“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.” —Fisher Ames (1788)

Just before the November midterm election, in which the Trump administration’s extraordinary record of achievement couldn’t prevail over the Democrats’ “Hate Trump” campaign, the Democrat Party and its Leftmedia propagandists repeatedly denounced Donald Trump for suggesting that the most blatantly biased elements of the mainstream media were the “enemy of the people.”

According to Trump, in his brash rhetorical style: “There is great anger in our country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!”

When Trump says “fake news” is the “enemy of the people,” he clearly means the enemy of Liberty, which has sustained our Republic — and, ironically, freedom of the press — since our nation’s inception.

A case in point would be the Leftmedia’s response to his remarks this week regarding the humanitarian and security crisis on our southern border. Many of the Demo public-relations outlets debated whether they would even broadcast Trump’s first Oval Office speech.

Trump first referred to the mainstream media’s insidious and fallacious reporting a week after his inauguration in January of 2017, when he opined, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

But Leftmedia protagonists and their ideological conscripts have no idea what Trump — and grassroots Americans living outside the Beltway — mean when they assert that the media’s erroneous and prejudiced news coverage is the enemy of Liberty and, by extension, the enemy of the people.

Regarding Trump’s MSM callout, distinguished journalist Brit Hume observed, “I don’t think the press is the enemy of the people, but I do think the mainstream media have proven themselves to be the enemy of Trump. … There has been more bad and biased reporting such as I have never seen in the 50 years I have been in this business.”

For the record, The Washington Post has never in its history endorsed a Republican for president, and the last time a Republican was endorsed by The New York Times was 1956.

And regarding the Times, according to Jill Abramson (its executive editor from 2011 to 2014), that rag has become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” In her upcoming book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Abramson slams the NYT’s unapologetic leftist bias. She writes, “Though [Dean] Baquet [her successor and current executive editor] said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”

Indeed, the Times and The Washington Post have become leftist tabloids, the latter as the ideological megaphone of its billionaire socialist owner, Jeff Bezos, one of this era’s leading “Archenemies of Liberty.” But the print media is moderate compared to CNN and the cable collective’s dezinformatsia campaign against Trump.

Media bias is nothing new, but in concert with the Democrat Party’s most vociferous gang of socialist deniers and the ability to reach virtually every American 24/7/365, that bias is a more formidable threat to Liberty than at any time in our history.

Remarkably, the Democrats’ primary tactic for mastering that threat was inadvertently outed by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a month after Trump took office — but received little attention at the time.

In a March 2017 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Pelosi outlined the “wrap up smear” tactic that has become the Demos’ political black bag go-to strategy to undermine the Trump administration. She did so framing the smear tactic as something Republicans used against Barack Obama. According to Pelosi: “It’s called a wrap-up smear. You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say, ‘Everybody is writing about this charge.’ It’s a tool of an [authoritarian regime] to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about.”

The problem with Pelosi’s explanation is that even those with the most rudimentary brainstem activity know that Republicans can’t “have the press write about” whatever they dictate, and then use that as bona fide to make their point. That tactic belongs exclusively to the Democrats, whom the media have long favored.

In June, during a House Minority Leader Weekly Briefing recorded by C-SPAN, Pelosi went into more detail about the “wrap-up smear” strategy:

“It’s a diversionary tactic. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You demonize, and then you — we call it the wrap-up smear. You want to talk about politics? It’s called the wrap-up smear. You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it, and then you write it, and they’ll say, ‘See, it’s reported in the press that this, this, and this,’ so they have that validation that the press reported the smear, and then it’s called a wrap-up smear. ‘Now I’m going to merchandise the press’s report on the smear that we made.’ It’s a tactic.”

Again, she ludicrously claimed that Republicans actually control the Demo/MSM media machine, but the phrase she used to describe tactical political deflection originates with her.

Pelosi’s corrupt collusion tactics with the mainstream media amount to a gross betrayal of the First Amendment. The resulting perversion of the power of the press completely erodes the historic role it was intended to fill, providing a balanced and truthful check against political corruption. But most of the media has now hitched its wagon to that corruption.

Pelosi’s “wrap-up smear” was precisely the prescription that former FBI Director James Comey followed when orchestrating his fake-news press leaks to Leftmedia outlets in order to ensure that, by his own admission, a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate Russian collusion within the Trump campaign. Comey’s sole objective was to set Trump up for a takedown.

As we now know, the fake Russian dossier Comey used to initiate the investigation against Trump was funded by the Clinton campaign and her Democrat Party cohorts about the same time that they were conspiring to rig the Democrat primary against upstart Clinton opponent Bernie Sanders.

And the Demos’ Leftmedia talkingheads and news pulpers have devoted endless amounts of their collective airtime since Trump’s election to the collusion conspiracy and the resulting Trump investigation by Comey’s old friend, now-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.

More recently, the Left used the same “wrap-up smear” strategy in a vile attempt to turn public opinion against the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. California Demo Sen. Dianne Feinstein scripted the smear, providing her Leftmedia outlets with a salacious story with which to begin shaping public opinion. And those suffering from the most chronic cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome and toxic femininity — the female voters who represent the Democrats’ largest voter bloc — bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Feinstein’s smear almost worked, but Justice Kavanaugh withstood the storm and called the smear exactly was it was.

Donald Trump, however, may not fare so well against the perpetual smears being leveled at him.

Now that Pelosi, the embodiment of the congressional “Trump Resistance Collective, is speaker of the House, she will, as I predicted, undertake impeachment proceedings against Trump.

The resulting discord will likely result in the recession that Democrats are secretly hoping for ahead of the 2020 elections. If their plan works, job and income prospects for tens of millions of American workers will fall victim to a politically induced recession.

As Pelosi took the gavel, Trump warned, "As I have stated many times, if the Democrats take over … there will be disruption to the Financial Markets. We won the Senate, they won the House. Things will settle down. They only want to impeach me because they know they can’t win in 2020, too much success!”

Bottom line: It’s all about leftists’ unquenchable thirst for statist power. And for them, Americans outside the Beltway are just collateral damage in their quest.

As symbols of the fakest fake news of 2018, several of our conservative media friends have provided us with their top picks.

The Washington Examiner compiled a list of the worst journalism moments. The Media Research Center collected the most ridiculous cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Shockingly, The Washington Post ate one of its own, exposing CNN’s Journalist of the Year for the anti-Trump hack he was. National Review offered a good perspective on why people believe fake news. Townhall has a list of the most awesome fake news. And The Daily Caller offers its estimate of the most egregious fake news of 2018.

And, of course, having continuously challenged the Leftmedia’s assault on Liberty, we offer a video collection of some of the most mortifying media moments of the past year.

Imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if our national mainstream media outlets were actually neutral in their reporting – conducting themselves as journalists rather than ranting political puppets. It would look much more like what our Founders intended – a nation where protecting Liberty and the Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s founding documents, was chief among the concerns of our people.

During his Second Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson shared this remarkably prescient observation of a malignant media that had plagued his first term: “During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.”

That artillery was, and remains now more than ever, the enemy of Liberty and, by extension, the Enemy of the People.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776