While it's true that a free press is a prerequisite for the people to have access to the data they need, it's not sufficient.

Americans don't need just a free press; they need access to accurate information in order to make up their own minds about what they want the government to do.

We currently, despite Democrat attempts to the contrary, have a free press in America. Yet the systemic left-wing bias of the mainstream media(MSM) – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Washington Post, L.A. Times, etc – means there is little difference between the accuracy of the information most Americans receive and the accuracy of the information people living in Communist China receive.

In both cases, highly skilled propagandists shape, through omission and commission, the news in order to create a false reality the ruling class uses to motivate people to go against what is in the people's best interest and instead support policies that benefit the ruling elites.

Many Americans believe, because of the Fake News generated by the MSM, lots of things that aren't true, including:

- Mankind is causing the Earth to warm in catastrophic ways. Real science says that at worst, it's unclear, and at best, there's no catastrophe at all.

- Twenty-five percent of the population harbors sexual attractions exclusively to members of the same sex. The real number is more like 1-2%.

- Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. No evidence has been found after months of investigations and illegal leaks.

- Republicans are racists. It's Democrats who oppose school choice for blacks, who don't care that black women are five times as likely to abort their babies as white women, who bring in cheap foreign labor while black unemployment is twice white unemployment, and who don't care about thousands of blacks being shot in our inner cities each year.

- The unborn aren't human. Science says an unborn child is human from the moment of conception.

- Planned Parenthood provides women's health care. Baby part-selling PP really provides only contraception and abortion.

What liberal-driven discussion about a "free" press ignores is that to be useful to the American people, the press needs to be not just free, but also honest.

It's not honest for the MSM to say Bill Clinton lying under oath to protect himself from a sexual harassment lawsuit has no bearing on his ability to be president and then turn around and say that because President Trump makes some aggressive tweets, he's not fit to be president.

It's not honest for the MSM to scream about Trump's Russia problem when there is not a shred of evidence, given that the same MSM ignored copious evidence of Obama and the Clintons conspiring with Russia.

Nothing Trump has said threatens a free press; it only threatens a dishonest one. This is why the MSM are so upset. They know they aren't journalists; they know they are in fact propagandists.

The MSM's fear is based on the solid fact that once people know they're being lied to, the ability of the propagandists to guide the people goes down dramatically. We've seen this in Nazi Germany as the war drew to a close, we saw it in the Soviet Union, and we're seeing it now in North Korea.

Lincoln was right: you can't fool all the people all the time. But dictatorships, and liberals in America, depend on having absolute control over what the people believe – something they can't have once the people get access to honest news.

A major reason for so many people voting for Hillary is that even though the number of news sources has exploded, the MSM are still able to mislead a large fraction of Americans.

A significant fraction of Hillary voters lives in an alternative reality constructed by the MSM, where Hillary is honest, global warming is real, the unborn aren't human, and blacks aren't being shot by the thousands in Democrat-run inner cities.

Hillary voters believed the lies spewed by the MSM because unlike the liberals running the MSM, most Hillary voters are honest people who couldn't imagine the media so consistently lying to them.

While there are honest alternatives to the MSM's near monopoly, the MSM and liberal politicians have been demonizing them from the start – a policy that has been successful in keeping a significant fraction of the Democrat base from seeking out truthful news sites.

Additionally, since modern liberals are fascists at heart, ever since the MSM monopoly began to crumble, with the advent of conservative talk radio, liberals have been striving to stop any speech they don't agree with. That that belies liberals' supposed concern for a "free" press is just one more thing the MSM doesn't report on.

Trying to silence opposing voices occurs not because liberals are snowflakes, but because they are fascist storm troopers who know they can get the power they lust after only by keeping the people cocooned in a web of lies.

That's why, in the 1980s, liberals tried to end conservative talk radio and why Bill Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing.

That's why the left has been demonizing Fox News with language far worse than anything Trump has said about CNN. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, liberals feel that their baseless hate attacks on Fox are not attacks on the "free" press but that Trump's accurate assessment of CNN is an attack.

Similarly, the same liberals who condemn Trump's supposed attacks on the free press have no problem with attempts to silence Rush and conservative speakers on college campuses.

When you realize that in the minds of the MSM, a "free" press is free in the same sense that a college campus that bans conservative speakers is free, their double standards make perfect sense.

In a truly Orwellian twist, modern liberals believe that freedom means being denied any information that does not conform to what the new fascists believe in.

In liberals minds, we are free when we bow down to the beliefs of the liberal elites, who, in their own minds, merit our obedience because of their own greatness and altruism.

When you listen to some left-wing media liar moaning about how evil Trump is for shining the light on Fake News, remember that he is just doing what Goebbels did when he denounced the "lies" of allied radio stations and what numberless communists have done in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea when they declare that anything that disagrees with what the government-controlled press says is lies.

Modern liberal beliefs are not rational, nor can they be defended by facts. They are a new faith adhered to with the same fervor with which true-believing Communists believed in the New Soviet Man.

Because liberal ideas can't win a fair fight with conservative ideas, liberals' only hope is to ensure that the fight isn't fair. Their weapon of choice is constructing a monolithically liberal media whose objective is advancing their faith, not informing the public.

Modern technology has presented liberals with a losing hand. They can no longer control what people know; essentially, too many Americans have taken the red pill and awoken from their MSM-inspired dream. When given the facts, Americans are staunchly conservative.

Liberals know that once people see behind the curtain, they will stop doing what benefits the liberal elites and start doing what is best for themselves, the American people.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.