Summary: The two-party political system in the United States is racing towards bipartisan (transcending perceived 'wings') rejection of free press, which won't be on the ballot box except for "third" parties; it's a real problem because it's designed to weaken if not obliterate accountability

THE ad hominem attacks I can cope with; threatening legal letters less so (they're a nuisance and I've lost count of how many I received over the years; they'd be nice 'trophies' if they weren't a massive distraction from the work we do here). Right now, in the US and elsewhere (even here in the UK), the media's freedom is under attack, and that's not even counting censorship and self-censorship (by publishers, by social control media, omission from searches because of some "right" for crimes to be "forgotten"). Those who are unaware -- or worse, in denial about it -- might be victims of tribalism or partisan politics. Remember that Donald Trump and Bill Barr nowadays want to treat opposition to fascism as "terrorism" (while obviously ignoring groups that actually engage in mass shootings). This is where we are today:

We don't endorse presidential candidates or anything, but this triplet of tweets from Wikileaks probably merits a mention (or screenshot; we omit links as we prefer to starve social control media):

Techrights has long published views and leaks nobody else dared publish; we need freedom of the press to be guarded in order to carry on with the work we've done for nearly 14 years. I'm not too optimistic and people that I speak to are more pessimistic than I am. Even in Free software communities discussions about topics outside the purely technical are being strongly discouraged (with severe consequences for any deviation from some perceived "professionalism"). If you do vote this year, and if there's an election at all in the United States (it's not entirely clear), try bearing in mind freedom of the press. And no, Biden is no champion of it either. He called Julian Assange -- on the record -- "high-tech terrorist". What an awful choice on display, just like in 2016. It's like freedom of the press principles aren't even 'on the menu' (or ballot box). From what I can gather, the American Green Party is the only party which openly and wholeheartedly supports freedom of the press, including Assange and Wikileaks. In 2019 it wrote: "The Green Party of the United States strongly and unequivocally condemns the arrest of Julian Assange and calls for his immediate release. Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this morning and is being held in the United Kingdom for extradition to the United States, where he is very likely to face espionage charges. Assange is the publisher of Wikileaks, which published documents exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights violations at the Guantanamo Bay prison and State Department cables that showed corporate corruption of US foreign policy." ⬆