Robert Reich discusses the Trump control techniques (1 minute):

Robert Reich’s Thursday substack email focuses on how the Felon In the White House (FIWH) has concentrated his power over our society by using the power of his office to squeeze (I would say extort) various sectors of our society and extracting concessions. Please read the whole post here:

I will extract some portions to illustrate the points that Reich makes. 

In what had to be one of the most widely followed public extortions was the caving of Paramount – parent of CBS tv – to the FIWH in return for the approval of Paramount’s merger with Sky Dance. Paramount paid what is basically bribes and then made concessions that seem unreal in what is supposed to be a democratic society with free speech:

Start with CBS. It’s now owned by Skydance Media. Under its Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission insisted, as a condition of allowing Paramount to sell CBS to Skydance, that the new owner install an “ombudsman.”

What will that ombudsman do? According to Skydance Media’s agreement with the FCC, the ombudsman will “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” for at least two years.

Yep, you read that right – CBS news gets a ‘minder’ or babysitter – from the government. Reich then discusses what this means:

If the ombudsman then decides that any complaint of bias or other concern is justified, CBS will have to remedy it. If the ombudsman decides that CBS has not remedied it, Skydance Media’s new president, David Ellison, must do so.

If Ellison does not remedy it — or if Trump believes the problem continues, regardless of what the ombudsman decides — the Trump regime can claim that CBS has reneged on its agreement, in which case Skydance’s ownership of CBS could be contested by the FCC. Its stock price would plummet.

Reich then goes on to show how the FIWH has used the power of his office to extract similar concessions for other sectors of our society. Perhaps most of you join me in shuddering as we watch universities cower in humiliation when the likes of Columbia and just this week Brown University. Brown agreed to a $50 million extortion from the current administration.

In his substack Reich makes this analysis of the Columbia cave to the administration:

Just like the CBS agreement, the Columbia agreement gives final power to the Trump regime. It allows the regime to maintain control over Columbia by holding a cudgel over the university. As Linda McMahon, Trump’s secretary of education, told Fox Business, “This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far-left-leaning professors.”

You see the pattern? Veto power over strategic decisions. Ombudsmen. Monitors.

Reich concluded with this very powerful observation:

I’m old enough to remember when conservative Republicans stood for limited government and accused Democrats of wanting too much government. No longer.

We’re now at a point in American history when a so-called Republican regime in Washington is extending its control far beyond the wildest dreams of the most left-wing of Democrats — or even socialists.

But this control is not exercised publicly. It’s behind the scenes. It’s found in the fine print. And it is personal. It depends on Trump’s whims.

This is what fascist control looks like, people.

I thought I was seeing a bit of groveling by NPR, but I just heard a great report from them on the FIWH’s breaking of norms. Hopefully, they are just tuning up for a fight.

I do know that while I probably cannot totally rule Paramount/ CBS out of my life it will be a very cold day in hell when I turn them on.

I also know that I will not trust any news source that has kowtowed to the FIWH. Americans  simply can not trust CBS or ABC for something as precious as their news, knowing that those companies are fearful of the FIWH and have shown they are by paying him bribes.

Remember that the truth has a liberal bias. Thus the truth will not be welcome on companies that bow to the authoritarian.

Democracies must have unvarnished news in order to function. We have seen this kind of control creep in to once solid democracies such as Hungary. This is stage one of autocracies.