MAGA Demands Unwavering Media Support For Their Shitty, Unpopular War
U.S. authoritarians won't be satisfied until the U.S. press is 100% pure propaganda, slathering the extraction class with relentless praise for a rotating platter of violent and terrible ideas.
By now you've probably seen how Donald Trump was too stupid to understand how modern warfare has changed in the cheap drone era, trapping the U.S. in yet another military quagmire only a small handful of sociopaths actually wanted.
The entirely avoidable clusterfuck and its vast economic reverberations comes despite Trump specifically campaigning under the faux-populist platform of being vehemently anti-war, a broken promise that has given the country's preeminent intellectuals, like Joe Rogan, no limit of sudden onset constipation.
Despite the U.S. press being historically pro senseless war and oblivious to its own class, corporatist, and nationalism biases, they've still somehow managed to occasionally communicate the pointlessness of the Iran war to the public, much to the chagrin of MAGA's dimmest lieutenants.
Like Secretary of Defense boss Pete Hegseth, who recently had a toddler moment (as my wife calls them) because CNN said the war was "intensifying." In a speech, Hegseth blasted CNN for the "fake" observation, and applauded the fact the network will soon be owned by a pro-war Trump-allied billionaire:
The irony here is that it was Hegseth's own Department of Defense that claimed the war was "intensifying" just three days earlier in a press release:
These are people who aren't even bright enough to know what they're upset about. They've spent more than fifty years pickling in their own lie that the problem isn't their greed, incompetence, or unpopular policies, it's that they're simply not getting a fair shake from the American press.
But Republicans already dominate AM radio, local broadcast news, cable TV news, the internet, and even the fake "pink slime" newspapers that now pepper local towns. They've murdered what was left of U.S. public media. Hegseth jettisoned all the Pentagon reporters and replaced them with weird parrots and dipshits.
Rich Republicans recently bought CBS, CNN, TikTok, Twitter, and even Cartoon Network. Trump's FCC boss, Brendan Carr, is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters if they're not gushingly enthusiastic about Trump and Netanyahu's mass murder of school children.
Trump officials are copying Victor Orban's media model in Hungary, where oligarchs buy up all the media companies, then slather autocrats with 24/7 agitprop while the government murders independent journalism just out of frame.
Our dull autocrats are very excited about the mass propaganda machine they're building, and they're utterly incapable of being remotely subtle about it:
It probably goes without saying, but Trump didn't "save TikTok," X doesn't support free speech, and by "booming," they mean the President's personal propaganda website, Truth Social, lost $712 million dollars last year.
The most pathetic part is that barely any pressure was required for U.S. corporate media to fold like damp cardboard. Media "leaders" caved immediately to threats of pointless Trump lawsuits, and like CBS and ABC, have slathered our mad toddler king with no limit of tributes and bribes to curry regulatory favor.
As a result, most mainstream U.S. news coverage of the war has still generally been jingoistic, unskeptical, and fawning as the Trump administration begs taxpayers for another $200 billion to keep the good times going.
This ABC News article, for example, waxes poetic about Marco Rubio's "rising star," in the wake of his Iran war blunders, taking until the twenty-first paragraph to bother to mention that the war is polling terribly (that Trump aggressively miscalculated Iran's response isn't mentioned at all).
Even MS Now, the closest the U.S. gets to a "progressive" TV news channel, spent the first few days of the war platforming unreliable warmongers like John Bolton despite no shortage of more ethical and informed expert alternatives.
And, as usual, press op/ed sections have been jam-packed with no shortage of outright lies, like this one published by the Wall Street Journal a week ago:
The disastrous attacks on Iran have netted Russia untold billions of dollars after the Trump removal of sanctions, despite the fact the Russian government is actively helping Iran murder U.S. soldiers. Can you imagine the press response to this under a Democratic President? Under (gasp) the leadership of a progressive?
That our captured corporate press has still, sporadically, been able to communicate the contours of this Republican disaster to the public speaks to just what a particularly hot mess America's latest senseless war has been.
Still, the current kakistocracy won't be satisfied until whatever's left of the U.S. press is just a 24/7 North Korean-esque agitprop bullhorn relentlessly blowing colorful smoke up the ass of wealth and power.
U.S. autocrats and their unhinged oligarch friends openly telegraphed for decades that they were repurposing the media as a weapon. The Democrat policy response to this extremely unsubtle information warfare has historically been, with some scattered and welcome exception, a protracted damp farting sound.
At any time over the last forty years Congressional Democrats could have aggressively fought against media consolidation and for media ownership diversity requirements. They could have prioritized creative funding for real journalism. They could have fought to expand public media. They could have copied Finland's efforts to teach schoolchildren about propaganda, media literacy, and unreliable narrators starting as early as three years old.
Instead, with rare exceptions (like Gigi Sohn), Democrat media reform policies ranged from performative to nonexistent; all while the right wing took direct aim at informed consensus and constructed the largest propaganda bullhorn in human history, directly paving the way for the rise of U.S. authoritarianism.
There are, as I like to repeat, still some bright spots.
None of the architects of this new media echoplex are what you'd call competent, savvy, or even sane. They do not see the field clearly. And U.S. consumers still have agency over what media they pay for, amplify, and consume (even though more often than not that's still some of the dumbest cack imaginable).
This madness is also just foundationally and increasingly unpopular, making retaining long term power and control over a country this large, fussy, and diverse likely impossible, no matter how many bobble-headed pseudo-journalists and seedy manfluencers they have under their employ.