The fascists want us to shut up. Don’t.

Amid the cowardice of legacy media, let’s find brave journalists and support them.

The Guardian’s notification read:

“Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to become the first convicted criminal to be elected U.S. president.”

We’ll have to see how long the Guardian keeps its press credentials after Trump takes power.

We’ll also have to see whether any other mainstream outlets will be as bold as the Guardian in telling the truth about Trump. After all, the TV networks and newspapers have every reason to fear that they’ll face government harassment if they make Trump look bad. Retribution is his brand, and they know it.

The coming months and years will be a roll call for fearless journalists, and I don't know how many will answer the call. But as we enter an era of deepening national madness, there will be hugely important stories to tell. 

Trump plans to put corrupt and deranged people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in positions of major responsibility. He appears poised to set up a Putin-style oligarchy, with billionaires like Elon Musk both profiting from the government and running it. Trump vows to round up millions of immigrants, put them in camps and deport them – an operation that would guarantee widespread human misery. His election is an endorsement of the second-class status of women and people of color, as well as the persecution of trans people. 

In Trump’s dictatorship, there will be lots of victims to interview. But will there be journalists willing to interview them?

Or will we see only a journalism of avoidance, a journalism of distraction?

We’ll get the answer soon. One thing is certain: This election showed us the power of mass media. But it was the power to disinform.

Right-wing propaganda, pushed by Trump and Fox News, made a majority of Americans think our country was in bad economic shape when it wasn’t. It made them believe the absurd idea that when they send their kids off to school, there’s a chance they’ll come home as girls. It made them think that rampaging brown- and black-skinned immigrants will invade people’s kitchens and slit their throats.

The lies overwhelmed the truth. Because the truth-tellers failed us.

The supposedly responsible media lost a sense of their duty, which is to help the public understand the facts. To accomplish that, news outlets needed to go to war with the liars. But they never did. Instead, they often treated lies as matters of opinion, worthy of consideration. Major outlets like the New York Times normalized fascist misconduct and minimized the threat to our democracy. And the TV networks, on Sunday show after Sunday show, kept putting the same Republican liars on the air to lie to their audiences again. 

Traditional media watched as right-wing propagandists constructed an alternative reality for tens of millions of people and allowed it to thrive in a hermetically sealed bubble. There was no serious attempt to rescue those people – to puncture the bubble and let the air of truth flow in.

Instead, major media went about their business making money. And when profits came in conflict with the best interests of the public, they chose profits. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today took the cowardly choice and avoided an endorsement of Kamala Harris that might have angered Trump. Now that Trump has received his shocking mandate as a strongman, there’s no reason to think those outlets will grow any courage now.

Look for Trump to put out the welcome mat for major media moguls to make humiliating pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee. He has already enlisted the owner of Twitter/X as a disinformation ally, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has fled to the safe and profitable position of downplaying political content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. 

I have no idea what the New York Times will do. After its failure to confront the fascist threat when it could have had an impact, perhaps the Times will try to prove critics like me wrong by being a sort of “loyal opposition” to Trump. And perhaps Trump will let the Times do that so he can use the news outlet as a punching bag and pretend he hasn’t conquered the legacy media. Or perhaps the Times will keep being detached from the ongoing battle for democracy. Perhaps it will reach into its big bag of euphemisms and describe internment camps as “involuntary gathering sites.”

Our salvation, if we are to be saved, will be the independent press, especially nonprofit media such as ProPublica. In an era when legacy media have become a dumpster fire, the independent media have offered us hope. We need to support these outlets with our money and our passion. Read The New Republic. Read Meidas Touch. Read Courier. And many more.

We need to keep posting on social media. About politics. About injustice. We can’t escape from the disaster of these times. We ignore it at our peril. We have to fix it.

We need to find ways to stay connected with each other, with a minimum of interference from people like Elon Musk. We need to talk to each other through digital startups, through a wide variety of newsletters, such as this one. 

The fascists want us to silently accept the loss of our rights and the persecution of our fellow human beings.

Which is why we can’t shut up.

And we won’t.