Discredited former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson appeared on an “endtimes newscast” and entertained the host's suggestion that the United States may soon see “a trigger event” that “justifies a full-blown totalitarian dictatorship where no dissent, no questions are asked.” In response to whether such a dictatorship could happen, Attkisson replied: “Gosh, it's hard to say. I just think right now the trend is bad.” 

Attkisson, author of the upcoming book Stonewalled, was a recent guest on the radio program Trunews. The show describes itself as an “Endtimes Newscast” and “the only nightly newscast reporting the countdown to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.”

Host Rick Wiles, as documented by Right Wing Watch, regularly peddles bizarre and outlandish conspiracies. Wiles has labeled Obama the "Antichrist" and a “stealth jihadist” and called on the military and God to save us from his “tyranny”; claimed “Ebola could solve America's problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion”; warned that Christians in America could soon be “arrested or possibly killed”; and said “Satan launched a D-Day invasion of the United States of America in 2012.”

Attkisson herself is no stranger to conspiratorial and false rhetoric, including about Media Matters.

On his October 24 program, Wiles asked Attkisson to predict where things are headed in the United States and if the country might become a “full-blown totalitarian dictatorship”: 

WILES: Sharyl, I can only see three alternatives. Either there's going to be a pushback and people are going to be demanding that the news media return to its rightful role. Or we're going to just continue gradually moving into this controlled media environment where number three, a trigger event that justifies a full-blown totalitarian dictatorship where no dissent, no questions are asked. Where are we right now, what do you -- which one of those options do you think is most likely?

ATTKISSON: Gosh, it's hard to say. I just think right now the trend is bad. The trend is for us accepting a tighter and tighter clampdown on what is it that we do, and we're supposed to do, without much objection.

I also see Congress -- both parties in Congress is willing to accept -- I mean even members of Congress are being monitored. And in some instances and are, they don't like it but they're kind of accepting of it. They're being told they can't have information from, you know, the branch that they do oversight on. And they just accept it. They don't really pursue it. I'd be knocking down the doors of the federal agencies that should be providing me with information on public matters, but they just sort of throw up their hands and say well, they never give us information when we ask for it.

I mean it's just sort of a shocking -- everybody's been shocked into kind of doing not much of anything because either they're afraid that something's going to happen to them, or they just want to get through, you know, I think in the case of Congress, they're just worried about the next election that they face. And it's been described to me by staffers on the Hill that they just want to get through the day, and not create much controversy, and not become a target. So they're not doing as much oversight. So if the press isn't, and if Congress isn't, we're basically saying that there's one -- there's a federal branch, a federal bureaucracy, that we're allowing to kind of grow and get way out of balance.