Dismantling Democracy Starts With Restricting The Media

I said yesterday it felt like part of the USA had died.  It appears others have felt the same.  This piece by Neal Gabler at Moyers&Company starts out with that focus, but then goes on to look at the death of the American media.  

And as AP News pointed out today, excluding the media was one of Trump's first moves.

"President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday refused to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his historic first meeting with President Barack Obama, breaking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nation's leader.
Trump flew from New York to Washington on his private jet without that "pool" of reporters, photographers and television cameras that have traveled with presidents and presidents-elect.
Trump's flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday."

The media, when doing their job well, and a lot of the media did NOT do their jobs well during this campaign, are the bulwark of democracy.  They are the key to keeping government accountable.  And restricting the media is one of the first steps a dictator takes.

In 2007 I posted Naomi Wolf's Ten Steps For Dismantling Democracy. Now's a good time to review those steps.   I suggest putting them up on the refrigerator.

I looked up authoritarian fonts for this list.  I was directed to Fraktur - this one above is Breitkopf Fraktur.  I know, it's hard to read.  So here's another one that's easier, but a bit messy.  But I want the image to be as jarring as the message.  Or you can write out your own copy.  That helps cement these in your mind. While looking for a font, I also found a book I found called A True Authoritarian Type. 

Restricting the press (8) already began during the campaign, and was one of the first actions newly elected Trump has taken that we know of.  And Bush had already begun on this road and Obama has also contributed to it (4).


Yesterday I decided that all posts about American politics need to have a positive step that readers can take. Here are two.

___ Clipping the list and putting it on the refrigerator is one.
___ Check out Klein's website, her Wikipedia page, or The Economist's rejection of her ideas 

Liberty Watch - TSA Guarding the Nation

Here's the beginning of the story of an Icelandic visitor who was chained and handcuffed at JFK held without sleep or food and very delayed phone contact, then taken to a jail in New Jersey. I found a number of other sites carrying the same story, but not futher corroboration of the story. It appears from the story that her crime was having overstayed a visit by three weeks in 1995. So let's withhold judgment at the moment, but put it into our Liberty Watch file as we watch Naomi Wolf's ten steps to dismantling democracy take place. This seems to fit 5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens. Although this is not a US citizen, would American citizens expect this sort of treatment when visiting other nations? The whole story is at this site.

[Note: Later stories say it is Erla, not Eva]

The story of Eva, [Erla] Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

I was photographed and fingerprinted. I was asked questions which I felt had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I was forbidden to contact anyone to advise of my predicament and although I was invited at the outset to contact the Icelandic consul or embassy, that invitation was later withdrawn. I don't know why.

The rest of the story is at this site.

[12/26/07 See related/follow up story here.]

More Horror Stories from Naomi Wolf

In a comment on the previous post, Phil linked to this piece by Naomi Wolf on another blog. These stories sound so unreal that I'm sure many will say, "It can't be true" or "She must have done something suspicious" but that's what they said as the Nazi's took over. We have the advantage of knowing about Nazi Germany, something those living in Germany in the 30s didn't have. Here are a couple of excerpts from her post:

Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States’ — though it is squarely inside the airport — so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States’ - is a legal no-man’s land — so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?’ `Lady, this is not detention,’ the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.’

Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared’ for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.

– Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

In a June post, I created a vision of a military coup in the US to set up a scenario to imagine the choices that Iraqis must face daily. If Wolf is correct, Bush and company have been using the presidency and the power of the US government to set up the base for taking over the country - with Blackwater as their private military.

Many Jews perished in Germany because they didn't leave when they could. If you read this report seriously, you can get a sense of how it must have felt. Can you give up your home, your job, whatever savings you have because some people are saying this is going to happen? I don't know that Wolf isn't seeing things that aren't there, but I don't know that she is wrong either.

Naomi Wolf - Ten Steps to Dismantling a Democracy

My mother was 11 when Hitler came to power in 1933. As a Jewish girl, she experienced the various laws that step by step made life more difficult for Jews, including when she was no longer allowed, as a Jew, to go to school. She managed to get out of Germany and to the US in 1939, and I grew up hearing these stories. Hearing how the country she took for granted and felt totally a citizen of, slowly deteriorated and made her and her family the evil threat to society. Since then I've
read my share of books about this period to fill in more details. A recent one that I'd strongly recommend is Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness

So when I see similar things happening here, I'm seriously disturbed. Most German Jews, not to mention gentile Germans, didn't believe it could possibly happen there. Just like most Americans don't believe it could happen here. When I've told people that the Bush administration is copying the Nazis in the steps they took to dismantle the rights of German citizens, they look at me like I'm crazy - we don't have concentration camps. I'm not talking about concentration camps, but what the Nazis did before they sent Jews and Gypsies and others to concentration camps. The steps they went through that allowed the citizens of arguably the most educated and advanced country in the world at the time, to accept concentration camps when the time came. [And if a number of blogs are correct, FEMA has set up a series of detention camps.around the country that could be used to put away dissenters and other undesirables. Originally set up for illegal immigrants and used for Katrina refugees, these blogs relate, there are such camps planned and being built all around the US already. The links I could find look kind of flakey, but I've been assured by people I trust and pointed to FEMA regulations for this.]

So I was pleased to find someone who has written a book about the progressive steps to dismantling a democracy. Wolf identifies ten steps that are used to overthrow democracies and shows how they have been used in various regimes and how they are being taken in the US today. Well, it's depressing as hell, but to the extent that this is exposed and people become aware of what is happening, the better our chances of blocking this.




[This is not showing in my preview window, but maybe it will show on the blog itself. Jeremy, at KWMD (87.7 and 104.5 FM in Anchorage) says they've already played this on the air and will play it again tonight -Sunday- at 6pm. You can try YouTube.]

Here are the ten steps as outlined by Naomi Wolf in her book The End of America and discussed in this tape from Youtube from a talk at the University of Washington October 11, 2007.

1. Declare the existence of sleeper cells.
2. Create a secret prison system where torture takes place outside the rule of law and very often establish military tribunals that strip prisoners of due process
3. Create a paramilitary force
4. Create a surveillance apparatus for its ordinary citizens.
5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens,
6. infiltrate citizen groups
7. Target key individuals
8. Restrict the press
9. Recast dissent as treason
10. Declare martial law - months before an election, destabilization


A quote from Naomi Wolf's talk:

Name a society that created a secret prison system outside the rule of law where torture takes place that didn’t sooner or later turn the abuse against its own citizens

She does have some proposals for what to do.

Thanks to http://1984comic.com/ for posting this from YouTube.