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" "This "zeal for secrecy" I am talking about — and I have barely touched the surface — adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear — as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban — they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press — that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.
Bill Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025), born Billy Don Moyers, was an American journalist and political commentator. He served as the eleventh White House Press Secretary under the Johnson administration from 1965 to 1967. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years. Moyers was extensively involved with public broadcasting, producing documentaries and news journal programs. He won numerous awards and honorary degrees for his investigative journalism and civic activities. He became well known as a trenchant critic of the corporately structured U.S. news media.
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Conservatives — or better, pro-corporate apologists — hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right … This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove — the reputed brain of George W. Bush — as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.