Dateline – Pittsburgh, Oct. 13, 2016: President Barack Obama denounces America’s “wild, wild west” media environment for allowing conspiracy theorists a broad platform and destroying a common basis for debate.
Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.
“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added.
Are you having an unpleasant flashback yet?
Venture back with me. It was a presidential election year, and Obama was not happy with what was happening. Perhaps he sensed, before many of his allies, that the 2016 campaign was not going quite like he expected.
By the way, if the Russians were turning the tide in this election, who was in charge? That’s right. Barack Obama was in charge. Obama wasn’t blaming the Russians for anything. He was blaming the independent media. Something had to be done about the fact that more than one “reality” was getting out there. The media were no longer in lockstep as they were when he was a child – with three news presentations to choose from.
If you doubt what I am saying, consider the way Agence France Presse explained the backdrop for what Obama was saying: “His remarks came amid an election campaign that has seen Republican candidate Donald Trump repeat ideas and take on key staff from right-wing media outlets.”
What Obama was calling for, and what even I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmare, would be the case 16 months later; he got his way. He had given the cue to his friends in the Digital Cabal: It’s time to unlevel the playing field.
That’s what we saw happen in the aftermath of the swearing in of Donald Trump as president. In the euphoria of that victory, we in the independent media could not perceived what was underway – a kind of media coup was taking place. The Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world took control of the digital domain. They began throwing their monetary and corporate power around to deliver Obama’s legacy – the end of the free press in America.
These powerful, all-knowing, all-powerful ideological thugs began a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on the independent media.
Perhaps the most important way they did that was by embedding left-wing extremists as rule-makers and gatekeepers, the speech-code cops of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to determine what is real news and what is fake news. It is nothing short of political censorship come to America.
I have been quite open about the development’s impact on WND over the last several years. It has been hell. We played by the rules set by our opponents, and we won. But, when we won, the rules began changing. As soon as we figured out the new rules, they changed again – and again, and again, and again.
The goal is nothing short of driving the independent media into extinction. This was what Obama was talking about. As we laughed about the kind of tyranny he disguised in the name of “democracy,” he was serious. And those who had the power to institute this diabolical plan to end freedom of the press in America without a constitutional amendment – the Digital Cabal – went about the business of doing so.
I won’t go into all the ways they have done it. But they did it. It was difficult at first, because I wasn’t seeing this reality as sharply as I do now. It was in full swing when Trump was elected. I was at the top of my game yet losing everything I had worked for. Even most of my colleagues were not fully in the crossfire. They were certainly not taking the sage advice of Benjamin Franklin who said famously: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Is it too late to save free speech and the free press in America?
Yes, it is. We will have to fight to claim what our ancestors first discovered for themselves – but it will never be like it was. The innocence has been stripped away.
We’ve lost everything – even our election integrity. Our opinions are no longer valid, the Digital Cabal tells us. We’re deemed “insurrectionists.”
But we can come back. America is not finished yet. And neither is the first independent online new site – this one, WND, WorldNetDaily.
If what you hear resonates, here’s what you can do:
Support this enterprise as we face an existential threat, the biggest, baddest challenge we have endured in some 25 years.
Support WND – including its ongoing investigations into the Digital Cabal. As the internet’s first independent online news outlet, founded back in 1997, WND has been systematically victimized by Google-Facebook through its manipulative algorithms, ad blocks and biased search results. We ask for your prayers and your critical financial support, without which WND will cease to exist.
If you think the internet is under the total control of Big Tech now, it’s going to get much worse this year as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and YouTube (owned by Google) get bigger and bigger.
It’s not just WND in their cross hairs. It’s Breitbart, the Daily Caller and all the rest.
Thus, there’s nowhere else for WND to turn than to direct financial contributions. What we collect in donations for the WND News Center all goes to reporters, editors and contributors – every dime.
That’s why beginning Tuesday, June 15, we’re launching our drive to raise $100,000 by July 15. And with your help, and God’s help, we will rise like a phoenix again to help America straighten out this mess.
Please support us with your prayers and by making a generous tax-deductible donation to the WND News Center, the nonprofit, charitable, 501(c)3 sister organization to the for-profit WND. And consider sending a monthly contribution of any amount.
If we go down, soon the independent free press will be a thing of the past, and with it, our uniquely blessed nation. Please make your tax-deductible donations online at the WND News Center website. Or, if you prefer to mail your donation, please make your check out to “WND News Center,” write “Farah donation appeal” on the check’s memo line and mail it to: WND News Center, P.O. Box 100, 580 E Street, Hawthorne, NV 89415-0100. Thank you very much, and God bless you.
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