Fascism Is a Cancer. Pro-Democracy Journalism Is the Cure. Plus 5 More Healthy News Sources You Must Spread to Fight for America's Life.

The information we consume directly impacts the health of our democracy. Improving your media diet, and the diets of others, is the best medicine against the quickly metastisizing cancer of fascism.

Aug 26, 2025

The Indignities of Suffering Under Terminal Fascism

Am I a broken record about the need for every American to adopt a healthy information diet immediately and encourage their friends and neighbors to do the same? Yes.

Why? Because just as continuing to smoke cigarettes when you have lung cancer vastly increases the likelihood of death, continuing to consume toxic information vastly increases the likelihood of American democray’s death. As our rights and protections are destroyed by the cancer of a lawless administration acting on behalf of dangerous billionaires and corporations, Americans remain addicted to sources of news and information that normalize fatal conditions.

As it poisons the tree of liberty, the Trump administration also literally poisons its citizens. From The Guardian:

The EPA is proposing to entirely ditch all restrictions on planet-heating emissions coming from US power plants, the second largest source of carbon pollution in the country, while also weakening a separate regulation designed to limit the amount of harmful toxins, such as mercury, seeping from these power plants into Americans’ air, water and soils.
These restrictions were imposed by Joe Biden to “advance the climate change cult” and the “green new scam”, according to Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, at an unveiling of the rollbacks on Wednesday that did not mention any benefit to the environment or public health.
“Together, these rules have been criticized as being designed to regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence,” said Zeldin, who touted the need for “beautiful clean coal” and for the US to develop artificial intelligence, neither a core EPA responsibility.

The insanity of Lee Zeldin’s statements is clear if you imagine your oncologist standing beside your hospital bed proclaiming the virtues of ‘beautiful, clean cigarettes’ in opposition to evidence of their toxicity.

A recent University of Marlyand study found “that rolling back these clean energy policies can cause substantial damages to economic and health outcomes across the country, resulting in a $1.1 trillion reduction in U.S. GDP by 2035, a $160 billion cumulative income loss, and at least 22,800 additional deaths of Americans cumulatively over the next decade.”

Despite these findings many news sources downplay these rollbacks, avoid direct discussion of public health harms, and create a false sense of equivalency between environmental science and political rhetoric. The Wall Street Journal’s headline, New EPA Leader Shakes Up Agency With a ‘Drill Baby Drill’ Mandate, makes tens of thousands of needless deaths seem exciting. The Houston Chronicle’s headline, EPA chief Lee Zeldin triggers historic policy rollback while energy leaders meet in Houston, lends a patriotic, pro-polluter tinge to a horrific outcome for the American public.

These articles place expert criticism of devastating policy decisions side by side with Trump administration propaganda, the equivalent of framing scientifically backed understandings of lung cancer as ‘All evidence says it’s bad to smoke cigarettes while you have lung cancer, but this one guy with a large megaphone and donations from cigarette companies is saying cigs are the cure for what ails ya…here’s everything else he had to say.” (Mainstream outlets, of course, often fail to even mention the influence of corporate donations).

Turning scientific consensus into a he said/she said between experts and stooges for deadly corporations is the opposite of journalism’s mandate to inform. Consider these two passages from a PBS article with the anodyne headline, “Trump administration moves to repeal EPA rule that allows climate regulation.”

This quotation of propaganda appears first:

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Zeldin said. “They created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of segments of our economy. And it cost Americans a lot of money.”

And then several paragraphs later we get the sentence:

Three former EPA leaders have also criticized Zeldin, saying his March announcement targeting the endangerment finding and other rules imperiled the lives of millions of Americans and abandoned the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.

Reporting that seeks to establish symmetry between asymmetrical phenomenon, between expertise based in fact and a corrupt politician’s paid-for speech, allows the cancer of fascism to metastisize by treating heinous actions as, well, normal politics. Rather than keep our democracy healthy with direct warnings of harms, such daily normalizations lead to complacency.

It’s entirely possible for journalists to take an empatically pro-democracy stance based on the evidence they uncover while reporting a story. In fact, it’s their job. Journalism is a democracy’s immune system, warning the public of danger so that citizens can take preventative action. We have fascism because too much of mainstream journalism, with its imperitave to make profit by appeasing as many readers as possible (and now an imperative not to upset Trump under threat of defunding and lawsuits), refuses to describe the threats to democracy, life, and liberty posed by Trump and his backers with the necessary frequency and prominence to induce us to make healthier decisions at the ballot box.

Decades ago experts helped us to recognize the public health threat of toxic cigarette smoke and our nation took action to eliminate the harm. America became healthier. Can we now do the same in the face of fascism’s threats to democracy?

Democracy’s Death By A Thousand Normalizations

In two recent articles one of the greatest media critics of our day, Dan Froomkin, offers a blistering rebuke of our national media’s normalization as well as ideas about how the industry can course correct. In his August 19th piece entitlted, “The elite media still falls for Trump‘s lies,” Froomkin wrote of the privilege mainstream outlets give to Trump’s lies about D.C. crime.

The elite media shouldn’t even remotely indulge the ridiculous lie that Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital has anything to do with crime.
Journalists should instead be aggressively reporting on Trump’s real motives, which include distracting from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, perpetuating racism, and normalizing the military takeover of an American city.
And yet the overwhelming majority of the media coverage of this debacle has focused on the issue of crime…
Consider the New York Times article by Katie Rogers last week. It began:
President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police force in the nation’s capital for 30 days and mobilized 800 National Guard troops to fight crime in a city that he claimed was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals,” even though crime numbers in Washington are falling. (my italics)
It quoted Trump at length:
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re not going to let it happen anymore.”
It didn’t mention Jeffrey Epstein once.
And the closest it came to identifying the takeover as a blatantly authoritarian act was an acknowledgment that Trump’s announcement “was an extraordinary exertion of federal power over an American city.”
Readers were left with little to no hint of Trump’s real motivation.
And if their only source of news is the elite media, they remain uninformed to this day.

He goes on:

There is a name for the phenomenon by which the media focuses on the false pretext instead of the real motives.
Back in 2008, political strategist and media critic Jamison Foser introduced the phrase “privileging the lie,” which (as he wrote more recently) describes “the news media’s tendency to center lies in its coverage of politics – not to center the fact that the people telling the lies are liars, but rather to center the lie; to adopt it as the framing for their reporting.” He continued:
When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. The media is privileging the lie that the takeover is intended to fight crime, when common sense and a mountain of evidence make it abundantly clear that it is not.

In his August 25th piece entitled, “We have become an authoritarian state, and our top newsrooms are in denial,” Froomkin offers ways that journalists can take a pro-democracy approach to their reporting during these dangerous times.

Armed soldiers patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, with more cities apparently to come. Immigrants who have done nobody any harm are abducted and disappeared by masked agents. The state is seizing stakes of national companies. Election integrity is under attack. Political opponents are targeted with criminal probes. Federal judges’ orders are ignored. Educational institutions are extorted into obedience. Key functions of the government are politicized and degraded. Expertise and science are devalued. Trump speaks of serving an unconstitutional third term…
And our dominant media institutions won’t call him out.
Rather, they obscure reality under a haze of incremental stories, each one presented as if what is going on is fairly normal. As if it’s just politics.
Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship.
The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.
The closest the New York Times newsroom will come to telling readers the truth, for instance, is to say that Trump is “promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism,” or that certain actions “increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries” behave.
The Washington Post will quote critics accusing Trump of “authoritarian overreach,” and protesters calling him “fascist,” but leaves even the most obvious conclusions to the readers to make themselves.

He writes of the need for a new journalism.

It is past time for our most consequential news organizations to recognize that Trump is leading an authoritarian regime.
I think that would lead to a different kind of journalism, one that prominently and repeatedly explains what constitutes an authoritarian state, and which of those factors are present here.
This new journalism would contextualize incremental events as actions of an increasingly authoritarian state. It would more closely monitor the integrity of the election process. It would more actively cover the resistance to the authoritarian state. It would explore how other countries have rejected authoritarianism in the past.
On Sunday, Perry Bacon, the former Washington Post opinion columnist who is now a staff writer at the New Republic, fantasized about a media that connects the dots:
CNN and MSNBC with a constant “The Trump Dictatorship” chyron on-screen. How Democracies Die authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt writing weekly columns in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. Reporters at major news outlets specifically assigned to cover authoritarianism, occasionally traveling abroad to study other autocrats and compare their moves to Trump’s.
This new journalism would have a different tone. It would shift from “it’s just politics as usual” to “we are in state of emergency.”
And in so doing, it would serve a public that deserves better than it’s getting, both from its government and from its media.

Too many reporters are given over to privileging obvious lies as a reasonable approach to a democracy at death’s door. Their normalization of Trump’s demands a complete overhaul of the journalism profession’s standards and practices.

The Homeopathic Remedy of Pro-Democracy Information. 5 Sources to Add to Your Media Diet.

If you had cancer, would you fight or just give in? I think you’d fight. And if the experts you once trusted were offering you misleading information, you’d explore every other avenue available to regain your health. Luckily, fact-based, pro-democracy information is thriving outside of mainstream journalism’s negligent standards. Improving our information nutrition is the only way to fight America’s fascist cancer. The remedies are readily available. The body politic must consume them and spread them with enough ferocity to overwhelm the disease.

Here are 5 sources for you to add to your media diet, and spread widely, so that we can defeat our American cancer.

Doomsday Scenario

Garrett M. Graff is a journalist and author who is a frequent voice on NPR, PBS NewsHour, and other outlets, he contributes to WIRED, CNN, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He independently writes Doomsday Scenario, his “regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era.”

In his latest piece entitled, America Tips Into Fascism, he writes:

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is. They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation's capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

Read (and spread) Doomsday Scenario

CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)

“CREW is a nonpartisan nonprofit government watchdog organization that takes on big fights—such as enforcing constitutional provisions like the Emoluments Clauses and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Despite the long odds, we continue to win victories, large and small, thanks to our dedicated team of around 50 lawyers, researchers, communicators, operations professionals and policy advocates. We will never stop fighting for the functioning democracy Americans deserve.”

CREW has a strong social media presence on Bluesky and produces plenty of pro-democracy journalism in conjunction with it’s legal advocacy work, like in this recent piece, Tracking Trump’s unprecedented—often illegal—firings of political appointees and watchdogs.

Read (and spread) CREW’s reports and investigations

Follow CREW on Bluesky

Center For Countering Digital Hate

“Our mission is to protect human rights and civil liberties online. Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation. Social Media companies deny the problem, deflect the blame, and delay taking responsibility. The Center for Countering Digital Hate holds them accountable and responsible for their business choices by highlighting their failures, educating the public, and advocating change from platforms and governments to protect our communities.”

I don’t need to tell you how important an organization like this is. Here’s their explainer on the harms of AI.

Read (and spread) CCDH’s reports and investigations

Follow CCDH on Bluesky

Inequality Media

“We are a nonpartisan digital media company with a mission. We produce compelling original video, share our content through social and traditional media to raise awareness about the issues, and partner with leading organizations to provide an avenue through which viewers can engage, mobilize, and take action.”

A media organization that fights for equality and provides readers with ways to take action? Can’t get more pro-democracy than that.

Here’s an incredible video about how monopolies harm us all.

Watch (and spread) Inequality Media’s videos

Follow Inequality Media on Bluesky

Follow Inequality Media on Instagram

Popular Information

I’ve stumped for Judd Legum and his outlet, Popular Information, since I became aware of him years ago. He’s covering the issues of our day from a pro-democracy angle, exposing Americans to facts and frames about corporate and political corruption that they likely aren’t seeing elsewhere. It’s true that Popular Information has been on these lists before. I just can’t recommend it enough.

Here’s a great piece to get you started:

Why you might not know that 2024 was America's safest year since the 1960s

Read (and spread) Popular Information

Follow Popular Information on Bluesky

Follow Popular Information on Instagram

Be Well-Informed, Be Contagious

Fascism exists where propaganda is strong. Dilute fascist propaganda by flooding the zone with fact-based, pro-democracy information every second of every single day. Stay informed, help others stay informed, save democracy. It’s that simple.

Public Enlightenment provides the context we need to understand the news. When you sign up as a subscriber or pledge a paid subscription, you're agreeing that we’re in this mess because of our toxic information ecosystem. You know that we must fight like hell to improve everyone’s media diet. Every single day.

Subscribe to help me keep up the fight for better outcomes for everyone!

Here’s to healthier information,
Brian

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