Welcome to the right's cancel culture era

22:14They said, well, because the job of Matt Eberflus last year, in this case, the job of Ben Johnson this year is to win games. And the job of the Democrats was supposed to be preventing this all from happening. This is why they're given tremendous fame and money and consulting gigs. And they get to turn around and go from being press secretaries to working with McDonald's, making seven figures like in exchange for this bargain, right? This political legitimacy to supposedly be a liberal party. They're supposed to prevent this from happening. So fundamentally, the failure has to fall on the liberal elites because this is the thing they were put in charge with doing, especially when it happened after the first time.

22:48Right. This wasn't supposed to happen a second time. And I do think that their commitment to genocide in Gaza with respect to alienating voters, alienating young supporters, alienating canvassers, alienating the kind of key constituents that helped Biden win in 2020 through this kind of reactionary, both in terms of Gaza, but also on immigration. Again, in February of 2023, they went hard right on immigration, thinking they could do the old triangulation, trick everyone thinking Democrats are tough on immigration. Of course, Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney. There was there was this sort of very conscious turn to the right, thinking that we would sort of do this clever neo-Clintonian triangulation that did alienate key constituents.

23:23And I think they did it because they realized that because they were supporting a genocide in 4K in real time, that they really had nowhere else to go. That Biden won the White House in 2020 in large part because they did genuinely channel progressive energies around George Floyd, around immigration, around the so-called whatever kind of woke thing we now also are supposed to hate, that the youth turnout was significant. The evangelical energy among canvassers was there in terms of going out during COVID and saying, please vote and so forth. So I think that they alienated that whole base. They had to alienate the whole base.

23:56They did the vote scolding routine. You have no choice. So yeah, I think that they failed in that sort of basic capacity because they had ideological commitments that were anathema, including, by the way, anything that remotely resembles coherent left-wing populism. Biden did some left-wing populism here and there. Obviously, his FTC chair, et cetera, was pretty good. He had much warmer relations with unions than, say, Obama did, but it just wasn't really part of a coherent politics. And of course, you add all this, the fact that Biden was like literally dying before our eyes. You had an opposition that was just not sufficient to the moment.

24:26And because everybody was pot committed, you had obviously the Biden circle whose ego took prominence or everything else, but also this kind of ideological commitment to the status quo. They continue to be viewed as the establishment party. Again, even though Trump represents by far more than Democrats, the ruling class interest, he at least had the kind of aesthetics of an anti-establishment candidate and still does for some bizarre reason, mostly because he surrounds himself with cranks. And so like there was no effort to be honest about those existential problems, the Democrats. There still isn't.

24:54They still think the problem is they need better tweaking. Now you have this kind of abundance pablum trying to take the lane. You know, now we're going after the groups because the problem was there was too many groups. I have a piece coming out in Real News about this this week, about all these sort of billionaire-funded anti-group groups that are emerging, whether it's Searchlight Institute, whether it's Majority Democrats PAC that's being funded, all these groups being funded by Reid Hoffman and hedge fund managers. And they're there to say, actually, no, the problem is that we're too left-wing.

25:18We just need to go more right-wing. And it's like, well, okay, you tried that, you lost. You tried that with Hillary Clinton, you lost. You sort of deviated a little bit from that with Biden and you won. Okay, that's COVID. That's kind of a mulligan. We'll say that doesn't count. But you have this apparatus of wealthy donors who want to keep their grip on the party and that desire to keep their grip on the party and the consultant class's grip on the party is just entirely anathema and antithetical to and counter to any way of actually meaningfully pushing back against Trump. And this is why you have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer who look like they're half asleep and kind of running through the motions and box checking and why everything they say kind of has the tenor and tone of a hostage video, because they know that these contradictions are existential to the party and their job is status quo maintenance.

26:01And so these failures we saw, these failures that were identified in 2016, I'm not going to stand here, but it's true. We're identified by Bernie Sanders in 2016 that were sort of because of the unique circumstances of COVID and Biden's kind of political savvy and instincts were kind of, we put a lid on it for four years during that. And now we're seeing it come to the surface again. And people listening to this way, of course, you're going to say that you're a lefty. And that's maybe true. But I think in this case, my ideological priors happen to align with reality in this instance. And so that is why I think the pushback has been so inadequate.

26:30quit. It's been so weak because Democrats have spent so much time policing and disciplining their left flank and not really worrying about Trump thinking that, okay, A, we'll kind of ride it out because he's not really going to come after us. He's not going to come after this consulting class. He's not going to come after elites, but we'll ride it out and the pendulum will swing back and we'll sort of go back to being in charge and everything will be fine. And also, you know, by the way, we can raise a lot of money off anti-Trump opposition. And I think all of those assumptions have turned out to not be true.

26:56And the extent to which there won't be some mysterious pendulum because the pendulum will be weighted by the lack of liberal establishment institutions and nonprofits and 501c3s and 501c4s, which may not exist by 2028. If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year.

27:44Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas. You can get access to Cujoplex, along with our monthly bonus episodes, by signing up for a paid subscription over at our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com.

28:25polls saying, look how unpopular this is if you frame it in the most maximalist way. And nothing's worth fighting for. And again, I wrote about this for The Nation in February of 2023, when they started doing the hard right turn on immigration, in which I said, oh, we're going to do trans right next, because again, it's the kind of lowest hanging fruit. You can sort of throw them under the bus. It's statistically just not a very significant demographic. It has no real money behind it, you know, with some rare exceptions, but ultimately those people get in line for the purposes of partisanship.

28:49And there's sort of this philosophy that you can throw constituents under the bus and that's somehow going to like triangulate into some electoral success because look at this poll that says X, Y, and Z. But what's the number one knock against Democrats in every single poll? They're phony. They seem phony. They seem insincere. They seem inauthentic. And so these people act like there isn't some broader branding problem with like, you know, if I work at a place and the guy to my left gets capriciously fired by some psycho boss and Bob from accounting gets fired by some psycho boss, you know, sort of without due notice or what's the first thing I'm going to do.

29:20I'm going to go home and I'm going to start polishing my resume. I'm going to find a way out. So if you have a party that consistently and conspicuously throws vulnerable groups under the bus, whether it be police reform, whether it be, you know, trans rights, immigrants, whatever it is, like, and you wonder why you have a turnout problem. Well, why would I go, you know, voting is fundamentally a moral enterprise. It is not a rational enterprise. It is, you know, one vote, the odds of one vote mattering is one in the several trillions odds wise, right? It's not a rational exercise. Voting is fundamentally an act of solidarity, fundamentally a romantic act.

29:49And I don't say that to be pejorative. I say that and actually be quite complimentary to what voting is and what it represents. And so this idea that like, I'm going to go to bat and I'm going to vote for a party that has sold out Gaza protesters, has sold out trans rights, has sold immigrants rights. It's like, of course, you're going to have turnout problems. Of course, you're going to have issues with young volunteers not wanting to go knock doors. Of course you are, because they're going to say, well, is my group next? Is the cause that's important to me? Environmentalism, prison reform, whatever it is, are they going to throw me under the bus next?

30:15And I think that's all these sort of clever, you know, Matt Iglesias and your David Shores and all your very, you know, capital V, capital S, capital P, capital G, very savvy politics guys. This is not part of their equation. They have no broad moral vision for the world. There's no like project people are signing up for. It's just, we got to prevent Trump. Preventing Trump is a perfectly fine thing to want to do. Obviously. I think we see that right now, but it doesn't move asses. It doesn't stir the soul. It doesn't convert people. It doesn't build coalitions. It simply makes them look weak and flaky and inconsistent and flip floppy.

30:48And so it's like, you know, everyone thinks they're so clever. It's like, hey guys, you can just see the whiteboarding session somewhere at, you know, the DCCC or one of these think tanks where they're like, hey guys, what if we just take, what if this trans thing, we just sort of drop, drop that to kind of show, we kind of sit to soldier that to show that we're, we're, we're savvy. Oh, that's fucking brilliant. I didn't think of that before. I mean, again, it's like at a certain point, if you're so clever, why not just take Trump's whole policy platform? I mean, seriously, if that's the, the goal is to sort of mimic right-wing formulations of victory, why not just take his exact policy form?

31:15Why not just copy his speeches and have Chuck Schumer? I mean, again, like, what do you represent? What is important to you? And in a politics where nothing is sacred, everybody is looking to update their resume. And that has been a fundamental, I think, failure of this, like, we're going to triangulate right formulation. And it worked in the 90s because Ross Perot was bleeding voters from the populist right. And I think that gave everybody the false impression you can kind of do this ad infinitum. And the contradictions within that politics are revealing themselves now with a total lack of opposition.

31:44Again, in a proper functioning democracy, if you had all these authoritarian power grabs against liberals and liberal norms, what would be the thing that would be activated by democratic leaders? It would be labor. You would have strikes. You would have some, and by the way, this is what ultimately got Kimmel back on air. Actors said, we're not going to work with ABC. That was it. Of course, that was only because he was in the club. Like Chuck Schumer is not calling on labor to shut down the ports to, you know what I mean? Like there's no, they have no muscle. They have no constituencies. They have no labor.

32:12They have no socialists. They have no radical. They have nobody. It's just a bunch of fucking lawyers looking after their own ass. And so this is the outcome you invariably have. Yeah, and a lot has been made just kind of coming back to the Kimmel moment, for example, a lot has been made of how certain politicians and, you know, thaw leaders like Ezra Klein responded to this moment. What would taking a stand look like to you, would you say, especially like when it comes to like free speech and how we handle a moment like this? I mean, as a practical matter or my kind of blue sky? Maybe a little a little of both.

32:46OK, I'll give you my I'll give you my like if a bunch of media conglomerates whom I hate anyway, for other reasons, if they came to me and said, like, how do we not capitulate the Trump again, whether it's universities. And I think in the university cases, that's a big assumption to assume they do want to not capitulate to Trump because in some ways they do because they want to, again, punish mutual enemies. But assuming they do want to stand up, there has to be a degree of coordination. And you fundamentally can't do much without the involvement of labor. There is no muscle without labor. And unfortunately, as we all know, not only have these groups largely alienated labor, they are largely hostile to it for various reasons.

33:19And so the liberal left like alliance that would have opposed this is deeply fractured, is deeply hostile to one another with some exceptions. You know, there's some think tanks that try to like, you know, you're kind of center for American progress that can maybe build those bridges more. But I think that's just for pure self-preservation. You have to look at this like, again, it's like making this analogy again, but I think it's an apt one. It's Captain Kirk in First Contact when he talks about the Borg, right? They invade planets, we retreat. They invade entire worlds, we retreat. The line must be drawn here.

33:47and he's just invading one after the other. And there's no sense that a line needs to be drawn anywhere unless it involves, again, a rich multimillionaire celebrity. And I think that they need to get together and decide where the line is and draw the line. And one of the problems with that, though, is that, again, he can pick them off quite easily with respect to their own business interests. And he knows that these corporations, because they're fundamentally driven by stock owner self-interest, don't have a sense of that kind of mutual interest. And then you look at other liberal institutions, let's say universities or these nonprofits that are under attack, they've been a little better at pushing back.

34:20Again, the nonprofit killer bill was defeated in Congress twice. So it's not like there isn't some pushback. Of course, it was originally supported by 52 Democrats, including Adam Schiff. And it wasn't until they were shamed by the ACLU that they changed positions. And there's just not any coordination. And theoretically, under our current system, that coordination would be run by the most powerful Democrats in the country, the House Minority Leader and the Senate Minority Leader. But they're not because they don't care and they don't view politics that way. And they've largely viewed their job as being managerial and punishing Gaza protesters.

34:48And so there's very little coordination. I think you're seeing a little bit more of it. I'm sure there's back channels, but as far as I can tell, everybody is just looking after their own asses. And that makes a very, very weak target. This constant dividing and conquering because again, they're about self-preservation, not about any kind of political project. And there's a general sense that we can kind of just wait it out. Then three years he'll be gone or he'll die of some Diet Coke induced heart attack. And we'll be kind of free of this jerk off. I don't believe that's very smart. And I think the ways in which we saw Vance this past two weeks seamlessly slip into the role of demagogue in chief, hosting Charlie Kirk's show, doing these kind of conspiratorial rants about they coming after them and calling on brown shirts to dox people.

35:27It is very frightening stuff. He's far more internet savvy. I think, frankly, he's not nearly as funny as Trump. That's kind of Trump's biggest thing is he's actually really funny. And Vance is the most humorless front row kid in the world, like a sort of classic Yaley, but he understands the red meat. He understands that it tickled the reptile brain. So I'm not sure you can take for granted. You can wait, wait this out. I don't actually think that that's a correct assessment. And there's a lot of just hopium. There's kind of like, well, things will sort of work out because they've always worked.

35:52I always remember the kind of Ezra Klein piece from 2016, where he basically argued Trump can't win because he just can't win. And it's like, says who? That's a teleology. That's not, that's not an argument. Like bad things can happen. Bad things will happen and they can happen. But I think there's a sort of there's a sense of like, oh, we're just going to regress to the normal mean that is also a huge part of this, that there's a kind of like, let's just watch our own ass, protect our own shareholders. And eventually things will sort of sort out. And I just again, maybe I'm sounding a little paranoid here.

36:20I just I'm not sure that's true. And I'm certainly not sure that's a good substitute for like coordinating opposition to these attacks on nonprofits and education. And so that's my general read of the situation. We touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to I want to go a little deeper now. Like, what do you say to those who say that this ascendant right-wing cancel culture or the really intense weaponization of cancel culture is the right taking the tactics that the left developed and throwing them back? Do you think some soul searching is in order here? Or do you think at least like the left sort of maybe made the mistake of ignoring speech rights as an issue?

36:57The original doxing and cancel culture was done by the Canary Mission against Palestine protesters. and they've been doing that for 10 years. This idea that this is a new tactic of the left or whatever is obviously ahistorical. And the idea that somehow the right needs a permission structure or some kind of precedent, otherwise they wouldn't do it, strikes me as highly dubious. Of course, it's counterfactual, you never really know. Again, I think to the extent to which one has seen liberal safetyism weaponized against liberalism, pretty much the only domain I've seen that in is campus, so-called campus anti-Semitism panics with respect to shutting down Gaza protesters.

37:30And I think it is telling that the ADL was central to both liberal so-called cancel culture in the 2020 and 2021 and that. So like, yeah, you could argue that those systems were developed in part to be easily turnkey, turn opposition to Israel and into this kind of mopey liberal anti-racism discourse. That's really the only place I've kind of seen that sort of reverse turnkey system because in college campuses, it has legal and statutory purchase. It's not a cultural vibe. It's a real thing, right? You have all these different constitutional protections against racism on campus. etc. But as far as like liberal cancel culture being turned on itself, this is, again, I think a kind of tendency just to the right has no agency, right?

38:08They're responsible for nothing. And I don't really believe that because A, we've obviously seen versions of it before, but B, that's part of their broader propaganda. I think to sort of accept that is to accept their propaganda narrative, which is like the left did this really sleazy power grab and we're just taking advantage of the same system. But of course, that's not true. Joe Biden never went on national television or Kamala Harris never went on national television and told their followers to get people fired. I mean, right. If any, and Obama, the most powerful non in government Democrat during that phase repeatedly spoke out against so-called cancel culture.

38:40Right. So this idea that like the left supported it in an institutional way, again, sort of assumes that the gravity of power and the so-called, you know, the democratic party are as associate editors at teen Vogue. And that strikes me as not really being true. So I think there is a broad cultural vibe and again, one can sort of talk about the excesses of, you know, quote, so-called cancel culture, vigilantism. And I think there probably was some here and there, but broadly speaking, it emerged out of a corrective of a institutional failure to address issues of racism and sexism, et cetera, et cetera.

39:08There were, again, I think some cases that probably were not that solid, but there were most of them were. I mean, let's be honest, they really were. They're usually at 18 different points of evidence and so forth. So I, this idea that somehow there was this Salem witch trial fervor that took over the so-called left for, you know, four years and 10 years or whenever they start the clock, I don't know. And that the right is simply using those tools against itself strikes me as very historic and not really true. They're calling it like a turnabout or something. Yeah. I mean, again, this wasn't a classic fascist tactic of blaming the left for why you had to do this horrible authoritarian and cruel thing.

39:42I mean, literally, I mean, every piece of Nazi propaganda from the 30s, not to like make everything about World War II, because that's, you know, whatever, but like they all did this. We have to go after the communists because they did it first is literally, I mean, that's just Der Strummer 101. I mean, if it didn't already exist as a kind of tried and true left-wing tactic of I was forced to become a fascist because the left did X, Y, and Z, I would maybe be more open to it. But if one knows anything about the history of kind of right-wing grievance politics, again, Fox News started because ABC and NBC were considered too far left and were jamming down homosexuals.

40:12I mean, we can do this all day, right? There's always this perceived, the right can never draw first blood. It is always simply defending itself from this ascendant kind of globalist conspiracy out to get them. So I'm extremely dubious to kind of lend that argument any credibility because of its historical, frankly, clichéness. I mean, this is always the argument they make. And it doesn't matter what it is. Obama did this first. We had to fight back. Obama went after nonprofits. Now we have to go. I mean, this is everything. So, I mean, there's always some supposed left-wing first blood that was drawn.

40:40So I don't really buy it to the short answer. And these kinds of tactics. Like, as you point out, they go back so much farther than like this current moment in the 21st century anyway. Obviously, they're more aided by tools like the Internet now, but they can't even necessarily be they can't be ascribed to one political ideology. You know what I mean? It is fundamentally a form of vigilantism. Again, I think some vigilantism you could argue kind of emerges for very good reasons, again, due to institutional failures being one of them, because it wasn't like people were going to solve rampant sexism in the media or in academia without it.

41:13There wasn't like a lot of motive to do so. But, you know, I think that's ultimately what we're talking about here. This kind of guy on the Internet sort of, you know, deputizes him or herself to carry out some sort of crusade. Right. You know, right. But, you know, a lot of these things were vetted by proper media. They were sourced. They were usually tethered with lawsuits. It wasn't like it was just some random accusation for the most part. So I don't know. I'm yeah. The idea that they wouldn't have thought of doxing and harassing when it wasn't for the woke left strikes me was fairly unlikely that they weren't doing it before.

41:42It's possible just that the left had, like within, for example, you know, universities, it's possible that just that the overall landscape and political landscape was different and led itself to hearing more about, you know, cancellations of professors on the right. And now you hear about cancellations of professors on the left because the overall landscape around the whole. Well, one thing, one thing they really want, they realized, and Vance did this in his tirade, is that they kept wanting to paint like the media celebrating Kirk's death. But of course, there was zero examples of that. Right.

42:13No one in any mainstream or even like liberal or left publication celebrated anything. They contextualized it. They criticized his word, but never celebrated it. So they needed to go find these obscure high school teachers. One was the wife of a manager at a Texas roadhouse in Florida. They need to sort of find these nobodies and be like, look, see this? This is the left. And Vance did this in his speech seamlessly. He would go back and forth from talking about the Nation magazine to like, again, some random dipshit in Arizona. And it's like, well, wait, Those aren't part of some nebulous left constellation of power.

42:45They're doing nutpicking at the kind of classic tactic to smear one's opponents because there isn't, you know, whereas you would say like, again, the same day, right? Fox News says we need to euthanize homeless people. That is not some obscure person on the internet. That is the most powerful, well-funded corporate media apparatus in the country. So they're very clever at kind of conflating these dynamics. Again, on September 3rd, a week before Kirk was killed almost to the minute, Van sent out a tweet saying there was that weekend where people online were joking that trump was dead saying if you had listened to the media you would think trump was on his deathbed it's like the media never said that it was just random shit posters and vanff knows what he's doing right he knows he's demagoguing because to the kind of reptile brain he's appealing to the left is this amorphous blob of people on twitter people you know activists and the so-called media they're kind of one institution out to get them and to undermine their sort of white way of life or whatever and so they they do this all the time i think that's also one of the reasons why they needed this doxing dynamic.

43:39It's the same reason why, you know, the ADL goes up to Mom Donnie and is like, well, you condemn these random tweets the day you were you on the New York primary. And it's like not something they've ever done to anyone ever because it's the way you sort of associate and smear people by just nut picking. And you can find any random person saying any horrible thing online. It's not hard. It doesn't matter. Right. Doesn't matter. So it's it was just another kind of way of presenting themselves as the victims because all right wing grievance Altix is predicated on there being a left woke globalists, wink, wink Jewish kind of conspiracy out to get them in their way of life.

44:13And they're the victims. And Trump, again, a multibillionaire land developer, somehow represents the interest of the little man. So you figure that out. This is probably a good time to bring up Bari Weiss. There was a really great piece in The Guardian by David Cohen about her like pending probable appointment to some leadership position at CBS and this astronomical sale of the pre-press to CBS for like 100 to 200 million dollars. She is an important figure, I think, to consider when we try to, you know, forecast where political media and the landscape around speech are headed. She obviously kind of rose to fame on this anti-cancel culture, anti-woke crusade.

45:04Which everybody knew was horseshit because when she was at Columbia as a student, her whole job was to try to get professors who supported Palestine fired. Yep. Specifically Joseph Mossad, who she failed to get fired. Yeah. So obviously, yeah, she is pretty much exhibit A of the hypocritical, inconsistent, one-sided, selective so-called anti-cancel culture media apparatus. And David Klune does an excellent job of framing how some of what we've been talking about, the sort of doxing culture or nut picking, she really played a big role in developing this culture where we now see citizens starting these databases meant to like call individuals out on these one-off supposed offenses and then kind of blowing them up.

45:48And she went from being a critic of so-called cancel culture to almost like being the leader of what this looks like coming from the right. I mean, yeah, when she did the Harper's letter, which she was, of course, the quarterback of at the time, critics were criticizing this, myself included, among others. Like she is the ultimate promoter of cancel culture. This is obviously absurd. This is obviously selective whining. This is just them working the refs. Anyone who knows her history and pedigree of trying to get people fired. Of course, you know, again, she puts targets on the backs of Palestinians and Gaza.

46:17So obviously, you know, people keep pointing out the hypocrisy, right? J.D. Vance, Donald Trump says it. They all, they can play clips. You know, the New York Times ran this thing where they did the clips back and forth of them saying, we support free speech. And then saying, well, there's free speech, there's hate speech and blah, blah, blah. And as others have pointed out, the hypocrisy is the plate. Again, it's just a fascist blob of reptile brain bullshit. It's not supposed to make any coherent sense. It's not supposed to be intellectually honest. It's just supposed to be a wave of demagoguery.

46:43It's like the opening line from Platoon. Hell is the impossibility of reason. And there's no reasoning with these people. There's no logic. There's no through line. It's just a vomit of demagoguery and faux victim politics meant to sort of disorient you. And you say, well, wait, you said free speech. It doesn't matter. Free speech doesn't mean anything. It's meaningless in terms of its actual practical effect. And the abstract, of course, it means something. It means something quite a bit. But in terms of how it actually manifests as a form of politics, it's just a fucking buzzword. All these things are just buzzwords.

47:10And so like when they wrote the Harper's letter at the height of so-called, you know, to the post-George Floyd woke, it was about protecting, I mean, a huge impetus was transphobia. It was really about protecting people who were criticizing so-called, you know, gender-critical types, right? That was, I think, one of the main impetuses. Another was to protect race science and the sort of, however you want to phrase that, so-called race science, you're kind of Steven Pinker's. It was about protecting basically old kind of stodgy academics who felt under siege and media workers who felt under siege by these younger, more progressive, less sort of deferential media and academics who are beneath them, basically.

47:44And it had nothing to do with, again, 2 million people are in prison in the United States who have no free speech rights. Is that part of the equation? To say nothing of all the stuff we've seen recently with respect to cracking down on free speech with respect to Gaza. So all this is very selective. It's all very self-serving. Barry Weiss has kind of made her name sucking up to billionaire donors, Silicon Valley donors, pro-Israel donors. And now she's being pegged by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, all, you know, very pro-Israel racists to basically run CBS News or just, I think the term they used in Puck News was quote, ideological guidepost, which is basically a way of saying we're going to do all the shit we do at free press, like genocide denial, famine denial, racist incitement against Palestinians.

48:26And then of course, just racism in general, right? Anti-trans, anti-black. We're going to do that at CBS with the kind of veneer of credibility with that 60 minutes branding is basically what you're paying for. which, you know, if I got$50 billion in the case of Larry Ellison, if I got$480 billion, what's a billion dollars, right? It's pocket change. You spend that money to have your little ideological play toy, maybe break even. So frankly, they're getting a bargain to control the narrative, to sort of gut out the last vestiges of real, of independent journalism within the corporate media space.

48:53And so I think that's what you're seeing. You know, they realize that to sort of finish off the genocide, especially you needed to get rid of any oppositional media. And if you can buy CNN, you can buy CBS, you can buy Comedy Central and HBO, which again, they have successfully done Paramount. They're working on Time Warner. Larry Ellison also is going to control the data and algorithm of TikTok now as part of this new deal with the Murdochs. And so you control TikTok, if you control CBS, you control CNN, I mean, you're pretty much halfway there in terms of how information is disseminated against.

49:22And it'll be pro-Trump because he's the guy in charge. It'll also be, again, anti-Palestine, anti-left, anti-worker, anti-trans for sure. So yeah, I mean, things are kind of working out as they're supposed to work out for them, unfortunately. And it's all kind of happening in slow motion, but... Or hyper-fast motion, depending on the day. So when we look at something like what's going on with the Ellison's Oracle ticking over TikTok, Bari Weiss getting hired, do we buy this sort of refrain that we often hear, which is like, oh, a lot of what we're seeing right now is just corporations doing what is best for their bottom of wine.

50:03No, there's absolutely no way that free press is worth 150 million. No way. If you go based on subscribers, that means The Intercept is worth$100 million. And I don't think anyone's going to pay The Intercept$100 million. Obviously, it's an artificial valuation. Obviously. So there's an activist element. This is pure ideology. It's pure ideology. Of course it is. Media is a notoriously horrible investment. For the most part, with the exception of maybe like a Disney who kind of has ABC as a branding thing, you don't really own media to make money. It's like when people say, oh, it's all about the clicks.

50:32It's all about ratings. It's sort of this kind of facile media criticism. Right. That's like saying building a ship is about going on the water and traveling somewhere. Yeah, but where? The making money is a baseline assumption of all of all these investments, or at least breaking even as a baseline assumption. But that's not why you do it. You do it because you have yourself a little ideological play toy. Now, within that system, there's going to be pushback. Obviously, 60 Minutes is an institution, but they know full well that they're paying for the brand to push their particular ideological agenda.

50:59And when when you say this about Fox News, nobody really blinks an eye. You say, of course, Fox News reflects Rupert Murdoch's right-wing agenda. Obviously it does. But for some reason, when you say it about ABC or CBS, it's like, wait, what? No, it's all about ratings. It's like, well, wait, is Fox just about ratings? Like, yes, it's about ratings. That goes without saying, but that's a very kind of superficial analysis. It's about ratings. It's also about ideological production and reproduction that defends your class interest with your other 99 % of your investments, right? This is why corporate media is inherently reactionary because it is not driven entirely by profit within the context of the media, but is driven by profit within the context of all of its other investments, oftentimes which are about war profiteering or they're just ideological in terms of, again, wanting to snuff out dissent around Palestine.

51:40So, and again, they're open about this, right? David Ellison, when he proposed to buy Paramount from Sherry Redstone in summer of 2024, put out an ad in the Jerusalem Post saying how good this would be for Israel. Skydance published a press release in the Jerusalem Post saying this would be good for Israel. So this isn't some like vague intuition I have. Like they're explicitly saying that if the Ellison family buys 60 Minutes and buys Paramount, this will be good for the promotion of the cause of Israel. They wouldn't put it in those sinister terms. They would say like, you know, it's good for the, you know, fighting terrorism or defending Jewish self-determination.

52:09They would put in this kind of live release. But that's basically what they, that's what they argued in that press release, which again, one is welcome to read. So like, yeah, is it about making money? Sure, I guess. But like, you know, I make a living off my Patreon, but I don't think anyone thinks that's why I do it. Like I'm not some mercenary. Like it's, I have a set of beliefs, you know, unfortunately I have, I don't have billions of dollars, but this idea that media is both for-profit and also deeply ideological, there's plenty of evidence to support that. And so the idea that like it's in the best interest of Skydance investors and just sort of as some abstract thing to go buy up free press for some obscene amount of money,$200 million.

52:45Again, I don't think anybody believes that because you can look at their subscription numbers. It's a sub stack and you can look at comparable sub stacks and nobody's trying to buy them for anything remotely the same. I'm like, we're going to buy the transitive property. That means ZO News is worth$50 million. It means Dropside is worth$50 million. I don't think anyone thinks anyone's going to buy Dropside for$50 million, as far as I know. So clearly, there's an ideological component here. I think anyone with two fucking brain cells can see that. Last question. Like, what do you imagine the media landscape will even feel like six months from now?

53:15Or like, are there things you're personally most worried about? I think the processes we're talking about will take a little longer than that. I think they'll take a couple of years. I know that the Skydance takeovers, I don't even until December of this year and who knows how long, because you're going to have to weed out elements. These newsrooms do have institutional leverage and institutional power. People have their own brands, their own integrity to look after. So I don't think you're just going to get full-blown like RoboCop news, like propaganda right away. But eventually two, three years, yeah, you're going to get a 60 minutes piece on how there's a homo sleeper cell inside of Columbia University.

53:45You're going to get the same schlock you got from the free press. And it's going to have the 60 minute branding. Much like the 60 minute branding in Australia is run by right wingers and has, you know, It's going to be looked very similar to that. And you're going to get that, I think, it depends whether or not the Ellison's into buying CNN, but again, CNN's already bad, but I think you're going to get this kind of more overt naked propaganda than you get before, where there isn't any effort to even have mainstream or liberal credibility. It's just pure racist incitement all day, every day. Will journalists be able to do their jobs?

54:11Or journalists who are not part of the decretion be able to do their jobs? We already can't do our jobs. No, it's going to have to be independent. And they'll go for that too. I mean, I'm sure they're going to start more ideologically policing Substack and Patreon. Again, they kind of allow lefties to exist within that milieu because the vast majority of it is right wing Silicon Valley shit. But they'll probably go after that, too, quite honestly. What a great note to end on. Sorry. I mean. But thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks so much, Adam. And if you guys don't want to see that happening, continue to support Adam's work.

54:44Continue to support the culture journalist. I know the solution. Me and me alone. Give me money. Fuck me, support. I know you wanted to say how we can support you. Or how I look at you. I don't know. Sure, yeah. I mean, I have a podcast called Citations Needed. Citations with an S. There's another one. Don't get into that. And then I have a sub stack called The Column at columblog.com. Awesome. Thanks so much, Adam. Thanks, y 'all. Appreciate you.

55:10This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.