The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s been 13 years since I first wrote a column from here. It was 2005 and I was house sitting for a close friend in Silver Spring, Maryland. The newspaper and magazine freelance business had already started to tank in the early days of the internet and blogging, so I went independent and started publishing on the web almost exclusively. Even before the Bush Great Recession hit in 2007-2008 and everybody started getting on Facebook in about 2009, it was already clear that newspapers were in real trouble.

Glynn Wilson

The New York Times, which I had worked for out of New Orleans and Birmingham from 2002 through the winter of 2005, had already started laying off reporters and cutting back on paying freelancers. The tech team tried putting up a paywall in 2005, but it failed to deliver enough paying subscribers to make up for the losses in print and digital advertising, so the Times got rid of it in 2007. The Birmingham News and other Newhouse papers were still trying to charge $1 for people to print out and read an article back then. No one was buying.

The future looked bright for the web, but we had to figure out how to build the economy for it. When the hacker/programmer in Homewood got my new site up and live, The Locust Fork News-Journal, I wrote this first Sunday column: Original Cowboy Blog.

It was sort of like a Brave New World back then, with lots of possibilities but also pitfalls. No one really knew what would happen to news and democracy, but we had great hopes even as Bush was crashing the global economy with deregulation.

Luckily for us, Barack Obama got elected to the United States Senate in 2004 and was sworn in in January 2005, and as depicted in one of the movies on the financial meltdown, was there in the room to carve out a plan to bail out the banks in 2008 even as Bush walked out of the room. The weak-minded president just couldn’t handle all the technical talk about the global economy, but at least he went along with the plan Obama crafted to save us from an international depression.

To this day most people don’t know how close we came to the utter collapse of the economy. If ATM machines had stopped working, we would all have been eating shoe leather like they were in Birmingham back in the 1920s even before the Great Depression of the ’30s. The gen-Xers and Millennials who took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement had bad timing and a nearly total lack of knowledge of history.

But of course like kids everywhere, you couldn’t tell them anything. By then the narcissist only opinions matter era had already begun, which just morphed into hyperdrive with the era of alt-facts thanks to Fox News, Facebook, Steve Bannon, Breitbart News and Donald Trump’s Twitter campaign for president.

We are now living in a world where a president of the United States is running the country on alt-facts, where the fake right-wing, conservative, Republican view of the world on Fox News is substituted for reality. It’s not just political “infotainment” anymore. Major national and international decisions are being made on the basis of what Sean Hannity says on Fox and Bannon says in Trump’s ear.

And unlike what many intellectuals and liberals on the political left see as an insane, weak-minded accident, there is an evil plan behind all of this to divide and conquer. We still don’t know the full extent of Trump’s collusion with Russia, and may never know if Trump is really able to get away with firing special counsel Robert Muller and pardoning himself.

But Trump’s recent comments about getting Russia back in the G-7 to make it the G-8 again is certainly telling. No collusion? Then why is Trump pimping for Russia, still? Trump torpedoes G7 effort to ease trade spat, threatens auto tariffs.

As New York magazine recently reported: Trump Is Fulfilling Russia’s Dream of Splitting the Western Alliance.

Remember why Russia was expelled from the G-8 “after invading and seizing territory from its neighbor, among other aggressive actions — including murdering people overseas, menacing other neighbors and, not incidentally, committing cybertheft against the Democratic Party as part of its operation to help elect Trump.”

A key line: “The rise of Donald Trump has been met with a persistent strain of denial.”

This denial continues, and literally resembles a similar phenomenon in Germany from the 1930s. Many people in a number of countries, including the United States, thought they could continue to negotiate with Adolph Hitler (including the Bush family). Many years later, after all the atrocities of World War II were studied by academics, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann came up with a theory to explain why people remain silent in the face of crisis. It came to be known as the spiral of silence theory.

Now you can argue that the Wikipedia version of this story is shallow, for sure, but here is the lay person’s summary just so the average news reader in the U.S. and Alabama can begin to grasp what’s really going on.

This theory “stipulates that individuals have a fear of isolation, which results from the idea that a social group or the society in general might isolate, neglect, or exclude members due to the members’ opinions. This fear of isolation consequently leads to remaining silent instead of voicing opinions. Media is an important factor that relates to both the dominant idea and people’s perception of the dominant idea. The assessment of one’s social environment may not always correlate with reality.”

If that sentence doesn’t shake you to the core and make you want to march in the streets and financially support a better press on the web, I don’t know what will. I have been working my fingers to the bone for 13 years for very little money to try to get people to understand how important this is. I understand many people in my home state of Alabama are too afraid of their conservative friends, neighbors and co-workers to share these links on Facebook.

But let me ask you what is worse. Starting an argument with your friends, family members and co-workers — or a fascist dictator taking over the United States of America and crashing the global economy again for political purposes and to take over the country? This is NOT some partisan exaggeration. It is happening right before our very eyes every single day.

I don’t know how many horrible disasters it will take to wake people up. Even Al Gore said it will take a crisis. How much of a crisis? Look around. Will it take shutting down the ATMs where people can’t get access to their money? Will it take a nuclear war with Iran and/or North Korea? Will it take sea levels rising to a point where it creates beach front property on the Creek reservation in Atmore?

Wake the fuck up people and get involved. We can’t just save the world on Facebook. Democracy takes real American objective journalism, news steeped in the facts, not alt-facts on TeeVee. And you can’t get that for free.

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Brother, can you spare a dime?