Dominic Bordenaro is a freshman political science major and writes "Dominic's Politics" for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. Write to Dominic at dabordenaro@bsu.edu.
There is a new war in America, pushed by the Trump administration.
It’s not a war on drugs.
It’s not a war on poverty.
It’s not even a war on terrorism.
It is a war on the First Amendment and the press of America.
It all started with “fake news,” which should not even be called that because it is not news.
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Now it has escalated, with the Trump administration promoting what are really just lies. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, has only made matters worse.
He has made several claims, including that Trump’s inauguration was the largest ever viewed. Period. There is no evidence to support that claim just like there is no evidence to support the claim that millions voted illegally, as the White House likes to claim. Spicer even went on to call CNN “fake news.” Trump has also called The New York Times and The Washington Post, two of the world’s most respected newspapers, “fake news.”
Every American should feel outraged. I am outraged. Thousands of hard-working, honest journalists are outraged.
This is a government, an administration, trying to censor the press. They are trying to make us believe that only what they tell us is the truth, and that we should not believe the facts presented by thousands of investigative reporters.
Recently the White House released a list of terrorist attacks that they claimed the media did not or barely covered.
The media responded swiftly, with CNN even showing clips of their very famous hard coverage of the attacks.
This was another blatant lie and politically motivated attack meant to divide us even more.
The list left out some key terrorist attacks. Those include the attack on the Charleston church that killed nine in 2015, as well as the attack on Planned Parenthood that followed, which killed three. In fact, the list leaves off any attack that was not committed by someone claiming to be of the Muslim faith, and was only included if it involved the deaths of westerners.
The First Amendment is under attack and we must support the press just like they must support each other. We cannot lose our free press.
However, if we want to keep that freedom of speech, we cannot react with violence like many did at Berkeley University recently.
The University Republicans invited a well-known right wing speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos, to the campus. That was met with protest.
Along with the peaceful protesters, a few of them got violent and the university had to shut it down. This is wrong. We cannot advocate violence to get what we want.
I am completely against the hate speech this man preaches. He is wrong. But when we answered with violence, we were wrong too.
If we want to defeat this kind of speech, we must protest it, and we must debate it. It cannot be normalized.
Later, Trump responded by threatening to pull federal funding from the university for not letting the man speak. That was wrong too. The university had no choice and was doing what was best to keep the peace.
We must stand up to this. We must stand up for our rights and, in particular, our journalists. In that, we must be peaceful. We must condone those who would be violent and protest those who would silence us.
We can get through this, but only if we do it together, and we do it peacefully.
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