Tag Archives: The Failure of the 4th Estate

Insurrection by Proxy

Below is a quotation reported in The Hill of the “swearing in” of attendees at the recent 2026 Dallas hootenanny of the GOP. Trump asked the attendees to take the following oath-

Nobody would write a movie script with a scene having the above swearing in conducted by a president. It’s too corny for adult audiences. It would result in a movie rated 7 tomatoes out of a hundred on the Rotten Tomato scale. Yet the president of the USA delivered this order to commit voter fraud in the Nov. 2026 midterm election.

The American president is verbally directing citizens to commit voter fraud. This is an attack on the central pillar of American democracy. It is meant to disqualify winning Democratic members of congress by direct injection of hand waving uncertainty into the very voting process itself. This could lead to the congress disqualifying elections where the GOP led congress could cherry pick districts to disqualify and at a pace that would lengthen the duration of GOP dominance while investigation drags on.

This is tantamount to the theft of public voting rights and is a hybrid attack on America itself. If another country did this, we would consider it as an act of hostility.

According to the Cornell Law School website, treason is defined as-

Trump’s speech gives instructions that if executed as requested, will result in the ruling political party having oversight over the remedy to alleged election fraud. How much more absurd does this have to get before there is a large scale uprising? The 2016-2016 decade of Trump has been a disaster extending well past our borders. The whole global political and financial operating system is fragmenting and rebuilding to the exclusion of the USA.

I doubt that in the current political climate a court, especially SCOTUS, would actually find Trump guilty of treason. Whether or not Trump’s oath constitutes “betrayal” is a legal grey area and grey areas are beachheads for the MAGA lawfare invasion.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission. Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What used to be reverently referred to as the 4th Estate is being taken over by America’s splotchy clique of oligarchs. The acquisition of CNN and CBS by an IT Oligarch’s clan and Fox News by an Australian monopolist have gone far to turn the news policies of electronic media from liberal to Trump loving broadcasters.

The conversion of the meaning of the words liberal or liberal media to a common epithet began decades ago in the Reagan years. During the Reagan years, the Republican Party joined up with conservative protestant evangelical congregations to spread anger and dismay. It has worked brilliantly. Evangelical pastors, especially those on television, began to blend theology with conservative politics in their weekly performances.

Hellfire, brimstone and abortion combine naturally like eggs, bacon and home fries stimulating the end-times theology of Baptist church goers. Citizens normally absent from the political scene latched onto abortion as their single issue and voted accordingly, irrespective of what else may come of their candidate choices.

From inside my online world, I’m left to conclude that the Democratic party and the so-called liberal media have consistently FAILED to meet expectations as a unified political force in opposition to the GOP. This, multiplied by voters who vote against their best interests under the hypnotic blathering of Trump and his stable of idiots, has led to the accelerated demise of America’s global hegemony.

The Democratic party has failed to produce a platform that lights a fire under voters and candidates. Republicans know how to get elected but can’t seem to govern. Democrats show greater skill in governance but have trouble getting elected. The Republican electoral playbook is wide open for study. They’re good at persuasion and mobilizing voters. Yes, they’re liars, but this is a war for the progressive America we recently allowed to slip from between our fingers. More Democrats should be removing their gloves in this cage fight for America.