Republished with permission from D. Earl Stephens

This has not been the holiday season that so many of us had planned.

Just two months ago, the good and righteous among us fervently hoped that America’s worst days would finally be put behind her, and a period of endless possibility would begin.

Glass ceilings would be broken, and maybe for the time ever the audacious dream that there really could be liberty and justice for all of us in America would be grounded in results.

If nothing else, we were not going back …

Today I type to you with a bitter taste in my mouth, and an unshakable feeling that our worst days are only beginning. After putting it all on the line for eight years, and righting as many wrongs as possible, we are once again being relegated to the back of that line, while all hell breaks loose in front of our tired eyes.

It is too damn much to contemplate, it really is.

Cloaked in that bone-dry spirit, I set out last week to lift us up a bit, and go for some much-needed laughs. A helluva lot is being asked of us as we set out yet again on the never-ending battle to save Americans from themselves.

And before getting to the heart of it here, I do want to acknowledge the pain people are in right now. As I’ve written before, the results of that terrible election are still very raw. They are shaking us to the core. We all have to tend to our mental health right now, while we grapple with how, or even if, we come back to face all this hurt.

How you choose to deal with all this is strictly a personal matter, and I won’t judge. I see too many people hoisting guilt upon the sick and tired by pushing them back into the fray. I don’t like it.

This has become a very nasty country, and if you’ve had enough of all of it, and are seeking the safety of shelter from the storm, I don’t blame you.

I will never shake off the profound disappointment I have in my country right now, and will fight for what’s right, but I, too, need some damn time.

All those heavy words written, I reckon we could all use a laugh.

Subscribers will know that in the past week I have broken out a couple of chapters of the book I penned in the choppy wake of the last terrible election in 2016. During that period I found myself sliding into a political satire to cope with the depression, and “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” was born.

Here was the premise for the book:

I wrote a bunch of these letters, and used Trump’s best words to dismantle him.

I hadn’t opened the book for a while, because I thought we were finally done with the raw sewage that inspired it, so yesterday when I came across what I had written for the dedication in 2018 it surprised me a bit:

When I wrote that bit to open the book, it was clearly aimed as a fist bump to a working press I had given my professional life to.

It was also a shot at the repulsive Trump, of course, who had subjected many of the woman and men in the media to violent threats on his odious campaign trail as well as labeling them, “the enemy of the people.”

This was the revolting woman-grabber perfecting the scribbly art of projection, as well as paying homage to his murderous heroes like Joseph Stalin, Joseph Goebbels, and Benito Mussolini who also freely labeled the press “the enemy of the people” in an effort to incinerate the truth, while spreading their hateful bile to the masses.

Just six years ago, when the majority of the book was written, I was still very much of the opinion that our working press would bring the career criminal and racist to his fat knees. He was overmatched, and as an immoral, dishonest man, with a rotting mind, it all just had to spectacularly catch up with him.

He worked for us now …

If making fun of the disabled didn’t end it for him before it even started, then defending the murdering Putin in Helsinki for his attack on our vote surely would.

Turns out, there were in fact all manner of consequential stories broken about the loathsome thug, but somehow nothing stuck. America had stepped in a steaming pile of shit, and try as it might, could never scrape it off its boots.

We mostly have a sickening Republican Party and their deplorable voters to thank for that, but our national working press has also failed us spectacularly.

I am not excusing the mainstream media’s treatment of the 2016 campaign, and their appalling both-sides approach approach to Hillary Clinton and the America-attacker, but something radically changed in the way the media started covering Trump after his attack on January 6, 2021.

After that mauling of America, Trump and his domestic terrorists proved themselves the greatest threat to the United States of America in the world.

It was the biggest, most jarring story of most of our lifetimes, and it should have never left our front pages until he, and everybody involved were tried for their crimes and thrown in jail.

But even an attack on our country went unpunished because in addition to the media’s slow and steady normalization of this appalling man, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department was only too anxious to give him a free pass.

That, too, should have been reported vigorously.

It wasn’t of course, and the America-attacker was free to shake down campaign officials, threaten poll workers, invite violence and retribution against his rivals, chirp one racist thing after another, and defend fascists like Putin as if his life depended on it.

But sure, let’s endlessly report on Hunter Biden and the price of eggs …

The working press I once revered, and had been a proud member, have been on the retreat. Their heavy-handed corporate overlords are pulling editorials, endorsements and fast ones on their readers and viewers.

They tout wretched poll stories they pay for and spread as gospel, and have normalized fascism, as if it were just some passing fad.

There’s big money to made bowing to and kissing Trump’s fat ass.

On Sunday, ABC-News tried to quietly settle a defamation lawsuit brought against it by the hideous Trump. ABC-News, of course, is owned by a Disney, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

I cannot tell you how hard it is to prove defamation, especially when you have an army of lawyers who specialize in nothing but defending these cases. But ABC-News decided to surrender nonetheless, so as not to offend their new king, and make good and sure they get plenty of access to cover (up) his crimes.

Just as I was getting ready to type that this settlement would only embolden the mad king to go after more media entities, Reuters is reporting this morning that Trump “is suing the Des Moines Register newspaper and its top pollster, court documents showed, the day after he stepped up his legal threats against news outlets and said he would also consider suing social media influencers and others for defamation.”

Read this again: “… he would also consider suing social media influencers and others for defamation.”

So essentially everybody in America is now a target of this smoldering sludge of an administration, and that my friends is what Hitler’s Germany looked like in the late-1930s.

Fascism is officially here.

According to the reporting “Gannett, parent company of the Des Moines Register, is also named in the suit,” and for now, “a Gannett representative said the organization stands by its reporting and believes the suit is without merit.”

I will hope this is a given, and Gannett will stand its ground, but after what ABC-News pathetically pulled, along with all the other troubling signs in our media that I alluded to above, I find myself actually questioning if our working press has the stomach for this.

I won’t go so far as to call the media the enemy of the people, but I am telling you right now they are in the process of surrendering to the people who most definitely are.