Legitimate outlets of satire, like this website or Real Wisconsin News, are not part of the Fake News movement. Fake news is not really satire, even though the purveyors of this news will attempt to say it's satire in order to avoid lawsuits. Satire is protected. Satire calls attention to the faults of humans. Satire is good, so long as people understand where it's coming from. That's why the category under which this article appears is "Satire." My satirical writing does not try to further my own agenda or make huge profits by trying to get people to believe something that isn't true.

All that being the case, Fake News will probably have a double-edged effect on society. It causes people to believe propaganda and lies, but it also makes satire APPEAR to be fake news, and that takes the bite out of satire. If the social media outlets and search engines start labeling legit satire as fake news, then it ends up getting lumped together with the crap out there that got Donald Trump elected. In fact, now that it's served its usefulness, Trump is labeling all news that doesn't agree with his point of view as fake news. Do you even know how dangerous that is? You may not agree with the editorial stance or stories chosen of CNN, but to say the NEWS network IS fake news makes me very scared. The satire I write is FAKE, even if it serves a real purpose. CNN is news as reported by trained professionals. It's not fake, only tainted by any bias they might have. NOT FAKE!

Satire is SUPPOSED to be fake. If Jonathan Swift wrote about the atrocities of England towards Ireland, the English would have just written him off (or arrested him). Instead, he wrote "A Modest Proposal" that never accused England of anything. Fake news accuses all kinds of people wrong doing. Real news does the same thing. When people are fed the big lie by those who espouse fake news, they will believe only the fake news over the real news, and Trump wins an election. Now, it's time to say it's all fake, since some (the stuff that supported him) got him elected already. 

I hate to say it, but Hitler accused the foreign media of being fake news. One of his big lies was that Concentration Camps did not exist. How could they possibly exist? Today, we look at Hitler's propaganda in state-run newspapers, and we deny it could ever happen again. I'm not saying Trump wants to round up foreigners or destroy his political enemies, but the techniques he is using to suppress the media have been used to do just that. His desire to control the message sent out by the press is not new. Bill Clinton started issuing press releases from the White House that the press treated as news. That should have scared us, too. Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction lie scared me enough to actually vote. I called him names and voted against him, but he didn't worry me nearly as much as Donald Trump.

I can only hope our checks and balances have been created in a more intelligent way than our Electoral College. If not, we're all in real trouble.