The economy's in crisis.
Unemployment is rising.
The country is deeply divided.
But there is a new way forward.
It starts with putting as much emphasis on communicating with our people as we do on defending of our nation.
The masses can no longer be left "to their own devices." In this moment, we must call upon "modern princes" to tell the people what they want — and to make sure the government keeps pace with latest technologies.
And because we want the entire country behind us, we won't seek to influence only our own supporters.
We will work on those who oppose us, not simply until they have "reconciled" themselves to our regime, but:
"Until they have capitulated to us, until they grasp ideologically that what is happening... must be accepted."
Welcome to Germany, 1933.
The above summarizes what Joseph Goebbels laid out in two speeches in March, 1933 as, against a backdrop of economic hardship and political division, he announced the establishment of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
America's "modern princes" control tools Goebbels couldn't have imagined
Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda was "given complete control over the cultural and media landscape," creating a "machinery of indoctrination":
- Newspapers were banned.
- Editorial departments were put under surveillance.
- Hand-picked staff wrote the day's main news stories.
- The new media of the time — radio and film — were eagerly embraced, ensuring the public saw only the "correct version" of world events.
In recent years, Goebbels' propaganda playbook has evolved, but only slightly.
Today's would-be dictators are more likely to look outside of government for the "modern princes" — or, as we now call them, "oligarchs" — whose job it is to control the media and manipulate the masses.
It's happened in Russia:
It's happened in Hungary:
It's happened in Turkey:
In his second term, Trump is emulating his buddies Putin, Orbán, and Erdogan. But all of them are still taking notes from Joseph Goebbels:
Policies must have mass support. The leaders of today must be modern princes of the people. They must be able to understand the people but need not follow them slavishly. It is their duty to tell the masses what they want and put it across to the masses in such a way that they understand it, too — Joseph Goebbels, 1933
Goebbels, even though he lived in a less-fragmented, less-algorithmic media world, knew that effective propaganda had to adapt to ongoing innovation:
We must not allow technology to run ahead of the government but rather the government must keep pace with technology. Only the latest thing is good enough — Joseph Goebbels, 1933
In 2025, Trump is accelerating his efforts to achieve the same kind of control over the cultural and media landscape that Hitler enjoyed in Germany in the 1930s.
He's attacking legacy media (the only kind of media he truly understands) from all sides:
- Defunding public media.
- Demanding that late-night comedians get taken off the air.
- Winning multi-million-dollar settlements from both ABC and CBS.
- Using constant bullying and intimidation of journalists, media brands and corporations in an unrelenting effort to silence dissent.
Trump is taking legal settlements as bribes. He's using the FCC and DOJ to target his enemies and help his allies. He's abusing his power to corrupt the government's media-merger approval process. And he's turning TikTok from a "national security risk" into a weapon he can use to attack America from within.
In summary: Under Trump, the American media landscape is rapidly consolidating, putting a small group of regime-friendly oligarchs in control of country's most powerful media brands, most powerful algorithms, and most powerful data-mining operations.
Control of the media helps make tech fascism impossible to uninstall
Ever since Roger Ailes first wrote his "Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" in the Nixon White House in 1970, Republicans have sought to seize control of the means of information production.
- Reagan's FCC helped advance the plan with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.
- In 1988, The Rush Limbaugh Show debuted, quickly proving that Goebbels had been right about the power of radio in disseminating propaganda.
- In 1996, Fox News was launched. By 2000, it was so powerful that it was helping Republicans — with the help of the Supreme Court — steal elections.
- By 2016, Putin and the Trump campaign had fully embraced the power of social media to spread propaganda to influence the election.
- By 2024, Trump, Elon Musk and the GOP had added the manosphere's most influential podcasters to the mix — expanding the right-wing ecosystem still further.
In the 2020s, Larry Ellison's vision is even more nefarious than Roger Ailes' 1970s ambitions.
Ellison wants America to embrace the same kind of digital totalitarianism used in China — deploying high-tech surveillance and relentless propaganda to create a citizenry that's compliant with social norms and obedient to authority.
To achieve his vision, Ellison is building a "MAGA media empire" that could soon include TikTok — a surveillance device currently installed on about half the population's phones and which, says WIRED:
"Knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you're viewing and for how long."
As Popular Information reported this week:
As part of his role in spinning off TikTok's U.S. operations, Ellison will gain access to a massive trove of data delineating the political views, consumption habits, and social connections of tens of millions of Americans who use the app. "[TikTok's] data and privacy will be led by one of America's greatest tech companies, Oracle," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News over the weekend. "And the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well."
If both the "framework" of Trump's proposed TikTok deal gets approved and a potential Paramount-Warner Brothers merger goes ahead (as now seems likely), Larry Ellison will, suddenly, sit astride a media empire that owns, among other assets: CNN and CBS News; plus Comedy Central and HBO, where Jon Stewart and John Oliver host influential comedy-news shows; plus two of the "Big Five" movie studios, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.
All that plus TikTok — a Chinese app seemingly designed to, as Goebbels once put it, "tell the masses what they want and put it across... in such a way that they understand it."
With an estimated 170 million US users, TikTok is not just for kids anymore. It's also a place where 1 in 5 of all US adults regularly access news.
Ellison's media acquisitions are quickly establishing him as a tech-media broligarch on a par with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. (Other oligarchs reportedly included in the TikTok deal include Rupert Murdoch, who already owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post, and Marc Andreessen, whose VC firm a16z is already a major investor in Substack and recently acquired the podcast network Turpentine.)
Trump's new "Ministry of Propaganda" will control the narrative, the data — and the algorithms
In May 2024, I warned that, in a time of massive technological change, a Trump victory would give "rich white men" the opportunity to "fully dictate what happens to our lives, our bodies, and our world."
As of now, if planned mergers and acquisitions go through, here are just some of the media and information assets the six rich white men at the top of this page will control or influence:
- Larry Ellison: TikTok, CNN, CBS News, Paramount, Warner Bros, HBO, Comedy Central, MTV
- Jeff Bezos: Amazon Studios, Amazon Prime Video, Audible, MGM, Twitch, The Washington Post
- Elon Musk: X, xAI, SpaceX/Starlink
- Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Oculus Quest, Meta AI
- Rupert Murdoch: TikTok, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post
- Marc Andreessen: TikTok, Substack, Turpentine, plus influence at Meta as an investor/board member
Taken together, these six men have the ability to decide which stories get told — and how they get told.
Equally important, they have the power to suppress stories, too. Multiple influencers on social media are already claiming that just mentioning "Epstein" gets a post deboosted. Imagine that same suppression of negative stories applied to CNN, 60 Minutes, the nightly news on CBS, and the news decisions of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, where even subtle shifts in story placement can affect attitudes toward a political scandal.
Trump's Ministry of Propaganda will have the power to:
- Set the day's agenda: By corrupting "serious" news decisions to ensure that America's news junkies and opinion leaders are steered toward the "correct version" of events
- Manipulate the algorithms: By constantly monitoring keywords and topics to ensure that America's most powerful social media algorithms boost (and deboost) content to prevent anti-government sentiment from dominating realtime social feeds.
- Boost friendly voices: By influencing — overtly and covertly — how content gets promoted and amplified through newsletter platforms, podcasts, and messaging apps
- Control user access: By shutting off access to social content and satellite networks in times of crisis to disrupt news flows and prevent the resistance from organizing
- Spread disinformation: By continuing the process already started by Musk and Zuckerberg to end content moderation and allow compelling, AI-generated deepfakes and memes to spread virally, while choosing who sees what
- Turn entertainment into propaganda: By greenlighting projects designed to shape the longterm narratives delivered to mass audiences, creating a steady pipeline of shows and movies that normalize extreme viewpoints and promote acceptance of new restrictions on America's long-established rights and freedoms
For the biggest broligarchs — Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg — control of media and social media platforms meshes seamlessly with their sci-fi-and-supervillain-inspired dreams of AI-powered world domination, transhumanism, and various interplanetary adventures.
For Trump, the arrangement creates a new, oligarch-led Ministry of Propaganda that aligns with his dictatorial ambitions.
It doesn't just shape the news. It controls what Americans see and here.
It doesn't just feed us information. It tracks how much of it we consume — and how we react to it.
It doesn't just tell us what the government would like us to believe. It knows when, where, and how to target us with the most effective forms of personalized, AI-powered propaganda ever created.
As Joseph Goebbels explained in 1933, it's a Ministry of Propaganda designed to cause a "mobilization of the mind" that will "unite the nation".... "though admittedly in another form than... democracy."
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