Are we now officially in a dictatorship?
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Red
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fishonjazz
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LOLOLOLOLOOLOLOL
As much as I hate trump and as bad as I think he is, he does make me laugh sometimes.
Sent from my OPD2203 using Tapatalk
PJF
Well-Known Member
Once again, so nice to have adults back in charge. Were you guys even aware that the FBI was doing these things under Biden? I'm sure the answer is no.
View: https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1968334714860974158?t=nZghFmyQRTM0BnjDf9sRAg&s=19
View: https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1968334714860974158?t=nZghFmyQRTM0BnjDf9sRAg&s=19
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Every day a step closer at this point
PJF
Well-Known Member
We are on the verge of a complete mainstream media takeover
PJF
Well-Known Member
Best thing you've ever said.
Red
Well-Known Member
ABC is a collaborator. $$$ is far more important than preserving democracy in America. But, surely, we already knew that, correct? We knew money would always be priority #1. Even if it means terminating our 250 year old experiment in self governance, terminating preserving the Rights of Man. Surely we knew such high principles didn’t stand a chance when $$$ was at stake. Screw democracy in America.
theconversation.com
History’s path is never linear. But its turns can be very sharp.
It is rare to be able to identify the moment when we can say “this is the point at which everything changed”.
So have we reached the point where we can say the United States is in a constitutional crisis? Has American democracy failed? Has the US descended into authoritarianism?
If the answers to those questions weren’t clear already, they are now.
Yes. It is happening. Right now.
Not because of one incident, but a series of moments and choices, events within familiar historical structures, that are pushing the US over the edge.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the choices made by the administration in its aftermath, is one such moment. It was immediately clear the Trump administration would use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for accelerating its authoritarian project, weaponising it to destroy opponents, both real and imagined.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the “radical left” and promised a crackdown on “organisations” that “contributed” to the crime. His vice president, JD Vance, hosted Kirk’s podcast, effectively making it a tool of state-sponsored media.
On that show, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller promised “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks”.
In the MAGA-verse, terms such as “radical left”, “networks” and “organisations” are code for any form of opposition or dissent – including the Democratic Party and traditional media. It is worth noting here that “radical left” is now shifting to terms as broad as “left-leaning”, progressive or, even more subversive, liberal.
The Trump administration is promising to go after the fundraising architecture of its opposition, broadly defined. And it will. It is already using the agencies of the federal government – including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service – to threaten, punish and obliterate those who oppose it.
And the moments keep coming. On Wednesday, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on another far-right podcast. Carr – a Project 2025 contributor – suggested that broadcasters running the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show were risking “the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC” due to Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death.
That night, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show would be suspended indefinitely.
Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is the latest sign we’re witnessing the end of US democracy
Under the Trump administration, the widespread, coordinated suppression of dissent is are ripping apart the fabric of American political life.
theconversation.com
History’s path is never linear. But its turns can be very sharp.
It is rare to be able to identify the moment when we can say “this is the point at which everything changed”.
So have we reached the point where we can say the United States is in a constitutional crisis? Has American democracy failed? Has the US descended into authoritarianism?
If the answers to those questions weren’t clear already, they are now.
Yes. It is happening. Right now.
Not because of one incident, but a series of moments and choices, events within familiar historical structures, that are pushing the US over the edge.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the choices made by the administration in its aftermath, is one such moment. It was immediately clear the Trump administration would use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for accelerating its authoritarian project, weaponising it to destroy opponents, both real and imagined.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the “radical left” and promised a crackdown on “organisations” that “contributed” to the crime. His vice president, JD Vance, hosted Kirk’s podcast, effectively making it a tool of state-sponsored media.
On that show, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller promised “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks”.
In the MAGA-verse, terms such as “radical left”, “networks” and “organisations” are code for any form of opposition or dissent – including the Democratic Party and traditional media. It is worth noting here that “radical left” is now shifting to terms as broad as “left-leaning”, progressive or, even more subversive, liberal.
The Trump administration is promising to go after the fundraising architecture of its opposition, broadly defined. And it will. It is already using the agencies of the federal government – including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service – to threaten, punish and obliterate those who oppose it.
And the moments keep coming. On Wednesday, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on another far-right podcast. Carr – a Project 2025 contributor – suggested that broadcasters running the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show were risking “the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC” due to Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death.
That night, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show would be suspended indefinitely.
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The more the right tries to take over the media, the more deaths that will come against right wing commentators. I hope they check themselves before they wreck themselves. The mainstream media machine is already a propaganda machine, but at least its a bit of a balanced propaganda machine (not really, but more so than it's about to be). People dont like being fed propaganda so unabashedly and I think people will lash out if the right goes too far.
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Red
Well-Known Member
Collaborators in ending democracy.
www.newsbreak.com
In those meetings, multiple executives backed Kimmel before ABC ultimately decided to cut the late-night host’s show, sources said, adding senior executives ultimately feared retaliation from President Donald Trump.
The report says multiple executives felt Kimmel “had not actually said anything over the line.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled off the air on Wednesday after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to withdraw ABC’s broadcasting license during an interview with conservative YouTuber Benny Johnson.
Carr referenced Kimmel’s comments on slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in a monologue on Monday’s show.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
That led to Nexstar, which owns ABC affiliate stations across the U.S., deciding to pull Kimmel’s show. The president of the company’s broadcast division, Andrew Alford, called the talk show host’s comments “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse.”
Insiders Reveal Chilling Reason Jimmy Kimmel’s TV Bosses Caved to MAGA - NewsBreak
Senior TV executives initially supported Jimmy Kimmel in the hours before they switched course and made the shock decision to pull his show. More details a
www.newsbreak.com
In those meetings, multiple executives backed Kimmel before ABC ultimately decided to cut the late-night host’s show, sources said, adding senior executives ultimately feared retaliation from President Donald Trump.
The report says multiple executives felt Kimmel “had not actually said anything over the line.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled off the air on Wednesday after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to withdraw ABC’s broadcasting license during an interview with conservative YouTuber Benny Johnson.
Carr referenced Kimmel’s comments on slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in a monologue on Monday’s show.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
That led to Nexstar, which owns ABC affiliate stations across the U.S., deciding to pull Kimmel’s show. The president of the company’s broadcast division, Andrew Alford, called the talk show host’s comments “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse.”
PJF
Well-Known Member
Was it "ending democracy" when your side did it over and over @Red ?
View: https://x.com/swamp_ist/status/1968505481221026218?t=dX1FJhh2LNDf_qI_YBl_QA&s=19
View: https://x.com/swamp_ist/status/1968505481221026218?t=dX1FJhh2LNDf_qI_YBl_QA&s=19
Mongoose
Well-Known Member
lol- yes the right wants to take over this industry that has been in total collapse for years because they cant tell the truth about anything. The right wants so badly to take over all of these bankrupt crooked "news" channels that only brain dead boomers are watching. Your teeny tiny feeble geriatric minds will soon be under the rights control.
Red
Well-Known Member
ABC, collaborators. In the history of authoritarianism, there is nothing worse than collaborators.
When “Last Week Tonight” won an Emmy on Sunday, Daniel O’Brien’s acceptance speech touched on something many intuited when Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled in July — at precisely the moment Paramount was trying to get the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission to approve its merger with Skydance. “We are honored to share [the Emmy] with all writers of late-night political comedy,” O’Brien said, “while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.”
It won’t be allowed to exist for long. Sunday’s Emmy Awards were creepy and subdued for good reason: Broadcast television, as it has existed for decades, is coming to an end. The crisis is as obvious as it is grave, and it has implications far beyond late-night: Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.
News broke yesterday that Disney-owned ABC — following a similar announcement from Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States — was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” off the air. The shocking move was ostensibly in response to a remark Kimmel made Monday night, which Nexstar and Sinclair, its biggest competitor, have characterized as so beyond the pale that the late-night comic’s show could not be permitted to air.
Here is that remark: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
The ordinariness of the statement is what unsettles the most. Accusations of political opportunism are hardly exceptional or unwarranted in this polarized landscape. Sure, Kimmel’s implication that the alleged shooter was “one of them” appears now to be inaccurate; based on the charging documents prosecutors submitted Tuesday, suspect Tyler Robinson was not a Trump supporter. As jabs go, it was a miss. But the outrage is so bizarre it almost seems (dare I say it?) opportunistic. Particularly since Kimmel’s target wasn’t Charlie Kirk!
I say that not to condone the current rush to treat any criticism of Kirk, a right-wing activist, as a fireable offense; few things are more quintessentially American than obnoxiously criticizing public figures. My point is simply that Kimmel didn’t. His claim was that “the MAGA gang” — that is, Trump supporters — were trying to “score political points” by mischaracterizing Kirk’s alleged killer.
One might wonder, then, why Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcast division, characterized Kimmel’s riff about MAGA discussions of Kirk’s alleged killer as being “about the death of Charlie Kirk.” But Alford did exactly that in the statement he issued explaining why he believed Kimmel’s show had to be preempted immediately: “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located.”
So there you have it: Criticism of “the MAGA gang,” meaning the president’s supporters, is so “offensive and insensitive” that it cannot be shown to Nexstar’s audience — which is, per its 2004 annual report, nearly 39 percent of U.S. households. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Alford said, in a statement he probably did not intend as a very dark joke.
But it reads as one, because the decision to target Kimmel appears to have very little to do with the public interest and quite a bit to do with the private interests of the parties concerned.
In the least surprising news in the world, Nexstar is seeking approval from President Donald Trump’s FCC to acquire Tegna, another media company. The $6.2 billion dollar deal would transform Nexstar-Tenga into an unprecedented mega-company whose reach would grow to 80 percent of U.S. households. There’s a hitch: A long-standing broadcasting rule prevents any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of U.S. households. So Nexstar doesn’t just need the FCC’s approval; it also needs the FCC to change that rule, or the deal can’t go through.
Luckily for Nexstar, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has signaled he’s open to ending “arcane artificial limits” on station ownership.
But just a few hours before Nexstar announced it was pulling Kimmel, guess who went on conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast to blast Kimmel and threaten that there were “avenues here for the FCC” if companies didn’t take action? Carr.
Calling Kimmel’s remark “some of the sickest conduct possible” and part of “a concerted effort to lie to the American people,” Carr suggested he would use the agency to punish companies that failed to punish the comedian. “I mean, we can do this easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said.
Shortly after Nexstar pulled Kimmel off the air, Carr celebrated the company’s decision to do “the right thing.” “Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest,” he wrote on X. “While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values.”
It’s hard not to connect those dots. It seems possible, and even probable, that Nexstar pulled Kimmel’s show because Trump’s FCC chairman made it clear there would be consequences — which might have to do with the Tegna deal — if he didn’t.
When “Last Week Tonight” won an Emmy on Sunday, Daniel O’Brien’s acceptance speech touched on something many intuited when Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled in July — at precisely the moment Paramount was trying to get the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission to approve its merger with Skydance. “We are honored to share [the Emmy] with all writers of late-night political comedy,” O’Brien said, “while that is still a type of show that’s allowed to exist.”
It won’t be allowed to exist for long. Sunday’s Emmy Awards were creepy and subdued for good reason: Broadcast television, as it has existed for decades, is coming to an end. The crisis is as obvious as it is grave, and it has implications far beyond late-night: Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.
News broke yesterday that Disney-owned ABC — following a similar announcement from Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States — was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” off the air. The shocking move was ostensibly in response to a remark Kimmel made Monday night, which Nexstar and Sinclair, its biggest competitor, have characterized as so beyond the pale that the late-night comic’s show could not be permitted to air.
Here is that remark: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
The ordinariness of the statement is what unsettles the most. Accusations of political opportunism are hardly exceptional or unwarranted in this polarized landscape. Sure, Kimmel’s implication that the alleged shooter was “one of them” appears now to be inaccurate; based on the charging documents prosecutors submitted Tuesday, suspect Tyler Robinson was not a Trump supporter. As jabs go, it was a miss. But the outrage is so bizarre it almost seems (dare I say it?) opportunistic. Particularly since Kimmel’s target wasn’t Charlie Kirk!
I say that not to condone the current rush to treat any criticism of Kirk, a right-wing activist, as a fireable offense; few things are more quintessentially American than obnoxiously criticizing public figures. My point is simply that Kimmel didn’t. His claim was that “the MAGA gang” — that is, Trump supporters — were trying to “score political points” by mischaracterizing Kirk’s alleged killer.
One might wonder, then, why Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcast division, characterized Kimmel’s riff about MAGA discussions of Kirk’s alleged killer as being “about the death of Charlie Kirk.” But Alford did exactly that in the statement he issued explaining why he believed Kimmel’s show had to be preempted immediately: “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located.”
So there you have it: Criticism of “the MAGA gang,” meaning the president’s supporters, is so “offensive and insensitive” that it cannot be shown to Nexstar’s audience — which is, per its 2004 annual report, nearly 39 percent of U.S. households. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time,” Alford said, in a statement he probably did not intend as a very dark joke.
But it reads as one, because the decision to target Kimmel appears to have very little to do with the public interest and quite a bit to do with the private interests of the parties concerned.
In the least surprising news in the world, Nexstar is seeking approval from President Donald Trump’s FCC to acquire Tegna, another media company. The $6.2 billion dollar deal would transform Nexstar-Tenga into an unprecedented mega-company whose reach would grow to 80 percent of U.S. households. There’s a hitch: A long-standing broadcasting rule prevents any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of U.S. households. So Nexstar doesn’t just need the FCC’s approval; it also needs the FCC to change that rule, or the deal can’t go through.
Luckily for Nexstar, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has signaled he’s open to ending “arcane artificial limits” on station ownership.
But just a few hours before Nexstar announced it was pulling Kimmel, guess who went on conservative commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast to blast Kimmel and threaten that there were “avenues here for the FCC” if companies didn’t take action? Carr.
Calling Kimmel’s remark “some of the sickest conduct possible” and part of “a concerted effort to lie to the American people,” Carr suggested he would use the agency to punish companies that failed to punish the comedian. “I mean, we can do this easy way, or these companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said.
Shortly after Nexstar pulled Kimmel off the air, Carr celebrated the company’s decision to do “the right thing.” “Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest,” he wrote on X. “While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values.”
It’s hard not to connect those dots. It seems possible, and even probable, that Nexstar pulled Kimmel’s show because Trump’s FCC chairman made it clear there would be consequences — which might have to do with the Tegna deal — if he didn’t.