months ending December 31, 2022 was $1.507B, a 4.94% increase year-over-year.
In 2015, Trump launched his campaign for President. His chances for success seemed impossible at the time—even to many mainstream Republicans.
But as he won victory after victory in Republican primaries, Fox News stuck with him. And stayed with him through the four years of his Presidency.
Fox was Trump’s favorite network. It gave him unstinting praise and sought to put a favorable spin on everything he did. As a result, Trump rarely gave interviews to CBS, NBC or ABC News.
In turn, Fox profited hugely as its audience—and advertisers—eagerly tuned in.
So when Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, he and Fox decided they must get him back into the Oval Office.
Trump did his best—or worst—by filing about 60 lawsuits to overturn the results of the election. But none of his attorneys could prove their claims that widespread fraud had robbed him of victory. The suits were dismissed by judges or withdrawn by Trump’s own attorneys.
Fox News couldn’t file fraudulent cases on Trump’s behalf. But it could poison the public mind by claiming—endlessly and falsely—that Trump had been cheated by massive voter fraud.
Fox didn’t even wait for the final results of the 2020 election to be called before it intervened on the side of what would soon be dubbed “The Big Lie.”
On Election Night, Chris Stirewalt, the political editor of Fox News Channel. was the first to project Biden’s victory in Arizona. This turned out to be right—and brought a furious attack upon Stirewalt.
Tucker Carlson
“We worked really hard to build what we have,” Fox host Tucker Carlson texted his producer, Alex Pfeiffer. “Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
For Carlson, credibility didn’t mean ensuring integrity in news reporting. It meant telling Fox’s Right-wing audience what it wanted to hear—whether the “news” was true or not.
Carlson added that he had spoken with fellow primetime commentators Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity minutes earlier and that they were “highly upset.”
In a January 26 Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, Stirewalt wrote: “Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally.
“The lie that Trump won the 2020 election wasn’t nearly as much aimed at the opposing party as it was at the news outlets that stated the obvious, incontrovertible fact.”
Stirewalt was fired from Fox News in January, 2021.
Trump was furious about the Arizona call. After the election, he attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax.
Which many of them did, costing Fox a big chunk of its audience.
For Fox, this was the ultimate catastrophe. The company began cracking down on its employees who had dared tell the truth on Election Night.
One case involved White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich. Her sin was fact-checking a Trump tweet accusing Dominion Voting Systems of election fraud.
Heinrich wrote that top election officials had determined “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
“Please get her fired,” Star host Tucker Carlson texted his fellow told host Sean Hannity: “Seriously….what the fuck? I’m actually shocked….It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity replied that he had already spoken to Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive. The next morning, Heinrich’s tweet had been deleted.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on September 16, 2026 at 12:26 am
On January 20, 2026, in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called for greater cooperation among the world’s middle-sized nations.
The reason: To protect themselves from great powers using tariffs to extort control over them.
An example of this: Ottawa and Beijing now have a limited tariff agreement that swaps reduced Chinese duties on Canadian canola seeds for lower Canadian tariffs on a capped volume of Chinese electric vehicles.
On January 26, Canada announced a plan to significantly expand trade with non‑U.S. countries, strengthen internal Canadian trade, and increase domestic investment by up to one trillion dollars over the next five years.
Canadian provinces and territories
On February 20, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled against emergency tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
This had been the basis—and excuse—for Trump’s slapping tariffs on more than 180 countries.
Ignoring the Supreme Court ruling Trump imposed a short term 10% global tariff.
On July 1, after a virtual meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts, Greer announced that the U.S. would not extend the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
Its goals had been to boost economic growth, reduce trade barriers, and secure preferential market access across North America.
On July 17, in a Truth Social post, Trump threatened to put new tariffs on Canada after hundreds of wildfires left much of the northern U.S. covered by smoke.
He could have offered to send American firefighters and firefighting equipment to Canada. But acting in a humane way has never been a part of Trump’s character.
On July 20, Trump alleged that Canada discriminated against American companies supplying alcohol, dairy and cars. He signed three proclamations under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, imposing 50% tariffs on Canadian dairy, alcohol, cars and other products.
On August 22, Trump’s 50% tariffs took effect on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods—dairy products, alcoholic beverages, cement and hockey equipment.
Trade negotiations had collapsed shortly before a midnight deadline the previous night.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms” had caused the collapse.
Mark Carney
“….The general attitude….is that the core Canadian industries either would be subsidiaries effectively of the United States industries or would put in place terms where those industries would be, gradually wound down in Canada and we’re not going to of course….accept those terms.”
And he warned that Canada would match the tariffs “dollar for dollar” starting on September 8.
After Canada suspended trade talks on August 21, Trump signed an executive order “changing” the name of Lake Ontario, which borders New York and Canada’s Ontario province, to Lake America.
Google and Apple, cravenly seeking to win Trump’s favor, immediately displayed maps offering the Trumpian version of geography.
“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions, we can have those discussions,” said Carney at a press conference.
There is no American precedent for such extortionate behavior—but there is a German one. That of Nazi Germany from t938 to 1939 under Adolf Hitler—first against Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland.
It was his aggression against Poland that ignited World War II.
But Trump can be beaten—if his enemies are willing to go all the way.
Democratic nations like Canada and Mexico dare not attack the United States militarily. America’s military is so powerful the country is threatened only by China and Russia.
But they can target with ruthless tariffs those Red states whose Fascistic voting blocs fanatically support Trump—and the House and Senate members who support him.
They can:
- Deprive Red state populations of the fruits, vegetables, meats, cars, computers, oil, gas—and especially beer and alcohol—they take for granted.
- Refuse to stock goods from Red states in their stores.
- Appeal to the patriotism of Canadians and Mexicans to maintain the boycott despite the suffering this will impose on their own countries.
Canada, in particular, has a deadly weapon it can unleash at any time:
Provincial authorities and grid operators (such as Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator) can reduce or halt power flowing through cross-border transmission lines to states like New York, Michigan and Minnesota.
The U.S. imports electricity from Canada because it is cheaper than generating more supply domestically. Losing Canadian electricity would force affected states to rely on rapacious energy companies, driving up electricity costs for consumers.
This, in turn, would trigger voters’ anger against Trump-supporting Republican candidates for the House and Senate.
Americans are used to seeking simple, painless solutions to major problems. Thus, in 2024, Trump won 77 million votes by promising to drastically reduce the price of eggs.
Instead, he gave voters an unprovoked and endless war on Iran. This has created a worldwide spiral in oil prices—and fueled inflation in the United States and other nations.
As prices soar for food, energy and housing, Trump focuses on vanity projects like a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom and a towering “Victory Arch” overlooking Arlington Cemetery.
When Red states are forced to suffer staggering losses for months on end, they will elect anti-Fascist Senators and Representatives to nullify the evils of Trump’s administration.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 15, 2026 at 12:10 am
For all his slim grasp of history, Donald Trump knows that presidents and kings (of which he thinks himself the latter) are remembered for the wars they’ve won.
Easily won wars, of course, are the best. And, for Trump, Canada—no match for the United States militarily—seems a sure bet.
On December 2, 2024 Trump, recently re-elected as President of the United States, threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the United States from Canada and Mexico unless they stopped the flow of drugs and illegal aliens.
Canadian flag
“Less than one percent of migrants coming into the United States irregularly come from Canada and 0.2 percent of the fentanyl coming into the United States comes from Canada,” then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Parliament.
During 2023-2024, American customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.
Heroin syringe
Unmentioned—if not deliberately ignored by Trump: Canada plays a substantial role as a U.S. trading partner. About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports as well.
Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon eagerly desires. About 77% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S.
Trudeau pleaded with Trump not to impose the tariff because because it would “kill” Canada’s economy.
Trump responded: “So your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the US to the tune of $100 billion?”
His comments referred to the American trade deficit with Canada.
The U.S. had a $75 billion trade deficit with Canada in 2023 but a third of what Canada sells into the U.S. is energy exports and prices have been high.
Trudeau left the meeting without reassurance that Trump would not impose a 25% tariff on products from Canada.
Trump’s trade conflict with Canada began immediately upon his return to office in 2025, driven by disputes over border security, immigration and tariffs.
On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Trump announced plans for a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports, citing illegal immigration and drug trafficking.
Donald Trump
In early February, 2025, Trump signed an executive order imposing a 25% blanket tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods (and 10% on energy) starting February 4, invoking a national emergency.
Then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed immediate retaliatory tariffs
In mid-February, Trump agreed to a 30-day pause to cool tensions and signed a separate plan for 25% tariffs on global steel and aluminum.
On March 4, 2025, Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canadian goods took effect (with energy capped at 10%). Canada fired back with massive retaliatory counter-tariffs.
American automakers, fearing their sales to Canada would be jeopardized, pressured Trump to delay auto tariffs. Trump agreed to do so, and temporarily paused levies on goods complying with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
But on March 5, 2025, Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Canada. Six days later, Trump announced that he would impose an additional 25% tariff on all Canadian steel and aluminum imports effective March 12.
Just as Adolf Hitler’s continuing aggression toward England promoted Winston Churchill’s appointment as its Prime Minister, Trump’s continuing aggression toward Canada did the same for Mark Carney.
Adolf Hitler
Carney, a member of the Liberal Party, was elected as Canada’s Prime Minister-elect on March 9. He owed his victory to Trump’s insults toward Canada and threats to make it the 51st state of the United States.
He described the tariff conflict the “greatest crisis of our lifetimes.” And he vowed to defend Canada from American aggression.
On March 12, Trump slammed Canada with 25% duties on steel and aluminum. This, in turn, led Canada to impose further rounds of retaliatory levies on American manufactured goods.
On October 14, Trump issued an executive order that imposed a 10% tariff on softwood lumber and 25% on certain wooden furniture and cabinets from Canada, with scheduled increases.
But by September, Canada’s trade balance returned to surplus as exports recovered, particularly to markets outside the United States, while the impact of U.S. tariffs eased in some sectors.
American lumber and cabinet tariffs escalated further on January 1, 2026: A 50% tariff on specific kitchen vanities and cabinets—affecting Canadian exporters without exemptions.
On January 20, 2026, in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney urged greater cooperation among the world’s middle-sized nations to protect themselves from great powers using tariffs to extort control.
On January 24, Trump, responding to a faulty report, threatened to impose tariffs of up to 100% on all Canadian goods in response to a planned trade agreement between Canada and China.
The arrangement between Ottawa and Beijing is a limited, issue-specific tariff agreement that swaps reduced Chinese duties on Canadian canola seeds for lower Canadian tariffs on a capped volume of Chinese electric vehicles.
It is not a comprehensive Canada-China free trade agreement covering most goods and services, as Trump believed.
On January 26, Canada announced a plan to significantly expand trade with non‑U.S. countries, strengthen internal Canadian trade, and increase domestic investment by up to one trillion dollars over the next five years.
Thus, through threats, insults and extortionate tariffs, Trump has singularly ended a friendly U.S.-Canada relationship that had lasted more than 200 years.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 14, 2026 at 12:11 am
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself.
–“Waterloo,” by Abba
To understand what is happening in the United States today, it’s necessary to realize this:
- Its decent, democracy-cherishing citizens find themselves in the same position as decent, democracy-cherishing citizens of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
- And just as Germany’s government became a ruthless dictatorship, so has that of the United States.
- And just as ordinary, peace-loving Germans hoped for a powerful, democratic outsider to remove the menace of Adolf Hitler, so do ordinary, peace-loving Americans hope the same will happen to Donald Trump.
Adolf Hitler
From 1939 to 1945, those democracy-cherishing outsiders consisted of Canada, England and the United States. (The Soviet Union reluctantly joined this alliance only after it became yet another victim of Adolf Hitler’s aggression.)
In the case of the United States, that solution can only be achieved economically—by pressuring Right-wing Republican members of Congress in Red states to end their support for Trump’s dictatorial agenda.
And the only democratic countries with the power to do this are Mexico and Canada, America’s foremost trading partners.
The 2024 elections gave Republicans not only the White House but control of the House and Senate.
Donald Trump
Republicans don’t care that Trump has trashed the institutions that Americans have cherished for more than 200 years. Institutions like an independent judiciary, a free press, and an incorruptible Justice Department.
He has viciously attacked all of these—and Republicans have either said nothing or rushed to his defense.
What Republicans truly fear about Donald Trump is that if they dare to hold him accountable for his lifetime of criminality, his Fascistic base will turn on them—and turn them out of Congress.
If they are conflicted—whether to continue supporting Trump or desert him—the reason is the same: How can I hold onto my power and all the privileges that go with it?
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, President of Mexico
Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada
Lea-Kim, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Republicans—with Trump as their Fuhrer—are utilizing the same my-way-or-else “negotiating” strategy as Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
And Democrats—out of cowardice and/or ignorance of history—are, as usual, refusing to publicly make this comparison.
Thus, America’s rescue from Trump can only come from outside the United States.
Donald Trump has proven his affinity for dictators and dictatorships—lavishing praise on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.
There are two reasons for this—and his hostile behavior toward democratic leaders:
- Trump admires dictators, desires to become one himself, and is now stocking essential federal agencies—such as the Pentagon, FBI and Department of Homeland Security—with his political hacks to make this a reality.
- He knows that compared to the dictatorships of Russia and China, democracies such as those of Canada, Mexico and Ukraine are comparatively weak militarily.
At a November 30, 2024 dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, he told then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canada could become the 51st state of the United States.
Canada’s Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who attended the dinner, insisted that Trump was joking.
But on December 2, Trump threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the United States from Canada and Mexico unless they stopped the flow of drugs and illegal aliens.
And on December 3, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated image of himself standing on a mountain with a Canadian flag beside him. Its caption: “Oh Canada!”
Trudeau had requested the Mar-a-Lago meeting to convince Trump that the northern border is completely different from the southern one with Mexico.
Canadian flag
“Less than one percent of migrants coming into the United States irregularly come from Canada and 0.2 percent of the fentanyl coming into the United States comes from Canada,” Trudeau said in Parliament.
During 2023-2024, American customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.
Most of the fentanyl reaching the U.S. is made by Mexican drug cartels using precursor chemicals smuggled from Asia.
As with Adolf Hitler, attempting to reason with Trump will prove fruitless. He respects only superior force.
But he has blinked when confronted with serious opposition.
Thus, on February 1, 2025, he threatened to hit Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs, accusing them of injecting huge amounts of fentanyl and huge numbers of illegal aliens into the United States. This allowed him to look tough to his legions of uneducated, Fascistic voters.
But then Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatened to retaliate with their own 25% tariffs on American goods.
And the financially conservative Wall Street Journal-–whose target audience includes business leaders, investors, and affluent consumers—called Trump’s threat “the dumbest trade war in history.”
Suddenly, Trump found a way to declare victory, claiming that Mexico and Canada would vastly increase border security to stop the flow of fentanyl and illegal aliens.
And dropping his threat of a trade war.
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In History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on September 11, 2026 at 12:10 am
“The [Oscar] winners included Regina King, Rami Malek, Alfonso Cuaron, Spike Lee—a group of people from very different backgrounds representing films that tell nuanced stories about diverse experiences.
“And then the top honor is given to a film that many people have criticized for being an overly simplistic story about race told from the perspective of a white savior.”
So argued Ari Shapiro, a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR’s award-winning news magazine. He made his comments the day after Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 91st annual Academy Awards on February 24, 2019.
Green Book is a 2018 biographical drama set in the Deep South of 1962. It’s based on the true story of a concert tour by a black classical and jazz pianist, Don Shirley, and his driver and bodyguard, Tony Vallelonga. Mahershala Ali plays Shirley and Viggo Mortensen plays Vallelonga.
The two men are polar opposites: Shirley is cultured and eloquent; Vallelonga is streetwise and volatile. Shirley is used to dealing with the cream of New York society. Vallelonga is used to dealing with its dregs—as a nightclub bouncer.
Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley
When his nightclub closes for renovations, he responds to an ad by Shirley for a driver for his eight-week concert tour through the Midwest and Deep South.
This is 1962, a time when a black Air Force veteran, James Meredith, must be given protection by deputy U.S. marshals when he enters the segregated University of Mississippi. White and black “Freedom Riders” are canvassing the South, sitting at segregated lunch counters and often being attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and equally racist Southern police.
In fact, the title of the movie—Green Book—is derived from a travel guide written for blacks venturing into the Deep South: The Negro Motorist Green Book. Written by Victor Hugo Green, its purpose is to help blacks find motels and restaurants that will accept them.
And as Shirley and Vallelonga make their odyssey through the South, they find themselves staying at separate hotels—and sometimes together, after Vallelonga slips Shirley into his own room.
An AV Film review called Green Book “a kind of comforting liberal fantasy, a #NotAllRacists trifle that suggests that our deep, festering divisions can be sutured through some quality time on the open road, resolving differences over a bucket of KFC.”
At the start of the movie, Vallelonga throws away a glass after a black construction worker drinks from it. But during his tour of the South, he becomes increasingly sympathetic to the plight suffered by Shirley—and other blacks forced to daily endure a series of humiliations.
Viggo Mortensen as Tony Vallelonga
According to television critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon: “Green Book is a feel-good movie. It doesn’t really require a lot of critical thinking or self-analysis. You know, people walk out of the movie feeling that, oh, well, racism is over, we’re good. So I think those are the things that are going on.”
Actually, the film makes clear that some people will always be racists. Thus, Shirley finds himself repeatedly forced to eat in the segregated rooms of the hotels where he’s to play concerts. And he’s almost murdered by a group of racists when he makes the mistake of going into a whites’ only bar. He survives only because Vallelonga arrives in time to rescue him.
And Shirley proves just as great a friend to Vallelonga. He introduces the semi-literate bouncer to the power of the written word by helping him craft articulate, heartfelt letters to his wife.
Toward the end of the movie, Vallelonga and Shirley are pulled over by a Mississippi police officer. Shirley’s “crime”: Being black—and out at night. When the officer insults Vallelonga, Tony punches him—and he and Shirley wind up in jail.
Shirley asks for permission to call his “lawyer”—and the man he dials is Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy, in turn, calls Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Barnett is already having his share of troubles with the Kennedys, and he orders the police: Let those men go—now!
This scene underscores the importance of electing people who will stand against injustice. Watching the release of Vallelonga and Shirley, it’s impossible to imagine the Trump administration intervening in such a manner.
At the end of the movie, Shirley visits Vallelonga’s home—where he’s warmly received by Tony and his family. The film’s end credits reveal that the two men remained friends until they died, within months of each other, in 2013.
In 1950, a Western called Broken Arrow-–starring James Stewart as Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as Cochise—told the true story of a friendship between a white man and an Apache. For many Americans, this came as a revelation.
After decades of seeing Indians depicted as bloodthirsty savages, audiences saw that there were those—among red men and white men—who could rise above prejudice and see each other as worthy of respect.
The lesson of Green Book is exactly the same. And it’s needed now more than ever.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 10, 2026 at 1:37 am
Upon his return to the Presidency in 2025, Donald Trump turned his “artistic” gifts on the White House.
On June 9, 2025, contractors began paving over the grass of the White House Rose Garden with stone tiles to create a patio.
This had been a special project of then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1962 she and designer Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created a classic, symmetrical space for official state functions and press events.
They installed a central open lawn surrounded by formal flower beds, seasonal plantings, and flowering crabapple trees.
The destruction of the rose garden ignited a firestorm of criticism. But Trump insisted that the paving go on anyway.
Like Adolf Hitler, Trump believes that “bigger is better” in architecture.
On July 31, 2025, the Trump administration announced that a 90,000 square feet addition would be made to the White House to incorporate a 650-person capacity ballroom.
In October, 2025, Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing to clear space for it. It’s the most expensive project in Trump’s roster, with an $800 million estimated price tag, according to New York.
American taxpayers are expected to foot more than half the bill, despite Trump’s repeated denials of this. In March, 2026, he told reporters that construction on the ballroom “is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”
Demolition of the East Wing of the White House
Trump intends this to be a monument to himself: By October, 2025, senior officials within the Trump administration were using the title, “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”
On August 31, the Supreme Court—packed with six Right-wing Justices—granted Trump approval to continue construction on his ballroom. This had been halted after a lower court issued a temporary block on the project earlier that month.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “We are living in the Golden Age of America, and this Building will be one of the Greatest ever constructed in Washington, D.C. When completed in the Summer of 2028, the magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex will be something that the entire Country is very proud of.”
In a rare burst of candor, Trump told New York Magazine that his construction projects are essentially monuments to himself: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
For Trump, there can’t be too many monuments to his memory. Among these:
- Like a Roman emperor, Trump has put his face on a new commemorative gold-finished $1 coin issued by the U.S. Mint—allegedly to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
- He has mused about changing the name of the Strait of Hormuz to “Trump Strait.” How he would get the Iranians to accept that name remains unclear.
- In May, 2005, the US Department of Agriculture was decorated with a banner featuring Trump’s face. Since then, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Labor have sported similar banners.
Achieving immortality—at least in how people remember them long after they’ve passed on—has long been a desire of tyrants. But once they’re dead, they no longer have control over the lives of their once-subject peoples.
So the way they’re remembered can prove vastly different from how they wanted to be regarded.
Alexander the Great thirsted be remembered as the world’s greatest conqueror, bringing Greek civilization to the nations he ravished.
Alexander the Great
Modern historians view him as a brilliant military leader—but also as a ruthless and megalomanic tyrant who slaughtered whole peoples and caused widespread destruction. Moreover, his empire collapsed quickly after his death.
Leon Trotsky—the Russian revolutionary and bitter foe of Joseph Stalin—wrote: “Nero, too, was a product of his epoch. Yet after he perished his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything.
“The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to think that this is consoling.”
By the time he died in 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had an estimated 6,000 statues of himself erected across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, holding the world record for the most statues raised to a living person.
After his death and the start of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, the vast majority of these statues were quietly removed, demolished, or melted down.
Finally, there is this classic poetic commentary on the uncertainty of immortality, courtesy of Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 9, 2026 at 12:10 am
With his popularity rating hovering at 33% to 39%, President Donald Trump desperately fears a third impeachment action against him if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the fast-approaching midterm elections scheduled for November 3.
Thus, his almost crazed lust to be remembered forever. And for all his slim grasp of history, he knows that presidents and kings (of which he thinks himself the latter) are remembered for the wars they’ve won and the monuments they’ve left behind.
Easily won wars, of course, are the best. And on January 3, 2026, Trump got just that.
American forces bombed military facilities and infrastructure in the capital city of Caracas and across northern Venezuela. And they captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both were flown to New York City to face federal drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges.
Flag of Venezuela
Savoring that triumph, Trump conspired with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overturn the leadership of Israel’s mortal enemy and America’s longtime antagonist: Iran.
Trump predicted several times that the war would be over in four to six weeks—the same timetable Adolf Hitler gave for the completion of his victory over the Soviet Union in 1941.
And just as “Operation Barbarossa” proved a fatal mistake, so Trump’s latest stab at playing Generalissimo has proven a total disaster. Six months into his war, he still has no plan for winning it or withdrawing from it without losing face.
Then there is his mania for monuments.
Upon his return to the Presidency in 2025, he turned his “artistic” gifts on the White House. On June 9, 2025, contractors began paving over the grass of the White House Rose Garden to create a patio.
This had been a special project of then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1962 she and designer Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created a classic, symmetrical space for official state functions and press events.
They installed a central open lawn surrounded by formal flower beds, seasonal plantings, and flowering crabapple trees.
By September, 2026 his administration had altered over 100 structures in Washington, D.C., alone, according to New York, which reported that the projects have collectively cost over a billion dollars.
On December 18, 2025, The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts became The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
Not, of course, by an act of Congress. That happened in January, 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the Center as a “living memorial” in his honor: The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
In Trump’s case, getting his name added to the Center was much simpler. First, he fired the longstanding board that had overseen the Center, and put his own handpicked board members on it.
Then his chosen thralls declared: “We’re adding Trump’s name to this building.”
No doubt to his amazement, there were serious objections to this—and lawsuits backing up those objections.
On May 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump’s name was illegally added to the Center:
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
And he ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the building within two weeks—by June 12, two days before Trump’s 80th birthday.
Trump has, predictably, appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.
He thus joined the ranks of arts-obsessed tyrants like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. For 12 years, Hitler served as the arbiter of culture in Nazi Germany. Stalin held that role for almost 30.
Hitler considered himself an unappreciated artist. At 18, he had applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but was rejected twice. If he had a friend, it was the architect Albert Speer, with whom he felt an artistic kinship.
Even as the Third Reich collapsed, he found time to pore over architectural models he intended to turn into gigantic buildings.
In Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, author Frederic Spotts argues that Hitler saw the world corrupted by “evils” he must first destroy so he could re-create it to conform to his artistic ideals.
Like Hitler, Trump sees himself as an unrecognized artist through his erection of buildings. And, again like Hitler, he believes that he has a mission to replace ugliness with beauty.
But he’s clearly more focused on the demolition process than on the creation of beauty.
On October 20, 2025, demolitions crews—on his orders—gutted the East Wing of the White House to create a massive, 90,000 square feet, 650-person capacity ballroom.
And he has threatened to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if his name is not added to it.
Meanwhile, he intends to close the Center for two years, to hide the embarrassing truth that artists and audiences no longer want to go there while he runs it.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 8, 2026 at 12:10 am
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
–T.E. Lawrence
Donald Trump’s first love has always been himself. And for all of his adult life he’s tried to promote himself as the smartest, the handsomest, the richest, the most popular man in the United States—if not the world.
Trump’s egomania is literally stamped on his properties. Of the estimated 515 entities he owns, 268 of them—52%—bear his last name. He often refers to his properties as “the swankiest,” “the most beautiful.”
Among the references he’s made to himself:
- “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.”
- “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”
- “My IQ is one of the highest––and you all know it.”
- “I did a lot of great deals and I did them early and young, and now I’m building all over the world….”
- “So I have a total net worth, and now with the increase, it’ll be well-over $10 billion.”
On October 7, 2016, Trump unknowingly—on a hot mike—outlined his approach to women he found attractive:
“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Even when he did not score with a woman of his desires, he left no doubt that—at least in his own mind—he could have. Just months after Princess Diana’s death in August 1997, radio host Howard Stern asked Trump if he could have “nailed” her.
Trump replied, “I think I could have.”
Donald Trump
But now Trump is an 80-year-old, easily distracted man who repeatedly falls asleep in public events—such as during White House meetings or a World Cup game. During press conferences and on his website, Truth Social, he often explodes in angry, insulting tirades against a legion of perceived enemies—particularly female journalists.
He avoids exercise—except for golf—believing that a human is born with only a finite amount of energy, which is depleted by physical activity. His diet is famously heavy on fast food, sweets and Diet Coke.
A well-known order from McDonald’s includes two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate shake or malted.
As a result, his diet poses several medical risks. Meals centered on cheeseburgers, well-done steaks, and French fries are dense in saturated fats and sodium.
Over time, excessive sodium and trans fats elevate “bad” LDL cholesterol, damage blood vessels, and spike blood pressure, significantly accelerating the risk of heart attacks, stroke, and chronic hypertension.
Moving from the personal to the political: He’s launched a losing war on Iran, repeatedly predicted it would be over in four to six weeks, and has seen it spiral into six months with no end in sight.
Instead of taking responsibility for his decision to provoke a needless war, he repeatedly blames others for his failure to win it. On September 4, he posted on Truth Social:
“The Radical Left Lunatics, Dumocrats, and Communists would rather have us LOSE the War in Iran, than have President Donald J. Trump WIN the War for America, In other words, they’d rather have us LOSE than have us WIN!”
Meanwhile, Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 million barrels of oil used to pass each day. That flow has been reduced to between two million and six million barrels each day.
Strait of Hormuz
This has created a worldwide spiral in oil prices—and fueled inflation in the United States and other nations. But as prices for housing, energy and food soar in the United States, Trump claims that “affordability” is a “Democratic hoax.”
Like Adolf Hitler contemplating architectural models while Nazi Germany neared destruction, Trump focuses on vanity projects like a 90,000 square foot White House ballroom and a towering “Victory Arch” literally overshadowing Arlington Cemetery.
When Trump—a five-time Vietnam war draft dodger—was asked in 2025 who the 250-foot arch was for, he replied, “Me.”
As much as he fears and loathes to admit it, he has to realize he can’t live forever—and that he’ll be lucky to live another 10 years, if not a far shorter span.
And with his popularity rating hovering at 33% to 39%, he desperately fears a third impeachment action against him if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the fast-approaching midterm elections scheduled for November 3.
Thus, his almost crazed lust to be remembered forever. And for all his slim grasp of history, he knows that presidents and kings (of which he thinks himself the latter) are remembered for the wars they’ve won and the monuments they’ve left behind.
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FOX NEWS: UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED: PART TWO (OF THREE)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 23, 2026 at 12:13 amReputable news organizations believe they’re hurt when a reporter gets his facts wrong—or, worse, invents a story for sensationalistic attention.
For Fox News Network, getting hurt means that some of its own reporters have told the truth. And, as a result, many of its viewers are turning to other Right-wing propaganda outlets.
In a series of email exchanges, Fox Network executives revealed they were not simply loyal to President Donald Trump but mortally afraid of him.
Star Host Tucker Carlson said that Trump was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Nor was Carlson the only one. The fear started at the very top—with Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch: “Nobody wants Trump as an enemy. We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.”
Up to January 26, 2021, Murdoch allowed Fox advertiser Mike “My Pillow” Lindell to appear on the Tucker Carlson Tonight Show to lie that Trump had been cheated of victory by massive voter fraud.
Questioned as to why he allowed it, Murdoch agreed with the statement, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
Rupert Murdoch
In short: Lust for money, not ideology, motivated Fox’s slant on politics.
And, as with all Fox News commentary, truth played no role in the decision to air it.
With unapologetic hypocrisy, Fox stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked the lies being peddled by Trump—and their own network.
In a text to Ingraham, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, an attorney who was representing the Trump campaign, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so.
Ingraham: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
Hannity said Giuliani was “acting like an insane person” and Ingraham described him as “an idiot.”
And Hannity said: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
Sean Hannity
How do we know all this? Certainly not because some outraged Fox whistleblower made these exchanges public.
It’s because Fox’s chief victim, Dominion Voting Systems, decided to strike back.
The Denver-based company produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States.
Dominion, claimed Fox, had criminally enabled Democrats to steal the election for Joe Biden by programming its machines to throw out votes meant for Trump.
Its reputation unfairly tarnished, its employees threatened with violence by Trump’s Fascistic supporters, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in March, 2021.
Dominion charged Fox News with pushing false conspiracy theories about the company to win back dissatisfied viewers upset with its coverage of Trump’s defeat.
Libel lawsuits are typically centered around one falsehood. But Dominion cites a lengthy list of Fox hosts making false claims even though they were known to be untrue.
According to an almost 200–page document Dominion filed in the lawsuit:
“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS.’ Yet despite knowing the truth—or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth—Fox spread and endorsed these ‘outlandish voter fraud claims’ about Dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as ‘crazy,’ ‘absurd,’ and ‘shockingly reckless.’
“As a result of the false accusations broadcast by Fox into millions of American homes, Dominion has suffered unprecedented harm and its employees’ lives have been put in danger,” Dominion’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
Backing up its assertions: A treasury of emails, texts, testimony, and other private communications from Fox News personnel contradicting the network’s claims that Dominion’s voting machines had rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor.
These had all been obtained through the discovery process.
While Fox was echoing Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud,” its executives and commentators knew that he—and they themselves—were lying.
In mid-November 2020, Carlson texted one of his producers that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election.
Later, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s attorneys and a prominent accuser of election fraud, “is lying.”
Dana Perino, an anchor, called allegations of voter fraud against Dominion “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense.”
Murdoch told an executive on November 6, 2020 that “if Trump becomes a sore loser we should watch Sean [Hannity] especially and others don’t sound the same.”
And on January 5, 2021, Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott:
“It’s been suggested our prime time three [Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham] should independently or together say something like, ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won.’ It would “go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen.”
But Fox never aired such a statement.
Fox has repeatedly tried to get the case dismissed, but Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has refused to do so. A trial is slated to begin on April 17.
There is a difference between journalism and Fascistic propaganda. And Fox News Network routinely provides examples of the latter.
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