We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS News for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if she fails and CBS is ruined, Larry Ellison wins.
Bari’s problem so far isn’t that she’s not good at journalism or unqualified (which is true and irrelevant), it’s that she’s not doing a particularly good job at the task she was hired for: engagement agitprop and semi-cleverly coddling the status quo.
“Journalists at CBS News say that Weiss still has not laid out a clear strategy for how she wants the network to change and adapt, though she is expected to do so as soon as this week, sources say.
“I’m constantly confused by what her definition of ‘making news’ is,” a second current CBS News staffer said. “It seems like she only cares about big names saying controversial things. That’s not the same as newsworthiness.”
Most of the news coverage of Weiss tends to downplay the fact that she was hired specifically by the Ellison family not to improve CBS journalism, but to either destroy it, or distort it into a right-wing-friendly engagement slop. Even journalists at CBS still seem confused as to why Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at journalism, when it’s very clear that’s not what she was hired for:
“We are a prideful newsroom, and she’s rubbing people the wrong way,” a third network staffer said.”
Weiss will inevitably be a glass ceiling casualty of the new 80s ski-villain movie brunchlord culture at Paramount, who will probably replace her with some younger hustlebro chode better suited for trolling the Internet in order to “sex up” the ratings for their culture war agitprop.
And again, it’s important to remember that contrary to some breathless media missives, CBS was, with spotty exception, not a great news organization before this all started. Network leadership’s very first response to rising U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more on-air authoritarians. The last act of the outgoing CBS leadership was to bribe our authoritarian president to get a terrible new merger approved.
The best outcome for everyone is probably a complete institutional collapse at the hands of the network’s new nepobaby brunchlord leadership, accelerated by the fact that nobody in any position of authority at the new CBS seems to have absolutely any idea what they’re doing. Both in terms of journalism, or in terms of building a modern right-wing-friendly grievance and propaganda empire.
American right wing propaganda companies are beginning to fight among themselves as a shrinking number of dodgy media companies vie for domination of the Trump-coddled U.S. propaganda market.
Newsmax executives filed an adorable complaint with the Trump FCC and Brendan Carr (who they actively helped install), pointing out that letting all the local fake-journalism right wing-coddling broadcasters merge into one giant shitty company will be bad for media diversity:
“The company formally filed a petition with the FCC on New Year’s Eve, arguing that the proposed merger “violates the law and creates an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of one broadcaster.”
Newsmax’s focus on its opposition is that the current ownership limits make a single entity owning enough stations to reach more than 39% of the U.S. TV households illegal. Should the proposed merger with TEGNA go through, Nexstar Media Group would reach nearly 80% of all households.”
These folks literally and actively helped install a corrupt NYC real estate con man president, who openly and repeatedly stated he was going to destroy whatever was left of U.S. media consolidation limits, and now they’re shocked and upset that he’s following through. It’s priceless.
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy goes on, suddenly seemingly concerned about media consolidation issues:
“This merger would create an unprecedented and dangerous consolidation within the broadcast TV industry, giving them immense control over local news and political news coverage,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy — who signed the filing with the FCC for the network — said in a statement.
“This merger is no better than others the FCC has already blocked,” the filing from Newsmax concludes. “The Commission should reject the proposed transaction because it violates the law, will harm competition, and will damage the public interest.”
Spoiler: Brendan Carr will not block the merger because he doesn’t care about the public interest, functional competition, or healthy markets. He cares about getting a post-FCC revolving door gig at whatever telecom and media giant remains at the end of the Trump administration.
It’s about to get much, much worse under Trump 2.0.
There are a few media consolidation limits left, like rules preventing the big four (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) from merging. There’s also the national television ownership rule, which prevents one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all US TV households (again, because the goal was ensuring a more diverse array of opinions and ownership, which is good for media markets and the public interest).
Once TEGNA and Nexstar merge, you can be absolutely sure the remaining company will seek to merge with Sinclair broadcasting, the poster child for right wing agitprop pretending to be local broadcast news. After that, expect efforts by ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC to both merge with each other, and increasingly merge with existing telecom and tech companies looking to goose stock earnings with pointless consolidation.
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is preparing to take a hatchet to all of these remaining restrictions, propped up by the false claim that the modern media environment is just so damned competitive and vibrant, such restrictions harm “free market innovation.” Ironically, the consolidated mass media doesn’t like to report on the problems this will cause because that’s not in ownerships’ best financial interests.
It’s not all downside. These folks are all rushing to try and dominate a traditional media sector aren’t historically competent. And their ham-fisted attempt to replace U.S. journalism with infotainment cack is likely to result in an even greater exodus of viewers as their primary target audience dies off. Which is why right wing billionaires also made sure to acquire Twitterand TikTok.
Somewhere in this hot agitprop mess you’d like to believe that there’s opportunities for individual, independent and worker-controlled media (and ethical, public-interest oriented companies, if any remain) to grab greater audience share. And for actual innovators to disrupt traditional app and media domination. Otherwise, any hope of having an informed electorate and building a useful anti-authoritarian cultural counter-movement grows increasingly dim.
“In the public letter, which is addressed directly to Ellison, the signatories declare that they “stand in solidarity” with the 60 Minutes team that worked on “Inside CECOT,” the story that was pulled by Weiss shortly before it was set to air on December 21. They also note that this signaled a “breakdown in editorial oversight” and risked “setting a dangerous precedent in a country that traditionally valued press freedom.”
Ellison, of course, won’t balk. Much like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the Ellisons bought CBS (and a part of TikTok) with the goal of information control. The goal is the same goal billionaires have had for generations: dominate mass media, soften its criticism of wealth and power, and befuddle, distract, confuse, and disorient an already pretty fucking dim electorate.
They’re not going to back off that agenda because you said “pretty please.”
It’s worth reiterating that CBS already wasn’t in great shape to begin with. Even before Ellison, the network’s very first response to rising U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more Trump-friendly Republicans. And if you haven’t read it already, this piece by longtime journalist Spencer Ackerman demonstrates how the network already had a very rich history of coddling U.S. wealth and power.
This is, as you might be noticing, a lot harder than billionaires tend to think. It’s very likely that the Ellison effort to dominate media simply drives people away from CBS and toward more ethical, interesting alternatives. There’s really no indication that this weird assortment of nepobabies and contrarian trolls have any idea what they’re doing. They’re not even good at agitprop.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. If successful, Ellison could still turn CBS, TikTok, and potentially CNN into an even worse version of Fox News, which is arguably the last thing American media needs.
Ethical folks who care about an informed electorate should fund trustworthy independent and worker-owned media (like Techdirt) whenever possible in the new year.
If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).
The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).
But a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates there’s been a larger recent mass exodus of staff:
“According to LinkedIn, roughly 20 university employees have left this year. That’s a lot for a new institution that had 34 staff members listed on its website this week (the number is separate from faculty). The departures include the president, the provost, the lead fund raiser, the executive director of admissions, as well as people who worked in events, operations, and other positions.”
In addition to a mass exodus of an already small staff, there’s also been a notable departure among key advisors (like Jeffrey Epstein pal Larry Summers) who claim they are only just now figuring out that the entire project might not be entirely on the up and up:
“Over the summer, the provost and the lead fund raiser also left the university, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Summers, the former Harvard president, stepped down from the advisory board in July, saying that he was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates and so am withdrawing.” (His colleagues on the board, Zimmer and Pinker, stepped down shortly after the university’s launch, with Zimmer saying that UATX’s critical statements about higher education “diverged very significantly from my own views.”
The inability (or refusal) of highly educated people to see this project for what it was (a billionaire-backed ideological assault on reality and common sense), doesn’t speak particularly well to our broader cultural awareness or ability to defend ourselves from deep-pocketed bad actors. And while this university, like Weiss’ “new CBS,” may fail due to ham-fisted incompetence, they (and their unlimited budgets) still leave a very ugly mark on informed consensus and a semi-coherent electorate.
We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss to run CBS for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power, validate and amplify right wing grievance bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism.
And she’s doing all of those things incredibly well.
Weiss’ first major move was to host a town hall with a right wing opportunist nobody was actually interested in. Her second major move? To effectively kill a major 60 Minutes story about the president’s concentration camps. More specifically, to derail a 60 Minutes story focusing on the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador (CECOT).
CBS announced they were “postponing” the story, which had already seen multiple layers of fact checking and legal review, just three hours before it was poised to broadcast. Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was understandably pissed off, and shared a must-read complaint with her colleagues about Weiss’ ham-fisted effort to undermine the network’s journalism:
Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
It’s quite a letter, which leaked almost immediately:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.
We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us.
We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it.
When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight. Sharyn
Before killing the segment, Weiss had recommended numerous changes, including adding a new interview with Trump’s unhinged racism-czar Stephen Miller, and replacing the term “migrants” more frequently with words like “illegals.” You know, to be fair and balanced:
“Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.”
Alfonsi notes that the 60 Minutes team had already asked for comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. She also noted that Weiss had basically implemented a “kill switch” for any journalism the Trump White House finds inconvenient.
One presumes they found this particular story extra problematic not just because it exposes the Trump administration’s brutal and unconstitutional industrialized racism machine, but because it humanized Venezuelans at a time when the administration is trying to inflame racial tensions to justify its illegal, militaristic pursuit of Venezuelan precious metal and oil resources.
CBS, of course, wasn’t exactly a bastion of independent, hard-nosed journalism before Weiss and Ellison came to town. The network’s very first response to authoritarianism was to hire more right wing voices. Like many media outlets, it had already been compromised by generational bullying by the U.S. right wing, designed to discredit all factual opposition of right wing ideology for having a “liberal bias.”
Weiss was just hired to finish the job.
The latest paper-edition of the Onion satirical newspaper put it pretty well:
This should not have surprised anybody who has been paying attention. As noted previously, Weiss doesn’t have any actual experience in journalism (certainly not enough to warrant the promotion). She’s an opportunistic, contrarian-for-contrarianism’s-sake troll who built a blog dedicated to culture war grievance and lazy engagement bait.
Billionaires hired Bari Weiss to inflame cultural divides, disorient the public, and undermine journalism. They fire real journalists and replace them with Weiss (and others like her) to divide and distract the electorate from the actual causes of most U.S. dysfunction: usually unchecked corporate power, extreme wealth disparity, corruption, and our increasingly sociopathic, technofascist billionaire class.
Weiss part of an army of fake journalists employed by U.S. billionaires for this purpose (aided in some instances by hostile foreign intelligence), and despite the agenda never being subtle, the consolidated corporate media (the remnants of which Ellison is steadily trying to buy up and dominate) is utterly incapable of being honest with itself about any of it. Quite by design.
I see a lot of commentary pointing out that “Bari Weiss isn’t very good at journalism,” which distracts from the point that she wasn’t hired for journalism. She was hired to blow smoke up the ass of establishment right wing power, whether that’s Trump’s concentration camps or Netanyahu’s industrialized murder of toddlers.
If Weiss gets fired sometime next year it won’t be because she’s a terrible journalist that undermined the outlet’s already sagging credibility, it will be because she’s a clumsy propagandist and a ratings bore.
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.
You might recall that Democrats made a point to join forces with Republicans during election season in support of a ban unless a big chunk of ownership was divested. Now that it’s happened, it’s basically shifting ownership of TikTok to a huge chunk of Trump’s authoritarian allies, while somehow still maintaining the supposed problematic tethers to the Chinese? Impressive. Great job.
You might also recall that folks like Brendan Carr spent literally years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. And their solution was ultimately just to shift a small part of ownership over to Trump’s autocratic buddies while still retaining Chinese involvement. Now, with the problem made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.
Republicans obviously take majority responsibility for this turd of a deal and the corrupt shifting of TikTok ownership to Trump’s buddies. But it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote.
As I’ve spent years arguing, if these folks were all so concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives.
If they cared about propaganda, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism.
If they cared about national security, they wouldn’t have helped elect a New York City real estate conman sex pest President, and they certainly wouldn’t have actively aided his cronyism.
This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
Apparently, Jared Kushner and his investment firm Affinity Partners didn’t like the attention the partnership was generating, and have announced their tactical retreat:
“The dynamics of the investment have changed significantly since we initially became involved in October,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to believe there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
And by “dynamics,” Affinity means that the the president’s son-in-law partnering with Saudis and the planet’s second-richest technofascist billionaire to gobble up the remnants of dying U.S. corporate media was generating a few too many negative headlines for their liking.
The $108 billion hostile takeover bid is still being backed (for now, apparently) by the Saudis. And, of course, it’s still the brainchild of right wing Trump billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who will assuredly receive favorable treatment should the dispute wind up being settled by the Trump DOJ or Trump-corrupted courts.
For his part, Trump is trying to pretend Ellison isn’t a close ally and massive campaign donor, because, one can only presume, he assumes you’re all very stupid:
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that ’60 Minutes’ has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump wrote. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
The whole fracas puts Democrats in a bit of a bind. In an ideal world with functioning regulators, you’d advocate for the rejection of all additional media consolidation, because these deals — whether Netflix or Paramount — routinely result in mass layoffs and higher prices for consumers.
But because Congress and U.S. regulators no longer function due to corruption (despite a lot of pretense to the contrary), it’s unlikely that all deals will be blocked. And while Netflix is certainly no saint, keeping consolidated corporate media ownership out of the hands of extremist authoritarian zealots hell bent on dismantling democracy with propaganda is pretty clearly the better option.
Which means that Democrats and organizations keen on actually helping (and keeping U.S. Democracy semi-operational) are probably better off finding common cause with Netflix. There’s dogshit Netflix homogenized consolidation, which is definitely bad, and then there’s authoritarian state television dominated by the planet’s second richest techno-fascist asshole, which is significantly worse
Not content with just filing baseless lawsuits against media companies who say mean things about our historically unpopular president, the Trump administration has unveiled a new lazy wrinkle in its war on journalism and free speech.
The website casually throws around words like “biased” and “exposed,” crying about various media reporting on subjects like the president’s death threats against elected officials for reminding the military that they serve the Constitution, for example.
It’s adorable to watch some MAGA-pilled White House intern pretend to do journalism and fact checking. There’s a list of stories that upset Trump, then a cute list of classifications trying to claim news reports aren’t true, with labels like “bias,” “left-wing lunacy,” and “malpractice” (?).
The great irony is that most of the feckless U.S. corporate press generally already covers Trumpism quite favorably. Even their stories and headlines about Trump’s threats against Democratic lawmakers were couched through the lens of Donald Trump’s claims of innocence (see this NBC News story), downplaying the insanity of the president’s often-illegal behavior.
CBS is now owned by Trump’s billionaire buddy Larry Ellison, who is busy turning the already Republican-friendly news outlet into a right wing propaganda mill with the help of Bari Weiss. But even CBS can’t avoid the grumbly whining of the White House and shows up repeatedly on the naughty list:
A cornerstone of lazy right wing ideology around the world for fifty-plus years has been to accuse fact-based journalism and science of having a “bias” if it reveals absolutely anything the right wing doesn’t like. It’s an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it’s been on display for longer than many of us have been alive:
The claims of “media bias” by the right wing comes simultaneously as the U.S. right wing builds arguably one of the biggest and most effective right wing propaganda machines ever constructed (Fox News, The New York Post, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair, CBS, etc.). The right wing’s propaganda efforts routinely take second stage to the false claims of widespread “liberal media bias.”
The U.S. press is, indisputably, center-right and corporatist. As it consolidates, it increasingly serves billionaire and corporate ownership, not the public interest. Layer on fifty years of bullying over nonexistent “liberal bias,” and you get the kind of journalistic fecklessness that was on proud display last election season as the country stared down the barrel of authoritarianism.
These billionaire-owned outlets enjoy doubling or tripling down on their bias claims with “solutions” to the nonexistent “liberal bias” problem that almost always make the problem worse (see billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s make believe effort to “fix bias with AI,” Bari Weiss’ efforts to “fix CBS bias” by… making it more biased, or Jeff Bezos firing of all the columnists he personally disagrees with).
There are a ton of existing “bias monitors” out there claiming to fix the problem as well, and most of them aren’t particularly reliable, and like Newsguard, have a history of giving unearned credibility to right wing outlets like Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. And even they are quick to face “investigations” by Republicans for, you guessed it, bias.
The only people allowed to identify and criticize media bias are, ironically, the most biased and non-credible people America has to offer.
That said, it’s not clear who this bullshit White House website is supposed to be for. The kind of folks trapped in the MAGA delusion bubble aren’t the type who are going to head to the White House website to fact check a story. The entire taxpayer-funded gambit smells of little more than sad desperation in the face of sagging poll numbers and increased media criticism of unpopular, unhinged Trump policies.
And now that most corporate media outlets have gotten their massive tax cuts and mergers approved, they’re likely to show slightly more backbone over the next year or two — especially as the president’s health, influence, and political power wanes. This weird little performance art isn’t going to help.
Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.
The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.
Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully.
A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example.
This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive.
Let’s be precise about the mechanics. The Trump Administration isn’t investigating Kelly for corruption or lawbreaking. It’s investigating him for defending the principle that law constrains executive power. The investigation isn’t meant to find wrongdoing—it’s meant to intimidate through spectacle of state punishment. The message isn’t “we enforce laws” but “invoke constitutional constraints and we come for you.”
And Watters—state propagandist on the regime’s preferred network—praises this openly: “You have to make examples out of people.” That’s Goebbels. Not as hyperbole. As accurate historical parallel. Making examples means using state violence visibly enough that others learn to submit without needing to be targeted. The cruelty is the point. The intimidation is the goal. The investigation is the punishment.
Kelly defended the constitutional framework distinguishing American military forces from authoritarian ones—the framework saying law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that service members have the duty to refuse commands violating constitutional or international law. This is why Admiral Holsey resigned over Caribbean boat strikes. He understood that following illegal orders doesn’t protect you—it implicates you.
And now the Trump Administration investigates Kelly for defending this principle while Fox News calls for him to be made an example.
Think about what this means. If you can be investigated by federal authorities for stating that military personnel can refuse illegal orders, then there are no illegal orders. If defending constitutional constraints on executive power becomes grounds for federal investigation, then constitutional constraints no longer exist. If senators can be “made examples of” for invoking established law, then law has been replaced by will.
This is the mechanism. This is how constitutional republics die. Not through formal coup or dramatic collapse but through making it dangerous to invoke constitutional protections. You don’t repeal the law protecting refusal of illegal orders—you just investigate anyone who mentions it until no one dares. You don’t ban opposition—you make examples until opposition becomes unthinkable. You don’t eliminate the Constitution—you prosecute people who cite it until citing it becomes sedition.
Eventually no one invokes it. Eventually no one remembers it protected anything. Eventually “the president ordered it” becomes sufficient justification for any action, any violation, any atrocity. That’s the world this investigation is building. That’s the world Watters is praising. That’s the world taking shape while we watch.
Kelly is doing what constitutional officers do: defending that law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that military serves Constitution rather than personal loyalty to whoever holds office. This isn’t radical. This isn’t partisan. This is baseline constitutional governance—the floor beneath which lies only authoritarianism.
The Trump Administration is doing what authoritarian regimes do: weaponizing state power against those defending constitutional constraints, using federal investigation as punishment for opposition, making examples to terrorize others into silence.
Watters is doing what fascist propagandists do: praising political persecution on state television, normalizing investigation-as-intimidation, celebrating the “examples” that teach everyone else to submit.
This is it. This is the thing. Not the prologue, not the warning sign, but the actual consolidation of authoritarian power happening on Fox News while many Americans legislate on whether noticing this is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
A senator stated constitutional law. The regime opened an investigation. State media praised making an example of him. And we’re supposed to worry that calling this “fascist” is too inflammatory?
The scandal isn’t the word. The scandal is that it’s accurate. They’re doing it. Openly. On television. While scolding anyone who names it as divisive.
Kelly is correct. The law is clear. Military personnel can and must refuse illegal orders. Stating this is not sedition—it’s constitutional duty.
Investigating him for stating it is not governance—it’s fascism.
Call it what it is. Without apology. Without hedge. Without the cowardice that mistakes silence for civility.
Because the alternative—the world where constitutional law becomes grounds for investigation, where “making examples” is normal, where all orders are legal because the leader gave them—that world is being built right now.
Not in some dystopian future. Today. On Fox News. By the Trump Administration.
With federal investigations and propaganda praise and audiences nodding along as if political persecution were patriotism rather than the exact thing the Founders built constitutional protections to prevent.
This is fascism.
And it’s happening.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn that blows smoke up their asses.
While Ellison has some competing suitors with names like Comcast NBC Universal and Netflix, the winning bidder will need approval from the Trump DOJ and FCC. Knowing that they likely have a distinct tactical advantage via corruption, Ellison and Trump appear to be already measuring the drapes, discussing programming changes (and CNN hirings and firings) that will please the president:
“Ellison often speaks to connections at the White House and in at least one phone call engaged in a dialogue about possibly axing some of the CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, the people said.”
The great irony is these networks that offend Trump weren’t exactly what you’d call bastions of hard-nosed journalism to begin with. Under the ownership of Trump fan David Zaslav, CNN is already know for flinging softball questions at Trump authoritarians, failing to challenge obvious lies on air, and generally airing a sort of safe, infotainment-centered pseudo-journalism.
But even that’s too much critical thinking for America’s thinnest skinned billionaires.
Ellison is already hard at work turning whatever was left of CNN into a right wing propaganda mill. If he acquires ownership of TikTok and CNN as well; the potential exists to create a propaganda empire that’s arguably larger and much worse than Fox News.
But given the recent failures of efforts to dominate U.S. media through consolidation (again, see AT&T) it’s also equally likely that this weird assortment of trolls and nepobabies simply creates a mountain of unsustainable debt and hubris crushed by the weight of its own incompetent ambition.
