My brush with censorship — and what is coming

One of the most grotesque things a journalist or any media entity can do is to make a story about — or draw attention to — themselves.

Unfortunately, this happens all the time these days, in the United States of Clickbait.

The crap that passes for news on TV — MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance — do this with reckless abandon. And please stop watching this nonsense, dear readers. I know for a fact, you are better than this.

Places like The New York Times and The Washington Post not-so-subtly draw attention to themselves every chance they get by making front-page news of their never-ending political polls. These papers can literally go on for days touting their manufactured garbage, and actually employ well-paid staffers who write and edit about nothing else.

I mean, why report urgent stories warning about the looming fall of our Democracy if you can just pay staffers to endlessly weigh in on a bunch of meaningless numbers that are nothing but a big f------ guess?

It’s reprehensible, it really is.

Our corporate media is a terrible joke right now, and thankfully, more and more people are becoming aware of this. These major newspapers and TV shows are dropping viewers and readers by the tens of thousands, and deserve every bit of it.

So having typed all that …

… you just knew where all this was going, didn't you?

Yep, I want to quickly talk about me and a story WARNING SHOT that I produced Tuesday.

Respectfully ...

Since moving my office over to Substack just 27 months ago, I haven’t written a piece that has garnered anything even remotely close to the attention this one has. It has resonated with people and I take heart. To give you some idea of how well-read it has been, it is on pace to get five times the number of page views I normally receive from a story.

I am proud of the write, stand behind it, and as I said in the lede:

“I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.”

Of all the awful things the America-attacking Trump has planned for the citizens of the United States, attempting to use our military to exact his revenge will be the most heinous thing of all. He is a monster without chains, and has a 6-3 Supreme Court that will allow him to do all his terrible harrumphing through the countryside.

Anyway … once the story was published, my one-person marketing team, me, hung it in all the likely places — Notes, Twitter, Facebook and Bluesky hoping it might get some attention. Except only two of those places allowed it on their platform.

In Twitter’s case (and, yes, I am working my way out of that garbage dump, but not before I bring over as many of my 80,000+ followers as possible before I do) even though it did not allow the link to the story to get eyes as is their anti-free speech policy, I was able to post about the story, and did my best to steer readers to the link on my profile that then took them to this Substack site where the story is housed.

Sometimes I am smarter than the average bear.

And a million thanks to all of you who have subscribed from Twitter this week. Hundreds and hundreds of you have come over, and I am appreciative as hell. Welcome, and I will do everything I can to make it worth your time and money. The November 5th attack on our Democracy is taking all my time these days.

In Facebook’s case, they just flat censored the story. I put the post on my author’s page, which in all candor, I don’t water and nourish near enough, and it was taken down saying it was “spam” and violated community standards — as if a site that allows predators to stalk our children has any damn standards.

I went to Facebook politely screaming blood murder about this, and they have so far ignored my concerns. Many of you have told me that you, too, tried to post the piece with similar results. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your efforts.

Which takes me to the main reason I am in full belly-aching mode right now.

As the Republicans push us toward fascism and authoritarian rule, you can expect to see far more of this type of thing. If they get their way, and I can’t think of any sound reason they won’t, they will take a sledgehammer to the Fourth Estate and try to beat it to death.

We know this, because they have told us this is exactly what they intend to do.

Ice-cold irony then that the mainstream media, which is currently screaming loudest about this now, failed us catastrophically before by not reporting on the consequences of another Trump “presidency.” They refused to give the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the editorial weight it deserves, and now here we are: royally screwed.

I have typed before to you that information is POWER, (See Tip No. 1 in my guide to the way out of this catastrophic mess ... ) and Trump’s Republicans will do everything they can to mitigate that power.

While a huge part of me wants to see the corporate media get exactly what it deserves for their atrocious both-sides, shoddy approach to covering the most pressing story of our times, we still need them around to stand up and call power into account when they occasionally feel brave enough to do so.

We also really need to support the other credible media sources out there, that are doing tremendous work and don’t have the vast resources of the largest planets in our communications orbit, places like the NYT and WaPo.

Trump has said in no uncertain terms that he will be going after everybody and anybody who crosses him — like me, for instance. This is what authoritarian regimes do with vigor. They could easily wreck many of us by simply levying bullshit lawsuits and/our suing us at random.

Bigger media operations have legal teams that handle nothing but these kinds of things. Ninety-nine percent of the rest of us don’t.

The America-attacking Trump is going to spend a lot of his time trying to stifle and tax free speech, while pouring those profits into his bottomless pockets.

And if you think I’m sensationalizing the threat, consider that on Thursday the Republican-controlled House voted to pass H.R. 9495 — also known as the "Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act."

The bill looks innocent enough, allegedly written to authorize the treasury secretary to designate some nonprofit organizations as supporters of terrorism and strip them of tax-exempt status.

Except who decides which nonprofits deal in terror? What through the bloodshot eyes of say the American-attacking Trump, even defines terror?

Thanks to reporting in AlterNet:

“H.R. 9495 could feasibly be used against some of the groups that vocally opposed Trump during his first administration, like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center among others. It could also potentially be used against nonprofit news outlets like ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Texas Tribune and the Center for Investigative Reporting.”

One needs not stretch the imagination too much to see the America-attacker and his Court going after some of these news outlets and organizations simply because they offend him.

Worse — much worse — while all the no votes were from Democrats, 15 of them had the unmitigated gall to support the bill including Reps. Colin Allred (D-Texas), Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.) Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

I’m guessing they voted on their knees as they submitted to the mad orange king. This is outrageous, folks.

The clear-eyed Maryland congressman, Jamie Raskin, said this about the bill: “A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional. They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has so far been quiet as to his position on the bill, which is just outrageous, it really is.

I urge you to call your representative in Congress and give them an earful about this one. They must do everything they can to suppress the America-attacker’s powers, not enhance them.

That would help people like me, to continue standing up for people like you.

-Thank you

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.