Could Seattle be Trump's Next Takeover?
During the Kennedy Administration, when the tube was king, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow made headlines with his description of television programming as “a vast wasteland.” Decades later, social media is taking shape as a vast clutter of misinformation, bombast, and division. We are witnesses to the demeaning of democracy, a rot that begins at the head.
Donald Trump has used posts in pursuit of vengeance. He used a Tweet to fire his first Secretary of State, and to call Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “an enemy.” He has borrowed from the Joe Stalin playbook in calling even modest dissenters enemies of the people.
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Social media has become a forum on untruth, disinformation, and abuse. When critics in Congress called for due process before deportations, White House deputy chief-of-staff Stephen Miller sneered: “Once again, Democrats leaping to the defense of illegal alien child sex predators.” So much for the vast majority who pick our crops, tend to the elderly, and work the night shift at hospitals. Lacking is any sense of civility and basic decency.
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Seattle has become a MAGA social media target. The right is conjuring up a crime wave (and demonizing immigrants) when the crime rate is actually falling. “Seattle looks like sh-t,” opined Jonathan Choe, journalism fellow with Discovery Institute. Choe makes and posts scary videos in which our city streets are populated exclusively by “antifa militants,” “far left lunatics,” deranged addicts, and squalid homeless encampments. The theme is relentlessly stressed locally on KOMO, mouthpiece of right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting, as well as Fox News, whose pundits are now helping to run the country.
https://www.postalley.org/2025/08/26/could-seattle-be-trumps-next-takeover/
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