The death of a dynamic and independent free press begins when the mainstream media becomes a propaganda organ for a government. And it was during the Obama regime's eight long malign years that this process reached its nadir. Now, under Obama’s protégé and current President, Joe Biden, the malignancy continues unabated.

Perhaps the media was once considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long now, the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead a disseminator of leftwing Democrat Party propaganda.

The dread examples of disinformation and misinformation were seen during the last century of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes, but it now increasingly pollutes our own mainstream media (MSM).

The alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN – are unapologetic shills for an increasingly leftwing Democrat party. Newspapers share the same guilt. The New York Times and the Washington Post leading the way in a baleful charge.

It was our 18th century President, Thomas Jefferson, who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become the present demise of a free and vital press. He said:

"If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter."

We are now witness to the dismal spectacles of print and broadcasting reporters, journalists and talking heads taking unabashed leftwing, pro-Democrat positions to the point of dropping all pretense at objectivity or impartiality.

In that same 18th century, when Jefferson uttered his warning about the press, Edmund Burke in England looked at what he called the three estates within the British political system. He saw the King, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. However pre-eminent above them all was the press, which he called the Fourth Estate.

The co-opting of journalists and journalism by politicians and their regimes have led to a polarization of the media. As mainstream print and broadcast journalists have veered increasingly to the left, the right has justifiably responded with its own conservative media establishment. This was a necessary development – vital for countering leftwing propaganda. That is why the Left relentlessly calls for the elimination of conservative broadcast icons such as Hannity and Levin, among others, and as they did so

vociferously towards the late and deeply lamented Rush Limbaugh.

As for the term, Fifth Column, which had its roots in the Spanish Civil War, it is now used to mean traitor or spy. Cicero, the Roman Senator and famous orator, warned against the "traitor within the gate who is more dangerous than a foreign enemy."

Briefly, two main triggers led us to the present untenable predicament. The first was during the Vietnam War when the Vietnamese Communist General Giap masterfully manipulated the American press to act against its own country during a time of war, thus breaking a long-standing taboo and turning much of the media into a veritable fifth column; thus, opening a ghastly Pandora's box.

Second trigger was the election in 2,000 when liberals and the Left erupted over what they considered a stolen election and defeat of Al Gore by the hated President Bush. Remember the Democrat frenzy and the hanging chads?

This perhaps more than anything else drove the Democrat Party and its allies in the media to do all in their power to attack and demonize any future Republican and Conservative president and administration, even to the extent of lurching so far left that they willingly appointed as deputy head of the Democrat Party an allegedly rabid Islamist and hater of the United States – Keith Ellison.

The eight malevolent years of the Obama regime – during which he reduced our military, our intelligence capabilities, as well as our influence abroad to such a degree that we were no longer able to influence the world's important events – revealed how his willing and captive media became a colluding device of government indoctrination. Now Biden continues unabated the remorseless destruction of the divinely inspired human experiment that we have known as America.

If a government co-opts the press to do its bidding, and that same press becomes a propaganda organ for the regime, we are in desperate danger.

Watergate seems like child's play compared to what some are now calling the "scandal of this century and of the last one."

People now find it harder to obtain unfiltered news that is not editorialized by leftwing political mandarins posturing on TV screens or in the pages of once respectable newspapers. Perhaps Jefferson and Burke knew that once upon that slippery slope it led to the abyss into which nation states fall, embrace tyranny, and ultimately perish.

The hope remains that the Far-Left Democrat party with its willing executioners in the MSM will, by their very own hateful acts, self-destruct by alienating an increasing majority of informed Americans. Indeed, American belief in the credibility of their news media is now about the lowest ever polled.

The hope remains among many that President Trump will be-re-elected and again "drain the swamp," end the rampant corruption that assails the nation state and encourage truly principled journalists and reporters to rebuild the shattered and malignant Fourth Estate.

Victor Sharpe is a prolific conservative writer and published author of seven books including his four-volume set dealing with the threat from resurgent Islam to the survival of Judeo-Christian civilization.