THE arrest of six journalists in the United States for coverage of the massive protests against President Donald Trump’s inauguration indicates what we can expect from his administration.

The vagueness of the police report on their arrests — “numerous crimes were occurring,” “the crowd was observed enticing [sic] a riot” — make it pretty obvious that the case against the six is weak.

This ugly incident is clearly a warning, a signal to the media that the Trump government is no respecter of a free media.

Nor is it isolated. This week the new president also slapped a media blackout on the Environmental Protection Agency, banning its officials from updating social media or speaking to reporters.

An administration packed to the gills with climate change deniers is clearly unwilling to allow scientists to speak openly.

In place of evidence-based assessments we will enter the era of “alternative facts,” to use the delightful phrase coined by presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway. In this corporate fairyland nothing that extracts a profit can be bad.

Environmentalism is “out of control” and anything that restricts the ability of big business to poison, pollute and lay waste our natural world in a short-term dash for cash has to be scrapped. This is clearly dangerous. But we should not exaggerate the difference it marks from the approach of previous administrations.

It is true that Barack Obama accepted the reality of climate change, and was a supporter of the Paris accord which Trump once stated he would withdraw from.

But despite the self-congratulatory rhetoric of US and EU leaders, the Paris agreement was a load of hot air.

It contains no enforcement mechanism to ensure countries do cut their emissions (Britain, as Labour’s Barry Gardiner pointed out earlier this week, is miserably failing to meet its own targets).

And the same governments that signed it were simultaneously pushing corporate trade deals which would effectively prevent any action on climate change — whether because subsidising or taxing certain products for being environmentally friendly or unfriendly is deemed a distortion of the market, or because polluting firms would gain the right to sue any government which put their profits at risk.

The world is heating up and rising sea levels, increasingly frequent extreme weather events and worsening droughts are likely to spell disaster for hundreds of millions of humans — but the entire direction of US-led Western policy was making this worse well before Trump was elected.

Similarly, the liberal hysteria over “post-truth” news rings hollow when the corporate and Establishment press has indulged and promoted government lies for decades, from hiding the truth about the police riot at Orgreave through the Iraq war to the deluge of misinformation we are spoon-fed today on everything from the Syrian war to the Southern dispute to the leader of the Labour Party.

These caveats do not detract from the appalling nature of the Trump regime, or from the need for solidarity with the six arrested journalists as well as with women, immigrants and all working people in the US as they face attacks by a viciously reactionary government. But a left fightback against Trump and “his Maggie” Theresa May must differentiate itself from the clapped-out pieties of a liberal era that created the problems we face.

Tackling climate change does not just mean agreeing that it exists — it means tackling and curbing the power of corporate giants. And that battle — for the rights of humanity and against the power and privilege of big business — is essential too if we want to raise wages or end insecure work.

It is a fight against capitalism, not a fight against one bigoted individual, however powerful. And in that fight liberalism is not our ally.