The "We Love America" network

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CBS News has proclaimed that it is the “We Love America” network, which is a lie built on lies, stacked on more lies, wrapped in layers of more lies.

CBS and Bari Weiss are supplicants at Trump’s court. What Weiss loves is money, power, private jet travel, a security detail of armed men that indulge a fantasy that loving Trump is a dangerous job.

It is an obscenity.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of January 6_, and the White House released propaganda that was ludicrous and absurdist. Comparing it to Nazi or Soviet propaganda would be unfair because those liars lacked the audacity of MAGA. You can see the White House’s false narrative here.

There is only one comparison that holds up. It would be the moment that “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s spokesperson, denied Americans were at the Baghdad airport on live television when American tanks were rolling past him. A generation ago, the entire country laughed in wonderment.

Years ago, I said the following on a PBS “Frontline” interview, but the first time I made the “Winston” point was in 2015 (I can’t find the clip). I made it again when Sean Spicer opened the Trump era with a fantastical lie that asserted Trump’s anemic inaugural crowd size was bigger than that of Obama:

These institutions are important; they matter. And to see them degraded, to see the men and women who work, who fight for the country, who serve the country, to be attacked, is disgraceful, but it’s dangerous, because in the end, what Trump is saying when he goes out and says, “This is the biggest crowd size ever,” what he’s saying, in essence, is what’s true is what the leader says is true. We don’t want to live in a country where truth is defined by what the political leader says it is. It’s straight out of 1984, when, at the end of the book, Winston, after being interrogated, looks at the party official, and the party official holds up three fingers and says, “How many fingers am I holding up?,” Winston says, “I see only three.” The party official says, “But it could be four, or it could be two.”

The obliteration of the line between truth and the lie is fundamental to grasp because it’s so elemental to a functioning democracy. And the degradation of those institutions is a weakening of our system. First the politicians are distrusted, and next the institutions. And what’s after that is the very system of democracy itself. And not surprisingly, we see a real rise in polling of disbelief in democracy as a system that is better than its alternatives, which is an amazing thing to see playing out in the United States.

The main point was that these were lies of authority that demanded obedience even though both the truth and the lie were staring everyone in the face.

Trump’s lies should have led every single network newscast last night, and been framed as a national emergency and a profound threat to the peace of the world.

When Bari Weiss took command for the Ellison boy, and set about unraveling the legacy of Murrow, Cronkite and generations of American patriots who informed the American people about the world and its dangers, she declared that the American people don’t trust the news and screeched her battle cry: “Let’s just do the f*#king news.”

Last night, new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil spoke about the foremost architect of the unfolding disaster and American gangsterism in Venezuela and the threats against NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark and the peace of the world, Little Marco Rubio. How can the people who aired this conceivably be believed about this…

Or this…

…or this…

…or this…

…or anything?

Edward R. Murrow delivered his “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech to the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) convention on October 15, 1958. It included these words:

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.

And I mean the word survive, quite literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show.

If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then perhaps, some young and courageous soul with a small budget might do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done--and are still doing--to the Indians in this country.

But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizen from anything that is unpleasant.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry’s program planners believe.

Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is. It is an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

Today, the CBS News viewer gets Bari Weiss’ “bonbons,” and the world keeps spinning on a most dangerous axis.

Apparently there is no such thing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Some people could see the danger earlier than others, but the indifferent, cowed or supremely stupid should see clearly now — unless they are a conspirator in the cause of destroying liberty and plotting aggressive war.

2026 is one week old, and chaos has been unleashed.

Death follows chaos, and the reaper is smiling because the furies have been loosed.

We have arrived at a place that was not predestined, but here we are.

The road was paved by epic cowardice, profound selfishness, delusion, fantasy, deep ignorance, arrogance, certitude and weakness.

I shared this Yeats poem in 2023, as Donald Trump was surging ahead of Joe Biden, and Democratic Party bosses were playing pretend, as opposed to resolutely facing an obvious crisis:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This was Donald Trump yesterday:

Bari Weiss and her hand-picked buffoon, a shallow man with a great head of hair, say that they love America, but they don’t love the American people enough to tell them the truth about the peril at hand.

They are architects of the coming disaster. They are Trump’s fellow travelers.

Let’s all of us hold that Little Marco profile close. It will be the perfect thing to recall when American kids start coming home in boxes.

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