Local newspaper looks complicit in supporting the MAGA movement

Now that I have escaped the almost two-week long rabbit hole of rebuilding my computer, I want to prompt discussion with my Victoria friends and journalist colleagues about the current state of local news. I’ve lived in Victoria slightly more than eight years and have seen our local newspaper, The Victoria Advocate, deteriorate to the point that a middle school newspaper offers more quality. The Advocate’s struggles certainly reflect the industry’s financial pain to some degree; but the real problem for this, the second-oldest newspaper in Texas, is its management’s incompetence and ideology.

After having gone through several editors, we now have some of the most pathetic content I’ve ever seen in a commercial product. Most of the staff-produced copy is either fluff or it’s proselytizing for Christianity. It’s the right-wing version of Christianity — the MAGA/Trump version in which the racism, misogyny, hate and cruelty are front and center. It’s clearly not the kind, gentle and loving Christianity of the inclusive Episcopal demonization of which I am so fond.

One might ask what has triggered my need to discuss the Advocate at this juncture. Well, the answer lies in how, Managing Editor Shawn Akers responded to the death of the right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. His column, posted September 12, starts with the asinine sentence, “I must admit, I was a fan of Charlie Kirk’s. I admire his high level of intelligence, and I admired his intentions when he visited college campuses to engage students about life and cultural subjects.”

That sentence shows the Akers’ blindness to reality and/or willful ignorance and/or lack of critical thinking skills. It’s further in the article, however, that Akers finally drops his charade and gives lie to Akers’ claim that his religion doesn’t affect his role at the newsroom’s helm — a claim he has made since I critiqued his introductory column in September 2024. (I can’t find the column on line any more leading me to wonder if disappearing the content reflects a calculated move or incompetence.) More and more, the Advocate is becoming a propaganda outlet and a poorly written version of Forward Day by Day.

To heap praise on a fascist and participate in the the right-wing game plan to turn Kirk into a martyred saint was the last straw; on the Advocate’s Facebook post of this column, I called for Akers to resign. And I sent an email to Justin Wilcox, the Advocate’s regional publisher for the Carpenter Media Group, asking him to tell me why I should spend $15/four weeks of my retiree fixed income to expose myself to such disgraceful journalism. I’ve posted the email to my blog as a supplement to this post. I’ve gotten no direct response from Wilcox, which would have been the professional thing to do. Instead, Akers wrote me to excoriate me for going over his head. That, I thought, was a strange turn of phrase considering I don't work for the Advocate. His email and my response are also on my blog so you can, if you wish, fully understand what, in part, this post is about.

Which leads me to another matter related to Kirk’s death. The Christo-fascists are weaponizing the killing to move us closer to the 19th Century nation the billionaires crave. The attack on dissent and the media not beholden to the oligarchs’ agenda, using their Cheetos-colored front man Donald Trump, is a scary start to what comes next. The violence against Kirk is giving the excuse for the Christo-fascists to engage in the violence they so badly crave. This is right out of the German Nazi playbook of the 1930s. Look for language coming soon from the “conservatives” to justify more force than the already deployed ICE version of Hitler’s Brown Shirts offer. Count on it.

Responses to Kirk’s death fall clearly along ideological lines. The authoritarian attack on people like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would make Joseph Goebbels proud. But that’s just part of the story. I keep telling people to read “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” by Duke University historian Nancy MacLean. In this book the reader will find the source of and inspiration for the MAGA movement. MacLean’s work also shows that the blueprint for Project 2025, with a clear plan for violence, began in the 1950s. All the turmoil we’re seeing this week — lionizing Kirk, using the large corporations to stifle dissent, perverting the media landscape to support the MAGA movement — is part of the plan to normalize the Christo-fascism being imposed on us.

The MAGA movement will push boundaries and norms. Trump and his minions will ignore court orders and dare people to push back. They will also continue to litigate everything fully knowing that they own the U.S. Supreme Court. And that brings me back to the Advocate’s and Akers’ complicity in pushing content that normalizes the alt-right agenda, openly supports Christo-fascism and ignores information that would reveal what’s really happening.

I hate the thought of violence, but MAGA’s attitude toward the norms that made our democratic republic work sadly, it brings to mind a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”