The Trump attack on the media continues to grow: not only has Bannon told the media to "Shut up" but now Minister of Propaganda Conway has called for firing media critics. Dailykos reports: "Kellyanne Conway goes on bonkers rant, calls for Trump's media critics to be fired"
Le 
t's Let's begin with a fundamental principle of propaganda:
"It.... becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." --- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
The repression of dissent has two tools: "alternative" facts and intimidation ("Shut up."). If that fails, there is always raw force, the Police State Trump promised. This ultimate mechanism does not repress dissent so much as eliminate dissenters.
Recently, both of Trump's ministers of propaganda have promoted these measures to eliminate or degrade dissent.
Kellyanne Conway presented the idea of "alternative facts" as a way of sanitizing lies and giving them equal status with objective truth (such as crowd sizes). Steve Bannon, Goldman-Sachs alumni and head of the neo-fascist alt-right, has told the media to "Shut up."
Public intellectuals like Paul Craig Roberts have aided this crackdown on free speech by claiming that both the recounts initiated by Jill Stein are Soros-funded attempts to execute a "coup" and by claiming that the millions of protesters against Trump are being paid by Soros or the CIA. This attempt to delegitimize both the right to fair elections (which requires the right to recounts) and protest is part of the effort to create an intellectual basis for fascism.....and we need to look no further than Hitler (whose speeches Trump studied) and Goebbels, the role model for both Conway and Bannon.
The major pillars of propaganda are:
1. Make a lie big enough, absurd enough, that few will believe anyone would tell such a whopper. Goebbels asserts that the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed. A good example is that Trump has demonized the undocumented immigrant population as very dangerous ("They are rapists...criminals), while the objective fact is that undocumented workers are the most law abiding and non-violent members of the community: in 2018, there were 14, 138 murders in the US and 8 were committed by undocumented workers.
Yet Trump has promised to make every violent act by an undocumented immigrant headline news, tho their rate of violent crime is 99% lower than US citizens. (Source: US Bureau of Prisons). That is why I suggest that what Jews were for Hitler (ie the most defenseless population), Mexicans are for Trump. The second key feature of fascist propaganda is to repeat the lie over and over until it is believed.
The third feature is in Goebbels Principles of Propaganda, #18, which ties all these lies together:
PROPAGANDA MUST FACILITATE THE DISPLACEMENT OF AGGRESSON BY SPECIFYING THE TARGETS FOR HATRED
This is exactly how Trump started his campaign, with the Big Lie about immigrants, repeated endlessly and fortified by the promise to build a wall, and then displacing white working class anger at neo-liberal victimization onto the least protected group, the peaceful and hard-working Mexican population of people denied legal protection.
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