Dismantling The Free Press

Tonight,  the moon's purpose has been overcome by thick, cloudy darkness. There is no discernible pearly glow suspended from the heavens, to illuminate the path forward for me and the puppies, on our journey. It feels like the same kind of augury, overshadowing America's hope for a better future.

It remains an undisputed fact, that there is an absolute correlation between a repressive government and the lack of a free press in a country.

Thomas Jefferson admonished his fellow Americans about the illusion of freedom. He exhorted all Americans to remain vigilant protecting the 1st. Amendment, specifying the right to free speech. He warned that there is no freedom, if there is no free press. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were very emphatic about the distortion of democracy and its stewardship, throughout their lives.

We now live in an era, where America stands precariously perched on the philosophical precipice of abdicating the tenets of democracy and turning her back on the Constitution. When our elected leaders publicly use their powerful positions to demean and degrade our free press, it has a very real influence on the mindset of average American citizens. Ultimately, it results in a biased and negatively skewed perception about free press organizations, their reports and dissemination of the news, that reaches into every home in America. It unscrupulously undermines, systematically dismantles and effectively endangers everyone's right to free speech.

Our elected leaders political currency is their public persona. Their image and influence affects the actions and reactions of all American citizens, to one degree or another. When the President speaks, his words do matter. Puppet Masters, Steve Bannon and KellyAnne Conway... know it.

Benjamin Franklin said:

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government: When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved,” wrote Founding Father Benjamin Franklin in The Pennsylvania Gazette.


Thomas Jefferson said:

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.

                                           "Good Night" and "Sweet Dreams"