The Tech Fascist Takeover of the Media

is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people. All of this requires capital. And the problem with all of this requiring capital is that the capital is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess

capital have interests. Fast forward to twenty twenty, as protests and uprisings raised across the United States against the police and white supremacy, a battle broke out inside of the New York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called send in the Troops, calling for You've Guessed it, Sending in the troops to attack protesters published by a member of the American governments named

Tom Cotton. Editors resigned in outrage debates raised across journalists slacks. It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the United States, fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. Twenty twenty was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed

was this. If the premise of twenty twenty is true, which is that the US is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system, which has legal slavery in it from the structure of the Thirteenth Amendment, and reproduces it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible,

and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to move to stop it, and so they created what they would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really a continuation of centuries old strategies, this time rebranded as anti woke. One of the avatars of anti woke was

Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss is that the New York Times at the time was an ideological diversity higher, which is to say, affirmative action for why conservatives as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives. She was given a cozy make work job at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for the New York Times. She was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section.

This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind right, and these are going to be about to people who really hate affirmative action. But again, what they are being given. They are being handed by the most important newspaper, probably in the entire world. You know, she was handed a

job because she was a fucking right winger. Now. Weiss was part of the shall we say, conversations at the New York Times about again whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting US representative calling for the deployment of US soldiers against the American people. She saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again, a sitting member of the United States government. She saw this as her moment to

do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from The New York Times in a huff raving about the quote lack of ideological diversity, who had a giant rants about how the Twitter is not the massthead of the New York Times. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Again. I kind of emphasize this enough, like that she was brought in as a right wing affirmative action higher in order to appease the demand from the ruling class. I guess for like pro Trump people, they already had electric

right wingers. This is completely unhinged. But you know, she resigns, and she has this big press tour in the right wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled, and of course none of this ever even happened. Right We can debate the effect to which cancelation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all, But she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own free will. She was not forced out. She chose to leave in order to pursue a career as a right

wing grifford in other fields. Namely Substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called the Free Press. It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's Substack. Come on, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? Now? Weiss is not a journalist. She is a right wing idea loge.

She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go into all of the absolutely unhinded shit that Barry Weiss has said and done over the years, all of the just unbelievably somophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit, all of the anti immigrant shit that she said, there's a very good John Oliver thing about her. She is part of this story. But if we spent this entire episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks, we would be here for like two decades now. In a

just world, none of this would matter at all. This would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by the New York Times, stomping off at a huff and going to start a substack whatever. Who cares. This is not a just world. This is the United States. She now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States. The story of how she got there is the story of the future of the American media. Unfortunately, for all

of us, the story is astressingly simple. Barry Weiss and her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations. Again, this is just a substack was bought out by one Larry Allison. Larry Ellison then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns CBS. There was no secret plan, there was weird strategy. There was no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any

effort at all. All you have to do in order to install a right wing hack as the editor in chief of CBS News is by the company. The results have been devastating. I would call what happened to resegregation. There was a large scale firing of non white employees. NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black, NBC Latino, and NBC Out. NBC Out was the queer one. They fired Gail King. They did some stuff that frankly

sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this quote from the root and the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa has been shut down, with coverage of Africa shifting to London. That is again, they closed the South Africa Bureau. This is a CBS bureau in South Africa and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London. If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in nineteen

sixty seven, no one would have believed them. And in the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch of comfort for different groups of non white people. Right NBCBLKS, EMC Black did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in twenty twenty. Right NBC Asian America did a bunch of good work. NBC out was a place where you could occasionally find a transperson who was

allowed to write. And all of that is gone because one man, Larry Allison and his son David Allison, bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know what you would call this position. The ideological purge executor. I guess you could call it of CBS. Now, obviously there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry Ellison himself in a second, because he is a very

important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Let's go here from some of those monopolies, product services. Let's go we are so back. One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become a right wing fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very famous thing in the US to say that most of American media is controlled by five companies.

Here's the thing. Even those five companies can always be consolidated into fewer and fewer companies. Right as the companies start to struggle, and as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones, you get attempts to buy them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which is again the parent company that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, is, oh, it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort

of outlet, and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really, what happened was Paramount was bought by Ellison and Skydance and they were merged together after that. And this is a problem with the concentration of capital.

significant advantage to the companies. To get the swallow this capital, they get to absorb all of the intellectual property, and so now they have control over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production, and as a sort of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media.

Now it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves now. Larry Allison, back in the Halcyon Days of twenty twenty, was merely the eleventh richest man in the world when he quote participated in a call shortly after the twenty twenty election that focus on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote.

According to court documents and a participant, the November fourteenth call included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Seclau, an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bob Junior, an eternity for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit. True of the Vote was a completely unhanged organization dedicated to overturning the twenty twenty election by doing all these weird voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call, like their attorney in a strategy call with a bunch

of Trump supporters Incline Voting one. Larry Ellison, now again that was back in twenty twenty. Here in twenty twenty five and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said, and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and

report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on now in that intervening time. Larry Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle, and Oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom. Daven benefited enormously from selling

a bunch of shit to AI companies. Lary Ellison is also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI, a huge someone who wants to spread AI, and someone who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and

this is very important into surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who, as twenty twenty went on and as the last half decade has come on, and as the giant sort of backlash against against the uprising, and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States and to make sure that capitals hold over this country and that white supremacies hold over this country would be maintained, he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not

the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post in twenty twenty five he went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter and we will get to that in a second. Two wrote and this was a letter that he was sent to his staff, and this is this is the editorial section to let you know about a change coming to our opinion. Pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of

two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist right but you know, I'm gonna read another part of this letter. Quote I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because you know he was the pamback guy, the opportunity to

lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that the answer wasn't hell yes, that it had to be no. After careful consideration, David decided to step away. So okay, what was actually happening here he came in was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck out of the way. And the guy he had picked to run the editor board like three years ago, when

this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this. And left and now Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like quote Pam Bondi's welcome Woke rollback, the Justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, you know, and you can in some ways see all of the things that are coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is a major support of the Trump administration. Put a bunch

of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom. And when he says Justice harn't rescins regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking about anti discrimination ordinances, right, That's what they're actually talking about. But these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of twenty twenty that they're now doing all of this reverse racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed

to discriminate, that's anti white discrimination. And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole bunch of a whole bunch of writing editorial changes. Its audience has significantly declined since this. A whole bunch of people who subscribed to the Post called it in their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful. Now the reach has been contracting. The paper is going to shit. But that doesn't matter because the Washington Post is not a money

making outlet. The Washington Post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks. And it is better that you know seven people in Washington, DC, who are all identically minded conservatives read the Washington Posts and agree with it than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor, from any of the people writing for it. We've also seen in recent months the elimination of teen Folk Conte Nasty.

Teenvogue's parent company eliminated Team Vogue as an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the US. It had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender. It was also one of the few outlets with consistent trans writing. And of course, the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable on hinde transphobia.

And this was them just destroying what had been a very very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non white people, telling the stories of workers,

and telling the stories of trans people. And they just destroyed it even though and this is actually very interesting, Ever since teen Vogue had you know, shifted to doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against Donald Trump in its first administration, and had gone towards actually, you know, talking about labor and talking about struggle and talking about unions and talking about you know, the like

the experiences of people living under white supremacy. Its readership had exploded, but again that doesn't matter because it's bad for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the ideological tightening consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed. Now speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically, Hey, product and services,

please don't destroy USOO. Now, as we covered on this show a few weeks ago, Conde Nasts also fired several union workers legally for you know, staging a again protected workplace action, demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these teen Vogue firings. And that's another aspect of all of his takeover, which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hates and this is this is the ruling classes to people who run these outlets viciously

hate unions. And this is something that's very important to understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because, as it turns out, workers and this is true, I could say that someone who's part of a media union less racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there to be more non white people and don't like it

when non white people are discriminated against. And this is one of the things that these media unions and that unions in general do, is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course a part and partial of this has been the targeting of the union and that's what we've been seeing at conte Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing to do with teen Vogue and also one of whom was on the show and is trans and you should

go listen to that episode because it's very good. But that's another aspect of this right being consolidation is that media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at CBS, where there are an doing giant specials with like Kirk's Widow and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now.

And in order to you know, stop that shit, you need powerful media unions, and this is one of the things the ruling class is trying to crush now. It's also worth mentioning that these fight wing billionaires are trying to consolidate their hold on social media as well as the traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has you know,

effectively turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now effectively unusable if you don't want like the most racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just

in every single one of your replies. And it's also become a major, you know, vector of targeting for the Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as a thing that does resistance, as a tool of protesters and as a tool of people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now been converted into just racist slop and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely centered left and

just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the States. And it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankworld the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also

part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under the Biden administration sort of bafflingly, and then Trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable, but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy it is a Larry Ellison thing, so he's also attempting

to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're going to close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now Warner Brothers currently is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept on submitting bids to them, and his efforts to actually get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But in the wake of that, they're attempt to get to a hostel takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what

they claim as a higher share price. I'm not going to go into that whole thing as a fiasco, but what is interesting for our purposes is that David Allison, who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purchase, has met several times with Trump, and last time they met, Trump has promised that he would change the coverage of CNN in order to make it better for Trump. Now. It's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part of the deal for the

Warner takeover bid by Netflix. Right if Netflix takes over Warner Bros. They don't get CNN. Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal. They would get CNN now, even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhandshit like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking electron coverage Jesus fucking Christ. Okay, Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even

a tiny bit critically about his administration. And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers in the fight between Netflix and Paramount, but he's now said that he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style

of what happened with CBS. And so this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right, which is trumpdministration has the ability to use is quote unquote antitrust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing this buy out, and Trump administration is using the fact that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him.

And I don't really think I need to explain why it's extremely bad that the president of the United States could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad, But that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital.

And a thing about the press under a dictatorship, even one that's as decentralized as the distainship of capital, is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in, buy the media and take control of it. And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these people are not under We beat them before we can beat them again. And in some ways the project is kind of self defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of

time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there is an extent to which, as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused or rot from the inside. And meanwhile, all of these, all of us control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy, everyone still hates them.

We can fight them, and we can.