~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Freelance reporter Don Lemon, two weeks after having covered a rally in a Minneapolis church, was arrested and indicted in Los Angeles for being at that protest.
It is illegal to arrest a reporter for being a reporter.
What they do for a living – report – is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Freedom of the Press part of that amendment.
After his bond release from jail, Lemon explained how to recognize democracies becoming autocracies/plutocracies/dictatorships: the first thing that has to happen is that the Press must be pounced on for something or nothing, and arrested. The self-involved wannabe auto-/pluto-/dic- man is projecting – actually telling on himself – the fear that his lie will show up in a reporter’s story.
Dictators, plutocrats and autocrats do not want the truth told about them by reporters like Lemon, so they “project” by demeaning the writer, or by getting him fired, or, ideally, by having him tossed in jail. [becoming a jailbird is Trump’s biggest fear.]
Remember when Trump spoke at his first Inauguration and told us that the “carnage” going on in America was going to stop right here and stop right now?
It was a startling statement to me and at first I had no idea what he was talking about.
But during his campaign for the presidency. I had heard him “projecting,” so I surmised that the carnage was going to be his, and I just had to wait for it.
He’s been carnaging ever since. Right now, his carnage is the Department of Human Services ICEmen rampaging and killing in Minneapolis.
Trump’s psychological projection, attributing his own self-image to someone else, is the only way of living he knows: his own deepest fears spewing out on the world explaining what he really is. When Trump calls a reporter a liar [or in one case, “a piggy”], it is he himself, president of the Free World, projecting himself as both a liar and a piggy.
