“What you mean their ain’t no center?” Swamp Rabbit said. “There’s the left wing and the right wing and the center. You can’t have the one without the others.”

I was telling him that CNN chief Chris Licht had been fired by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav for doing a clumsy job of transforming CNN into the “centrist” news vehicle envisioned by John Malone, the Trump-friendly billionaire behind the merger of CNN and Discovery. I reminded him that Licht’s job had been in jeopardy at least since CNN, invoking centrism, aired Donald Trump’s May 10 town hall.

“Enough about them corporate sleazeballs at CNN,” Swamp Rabbit said after downing a double shot of Wild Turkey. “They propped up an election-denyin’ crook.”

“Malone said he wants CNN to be ‘more centrist,'” I replied.

“What does centrist mean?”

I told him that, in theory, centrism involves giving equal weight to both sides of a story, even if one side might be distorting the facts or lying outright. In practice, the notion of centrism — bothsidesism is a more accurate term — often provides a platform for outlandish liars like Donald Trump and the people who endorse his lies.

“I’m not just talking about rightwing greed hounds like Malone,” I added. “I think guys like A.G. Sulzberger at New York Times and Martin Baron, late of Washington Post, are afraid they’ll lose too many readers/viewers and advertisers if they state the truth too plainly. Their newspapers propped up Trump for years before they tore him down. Centrism is about the bottom line.”

Swamp Rabbit opened a can of beer. “But we’d be in bad shape if there wasn’t no center, don’t you think?”

“We’re in even worse shape if there’s a center with room for Trump and mini-Trumps,” I replied. “Don’t you think?”

Footnote: “There can be no center to American politics as long as most Republican voters support Trump and most Republican lawmakers follow Trump’s lead. There’s no “center” between democracy and authoritarianism.” — Robert Reich