"As we celebrate America's birthday this week, let's look at some of the fundamental rights that make our country worth celebrating," Samantha Bee said on Wednesday's Full Frontal. "The First Amendment alone is crammed with essential freedoms: You can speak your mind, you can practice your religion, and as long as it's on a bagel, you can have pizza anytime. But lately the government seems to be having second thoughts about one of our First Amendment rights."
When the demonstrations against racism and police brutality blossomed after the killing of George Floyd, "police were mostly busy beating up protesters, but they still found time to go after journalists who were clearly identified as press, targeting them with arrests, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and good old fashioned beatings," with President Trump egging them on, Bee said. "Look, I know, it's not exactly a revelation that the president is always trying to undermine the media, but that's the problem: We're all so used to it that we act like it's normal. And the more that we ignore anti-press sentiment in America, the more it will spread."
"When Trump became president, he was crushed to find that the job comes with criticism and that the glowing PR he got from the business media isn't typical of the political press," Bee said. "Since the media refused to love him back, Trump has chosen to do the mature thing and use his presidential power to destroy them."
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Trump isn't suing news organizations for saying mean things about him because he expects to win, "it's to scare media companies out of saying anything to could provoke even a frivolous lawsuit, which can still be costly to fight — this is called chilling free speech," Bee said. And "the scariest part about Trump's war on the press is that he's winning. No one's been able to stop his attacks so we just go about our lives while they run constantly in the background like white noise — which is, of course, Trump's preferred color of noise. ... When Trump undermines the free press, he's not just attacking journalists' rights to do their jobs, he's attacking your right to know what's going on in the world."
Bee also still wants to save the U.S. Postal Service from Trump, and she'll buy stamps if you tweet using the hashtag #MailedIt. Peter Weber
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