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A young man born into wealth, the son of a powerful father, raised in privilege but always restless. He attended elite schools, but arrogance and antics pushed him out. Rules bored him. Attention thrilled him. Headlines, applause and gossip, those were the things he craved and what drove him. He used inherited wealth to build a platform that magnified his own voice. Scandal, spectacle, outrage, those became his tools. He discovered that if you could tell the public who to cheer and who to jeer you, you could shape not just the conversation, but wield power itself. He surrounded himself with celebrities, promoted beautiful women as symbols of glamour, and reduced rivals to caricatures. For him, everyone was a storyline. Patriots or traitors, saints or sinners, heroes or losers, he found a simple formula. Money plus media plus spectacle equals influence. And once influence was his, the next step was politics. He he believed that if he could dominate attention, he could dominate elections. That worked in entertainment would work in government. That the crowd's hope and cheers could be converted into votes. But there was more to his power. He understood fear. He wrapped himself in patriotism and branded his enemies as disloyal, untrustworthy and dangerous. He discovered that the quickest way to silence a critic was to convince the public that they were a threat. Workers became radicals, rivals became traitors, allies became foes. Women became morality tales. Virtuous or fallen, celebrated or destroyed. Destroyed. The stage he built wasn't just for news. It was for drama. For shaping the boundaries of loyalty and belonging, for deciding who would be welcome into the public square and who would be driven from it. His influence didn't just sell papers, it rearranged reputations, redirected politics and rewrote culture. If you think this is a description of the modern age and a particular contemporary figure, you're not wrong. But we're going to go a little bit further back in time. The story begins more than 100 years before now, and this archetype was first built by William Randolph Hearst. So who was the man who turned newspapers into weapons? And to understand how Hearst managed to shape a century's worth of public opinion, we have to start with the life behind the legend. His money, his ambition, and the myth of the self made emperor of the press. This episode follows Hearst's rise, explores his complicated story and traces the patterns and influences that he set in motion. Patterns that still echo in our politics and our culture today. Let's flip some tables. Hello and welcome back to Flipping Tables. I hope that you are all feeling a little bit more invigorated after the November 4th elections. I certainly was. It was nice to See, grassroots movements really show up for people in different areas of the country. I found it really inspiring. It was a reminder to me that democracy doesn't fail unless we cede it, unless we give it away, unless we relinquish it and obey in advance. So if you've been feeling like, where do I fit in this? Can I help? Does it matter? It absolutely does. And sometimes that help is following along with your local elections and sometimes it's helping with the campaign, sometimes it's knocking on doors, sometimes it's taking care of your community. Because this episode is going to be a little bit on the longer side, I'm going to do a few quick announcements and then we're going to jump right in. If you are an advocate or an activist on Patreon, those top tiers, all, all of the Patreon boxes have been sent. They are on the way. We had a really difficult time navigating shipping and tariffs and all kinds of stuff, but they have been mailed. Finally. The downside, the bad news to that is moving forward, those tiers will only be available to US Residences only because it was just far too expensive and really difficult to navigate certain countries getting those boxes shipped. So I'm sorry, if you are an international subscriber, we're looking for other digital options for you if that's something you're interested in. Just a reminder that my travel and true crime podcast highway to Hell with my co host Andy Jones is now live. You can find that on any streaming platform that you use for your podcasts. We just released an episode on Ed Gein. We're working on the Cecil Hotel and Albert Fish gonna be a lot. It's weird that that's now how I relax. Like my research for true crime is what makes my brain feel better in the wake of the world and a couple in person events that are happening that you can find both on my website and on Instagram. The first is in New York City on November 14th starting at 6:30pm Eastern in Brooklyn. I am doing a live premiere with Style like youe and the YouTube TV show what's Underneath. We are premiering my episode. There will be a live panel conversation as well as a Q and A and you can find use my link tree to find the ticket link. You can also go to my website and then we're doing a live event in Nashville. I will be in Nashville December 6th with Brian Recker and we will be meeting and having a night of conversation around his book Hell Bent but also our individual stories. We're really hoping to make this a community event where people can come and get re centered in, in hope and in our communities outside of dogma and animosity. Um, again, all of those details are on my Instagram and on my website. And then lastly, if you're not signed up for my newsletter yet, go to my website, montemater.com and go to the contact page. Sign up for that. We're doing Christmas a little bit differently this year. I am not going to be participating in Consumer Christmas at all this year. That's just my choice. I'm just kind of sick of capitalism. I'm sick of the pressure of it. I am sick of spending my money with organizations who then turn around and outsource their jobs to AI after they've just gotten government subsidies to hire people. I am tired of organizations who do not pay their workers a living wage and also profit off of their employees being on snap. I'm looking at you, Walmart. So I'm just not going to participate in that form of Christmas. And Christmas is one of my favorite times of year. It's one of my favorite holidays. And my goal is to really reconnect with what it means to be a person and have community, what it means to help my community. Nashville is struggling like much of the country with SNAP benefits not being paid out, people losing their jobs. So my goal for Christmas this year is and I'll be sending all the details as they unfold. I'm gonna be teaming up with local churches who are consistently helping meet food needs throughout the year, not just now, and local food banks that are consistently doing that, to organize drives and fundraisers for them, to organize teams of volunteers to help get food to people's homes if they do not have vehicles. And we're gonna be organizing some community events. What my goal is, is for us to have a huge community wide potluck where people can come out, meet each other, sit with each other, have dinner, meet like minded people. I always, I also want to have some form of kind of party, like a, like a very casual Christmas party that's really around, have a glass of wine and dance. Like that's just something that's in my brain and in my body right now about what if we just got together like people used to do before the Internet, and we listened to music and we danced together and we talked. So there's gonna be a lot of community organizing. I'm going to be doing this fall leading into the Christmas season and I'll also be helping with the District 7 campaign as we're having our special election. If you're in Nashville, early election, early voting is November 12th to the 26th, and the final vote is on December 2nd. We have the opportunity to flip District 7 with Afton Bain running in the Democratic seat. And she is incredible. And she's been a social worker and she has been advocating for people for a very long time and we have a shot to win it. So between working with her campaign boots on the ground and just wanting to do more for my community, and I want to be near people and I want to hug people and support people, that's how I'm doing Christmas this year. And so if you'd like to be a part of that, and I'm also hoping that when I give you the steps I'm following, maybe you can do it in your own communities. Because we all have something to offer. And I think one of the cool things that's happening right now is it feels like the world is burning, is that I think people are remembering. We're waking up a little bit to how disconnected we've become. People are longing for in person interaction. We're craving touch. We want to reconnect. So I think that even if you live in a small town, there's an opportunity to give back in that way. So again, this episode is going to be a little bit long. I want to give a huge thank you to Charles Harvey for the research on this. Just absolutely spectacular. Having the baseline of the research laid out for me to where I can just make little tweaks for my own language really has been a lifesaver between all of my work. The two podcasts now. But starting November 19th, I will no longer be Monty the personal trainer. I'm actually shutting down the ship, which was a really hard decision. Two weeks ago, I emailed my clients letting them know that on November 19, I was going to end my career as a trainer. And some of my clients I've been with for 12 years, one of them in particular, I have seen him three times a week for 12 years straight. And so it's been very emotional and very difficult. But I want to do this work. I want to do it fully. I really want to get my book done. And I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do that if I was still training four, five, six hours a day in addition to all the other work that I'm doing and try to take care of my health. It just wasn't going to happen. So it's been kind of a. It's a period of goodbyes for me where chapters of my life are closing and ways that I identified myself are closing. And it's positive. I'm doing work I love. I feel like I am giving something to the world that makes it a little bit better. At least I'm trying to. But it's also been really hard and really emotional because I can. You can probably hear my voice a little bit. But I feel that I'm, you know, losing friendships in a way with my clients, people who've become like family to me. One of my clients was the person who bought my plane ticket to go home when my dad died because I didn't have the money to go. And so it's been very emotional and a lot of gratitude for me because it really saved my life. So I'm thankful for you. I'm thankful for your support because you supporting me, supporting this show is the reason that I'm able to make that decision and to do this work full time. And so thank you for everyone who supported me on patreon. And that's patreon.com montemater thank you to those who have subscribed to the show, shared the show, reviewed the show. All of those things are extremely helpful and I'm excited for the rest of this journey. And for those of you, there's been a lot of new subscribers recently. Flipping tables is about curiosity. And yes, it's based on Jesus flipping tables of the money changers. I want this show to be about challenging systems, about sticking up for the little guy, about learning the history that we weren't supposed to find out, about digging deeper, asking questions, challenging the norms. Because that's how we grow and that's how we get better. The motto for this show is curiosity. Just be curious. Can you sit with the question? And it is totally fine if you don't agree with me on everything. That's actually great. I don't want people to agree with me just because I said it. This is how we grow and we get better. I learn new things every day, which is why I call my followers the coven of curiosity that we ask questions, we talk to each other, and we explore a lot more. I'm going to be leaning a lot more in the future. We're going to lean into a lot of biographies, learning about key people that got us where we are, a lot of kind of whitewashed history, a lot of the things that we weren't supposed to know, at least not in great detail. And hopefully it inspires you to. To grow and inspires you to challenge maybe what you grew up believing so that we can build something better for our kids, our nieces, our nephews, and for ourselves. I think sometimes we, we get caught up in this language of well, leave a better world for the kids, which yes, that's great, but like what about a better world for you? Is this the best that you think you deserve? Or can we do better Enough on that. We're going to talk about William Randolph Hearst, who was born in San Francisco in 1863, the only son of George Hearst, a mining magnate who would later become a U.S. senator, a Phoebe Apperson Hearst and. I'm sorry, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. A philanthropist and an advocate for women's education. He attended elite schools and eventually matriculated at Harvard College. His time at Harvard was brief. His mischievous behavior, including elaborate pranks like sending chamber pots engraved with professors names, led to his expulsion in 1885. After leaving Harvard, he turned his attention to journalism, enabled by his family's fortune. In 1887, his father gave him control of the San Francisco Examiner, a paper that George Hearst had acquired several years earlier. Under Williams leadership, the examiner became a showcase of sensationalism. You can think of this like a tabloid. Bold headlines, investigative expose, crime, scandal and a focus on human drama. What William Randolph Hearst would really create was the. What was what, what was what would become the magazines we see on the rack as we're checking out at the grocery store. By 1895, Hearst expanded eastward, purchasing the New York Morning Journal. There he entered circulation with a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's World. Their rivalry helped fuel what was called yellow journalism. Highly sensationalized reporting that blurred fact and fiction in pursuit of attention and influence. Think of this as clickbait. What gets the most views or certain news quotation mark news companies that will air misinformation because they know that they're going to get more viewership from it. The coverage of the Cuban conflict in the 1890s, especially the sensationalist accounts leading up to the Spanish American war, reveals how passionately Hearst believed in the media's power to sway public opinion. And he definitely did. Throughout the early 20th century, Hearst built one of the largest media empires in the world. By the 1920s, he controlled nearly 30 newspapers nationwide, along with magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, as well as newsreels and radio stations. At its peak, the media he controlled reached 1 in 4American families. 25% of Americans were held by the ear by William Randolph Hearst. He also experimented in Hollywood, backing Cosmopolitan pictures and promoting film Stars through his publications. Yet politics was always kind of front and center of his ambitions. Hearst was elected to Congress in 1902 as a Democrat and made bids for mayor of New York City and the governor of New York. Though he styled himself as a champion of the people, rallying against monopolies and elites, his own wealth and brash tactics undermined his credibility. Cough, Andrew Cuomo. Cough. He even had presidential aspirations. But Hearst was never able to break through the wall of opposition from the political establishment. Hearst's personal life also fed his public myth. In 1903, he married Millicent Wilson, and they had five sons. Yet his most famous relationship was with Marion Davies, an actress he met in 1917 and remained devoted to for the rest of his life. Hearst used his magazines and studios to promote her career, making her a household name. The phenomenon of cursed girls. Actresses, whose fame was boosted by his empire, reflected how he used women's stories both for personal interest and mass entertainment. In 1919, he began building his sprawling estate in San Simeon, California, Known today as the Hearst Castle. Designed by architect Julia Morgan, it was a playground of opulence, filled with European art, antiquities and extravagant architecture. Hollywood stars and political figures flocked to San Simeon, where Hearst played host and stage manager. Despite his cultural dominance, Hearst's empire was pretty fragile. The Great Depression hit him hard. Years of overexpansion left him deeply in debt, and by the mid-1930s, creditors forced a reorganization of his holdings. Though he retained symbolic control and influence, trustees managed much more of the business than he did. Still, his influence persisted. His newspapers attacked Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Reflecting his increasingly conservative stance. He remained a formidable figure. In the 1940s, though, the cultural tide was shifting. In 1941, Orson Welles released Citizen Kane, a thinly veiled portrayal of Hearst's rise in corruption. Hearst tried to suppress the film, pressuring theaters and threatening to expose Hollywood scandals. Yet his failure to stop the release only reinforced the connection between Hearst and the Welles. Charles Foster Kane. William Randolph Hearst died in 1951 at the age of 88. His empire endured through the Hearst corporation, but his personal power was gone. His legacy is complex and, some would say, kind of tragic. A pioneer of mass media who expanded the possibilities of journalism, but also a master manipulator whose thirst for sensationalism, exploitation of women's images, and the weaponization of patriotism left deep marks on American society and culture. And I think as I read these descriptions, you can hear the similarities, not just in certain people, but but in certain things that we've come to Understand, from journalism or in certain ways. We're used to women being portrayed now. But that legacy didn't spring from thin air. Long before the scandals and the castles and the film that tried to define him, Hearst had already discovered that the story could outmuscle the truth. The truth doesn't matter nearly as much if you can control a story, if you can control the rhetoric. In the decades before Citizen Kane, he was busy writing his own script. One headline, one controversy, and one outrage at a time. And he was really a journalistic puppeteer. Once the empire was built, the real experiment began. Hearst didn't just report the news, he performed it. The battles with Pulitzer, the race for the headlines, the Cuban war stories, this was where yellow journalism was born, where Hearst found his formula for power. And here's how spectacle and wealth and media power can bend to society, something I think we're pretty familiar with right now. But let's talk a little bit about yellow journalism. Picture yourself in New York City in 1898. You're walking past a newsstand and the headline screams out at you. Destruction of the warship Maine 266 live lost Spanish treachery. Now, here's the thing. No one had evidence yet that Spain was behind that explosion. But evidence wasn't the point. You feeling like you're listening and like thinking about Facebook now? The point was the outrage. The point was to stop you in your tracks, pull a nickel from your pocket, get you angry enough to not just buy the paper, but to demand action, to come back the next day and buy the paper again. This is yellow journalism in a nutshell, where the truth gets this stretched beyond its envelope, beyond its perimeters, so that you'll come back and buy the paper, or in our case, so that you'll send it in the group chat so that you'll come back to the page so that you'll stay longer on the post. It wasn't just about headlines. It was about spectacle. And one of the most unlikely stars of that spectacle wasn't a war hero or a politician. It was a comic strip character called the Yellow Kid. And if you're watching this on video, there's a picture of this yellow kid, this bald little kid in a giant yellow smock, very a la Georgie from. It was the mascot of America's newspaper wars. Pulitzer had him first, and then Hearst stole him away. And for a while, readers could find two yellow kids shouting from competing papers. Critics sneered at the spectacle, and the phrase yellow journalism was born. The Spanish American war gave yellow journalism a big stage. When The USS Maine exploded in the Havana harbor. Hearst and Pulitzer's papers went all in. Headlines blamed Spain. Editorial cartoons turned Cuba into a damsel in distress. Spain was the villain. And of course Uncle Sam is just the reluctant hero. But here's why we should still care. Yellow journalism didn't die in the 1890s. Its DNA is alive and well. Every time you see a clickbait headline, every time you're standing at the checkout line and you see a tabloid, every outrage fueled post, whether it's true or not, or a viral story that bends the truth for attention and as soon as you read an article you're like wait, that's not what that story is about at all. The yellow kids night shirt may be gone, but the style it inspired is still here. It's in new clothes and it's more viral than ever. In the years after Hearst and Pulitzer, sensational news didn't fade away, not in the slightest. It morphed into these new forms. The New York Daily News launched launched in 1919 pioneered the tabloid format with giant photos of crime scenes and scandals splashed across its compact pages. The New York Evening Graphic went further creating compose o graphs which are fabricated photo montages of celebrities in imagined situations. So this is, this is scissor paper and scissors and glue AI to like put them in imaginary situations that don't exist at all. One infamous example of this showed Rudolph Valentino on his deathbed. Even though no photographer had been there. It was fake, but it sold papers. Critics called it a pornographic but audiences bought in. And in this struggle, reporting didn't really stand a chance. Not real reporting. By the 1930s and 40s gossip became became its own kind of news. Walter Winchell, once a reporter at the Evening Graphic turned a radio microphone into national gossip column mixing insider whispers with sharp political opinions. He could make or break reputations overnight even if they were unfounded. The personality driven scandal heavy approach blurred the line between what was entertainment and what was journalism. Fast forward to the mid 20th century. The supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer perfected what was known as checkbook journalism. Paying for scoops sometimes regardless of verification. One example came from Larry fritz hustler in 1990s and 2000s when stories of politicians private misconduct were published or at least threatened to be published often through payment or exclusive deals. Another came two decades later when powerful networks tried to suppress the reporting on Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse. Ronan Farrell later described how NBC News shelved his investigation while Weinstein's team pressured other outlets the pattern was familiar. Scandal plus money plus selective reporting equals attention. By the 1980s and 90s, the spectacle jumped to television programs like A Current Affair and Geraldo Rivera's Notorious Al Capone's Vault. Special packaged scandal, crime, suspense as primetime events. Geraldo drew 30 million viewers to watch him open a vault that turned out to be empty. The hype mattered more than the truth. He didn't have Al Capone's vault. It was an empty vault. If Hearst had his screaming headlines, television now had its countdown clocks and dramatic musical stings. Through the 2000s and the 2010s, the digital age intensified these patterns. Outlets that were once local or niche learned how to sensationalize headlines and clickbait layouts as affordable ways to grab attention. In 2013, Upworthy and Buzzfeed mastered the art of the Curiosity Gap headline. You won't believe what happened next. This kind of thing drove millions of clicks, but also drove criticism for manipulation. I have gotten sucked into those where I'm like, I just want to know the answer to the question that was why I clicked on this in the first place, and I have to click the right arrow 30 times to get there. This is all part of the extension of yellow journalism. In 2016, Facebook's algorithm helped boost fake election stories like Pope Francis endorses Trump, which outperformed many mainstream news reports. A year later, coverage of a course, Pizzagate, spiraled from obscure online forums into real world danger, culminating in a gunman storming into the D.C. pizzeria based on false claims they weren't real. Studies confirmed a powerful trend. False stories spread farther, faster, and deeper than the truth online. At the same time, fact checkers, nonprofit watchdogs, and even platforms themselves have tried to push back. But recklessness and spectacle continue to eat the lunch of accuracy and accountability. And here we are Today. The techniques that powered yellow journalism haven't gone away. They're just in a new uniform. Outlets friendly to the MAGA agenda often emphasize outrage and loyalty over verification. And we've seen the current Trump administration build up a press corps that favors MAGA aligned podcasters and influencers, granting them access that used to belong to traditional news outlets unless those traditional news outlets agree to only publish what the White House says they can publish. The strategy echoes Hurst, reward the coverage that serves you best and sideline everyone else. Meanwhile, right wing media figures attack Trump's critics in ways that feel straight out of the old yellow playbook. When commentators within the movement dared to question Trump, I'll out MAGA you. I'm the true maga. More Epstein, more deportations. Whatever it is. Voices on Fox and podcasts lashed out, branding them as super Maga or accusing them of betrayal. It's the same tactic Hearst once used against his rivals, even in paint opposition as disloyal, make it personal, make it loud. It's no longer about the issue. It's about someone's lack of character, their lack of patriotism. But yellow techniques aren't just on one side. We've seen it on both outlets. Pushing back against MAGA often fall into similar patterns, highlighting the most provocative Trump statement, repeating them for effect, and framing every new investigation in its most sensational terms. Now, granted, sometimes the headlines are just that crazy now. But we've also seen where we get distracted with a sensational headline instead of a core issue or a core executive order or a dangerous budget. What it all ties together is the business of attention. In Hearst's day, it was about selling more newspapers. Today, it's about clicks, ratings, and viral reach. Whether it's an influencer granted White House access or a headline crafted for outrage, the through line is clear. Sensationalism is still the main seller. And the habits of yellow journalism continue to shape what Americans see, hear, and believe. But Hearst didn't stop at getting people to look. He wanted to make them feel something. And that, I think, was truly his superpower. Once he realized emotion could outrun evidence, everything changed. Outrage became a product. It certainly became the hook. And manipulation was the strategy. You know the saying, don't believe everything you read in the paper? That wasn't a warning. This was a Hearst business model. Hearst didn't sell the news. He sold outrage, drama, and certainty, and people ate it up. He proved you could move nations with a headline. Few, if any, facts were required. He wasn't just a publisher. He was a master manipulator of perception. By the end of the 19th century, Hearst had shown how emotion could outweigh evidence, how story could outrun fact. And those lessons didn't stay in his papers. They resurfaced in the propaganda of Nazi Germany, in the censorship offices of the Soviet Union, and more than once, the choices of American leaders at home. Remember the newsstand in 1898 that I had you imagine walking by? The biggest words on the page from Hearst's New York Journal. Destruction of Warship Maine was the work of an enemy. No official investigation had reached that conclusion, but the headline gave readers certainty that there was a villain, a cause, a reason for outrage, and a common enemy. And all of that sells papers. Hearst's Genius was to turn circulation into a spectacle. Human interest dramas, crusades against corruption, even invented details when the truth wasn't vivid enough. The formula was simple and powerful. Frame the story as urgent and moral right. These stories become a morality test, a character test. Elevate the hero or a villain. Use striking images and repeat that frame across the syndicate until it sounds like consensus. Hearst wanted to move readers, and moving readers meant moving nations. In the example above, his coverage helped steer public opinion towards supporting the Spanish American war. And he cultivated a reputation as the man who could swing both polis, swing politics with his ink and his paper. Hearst was not a dictator. He was a businessman chasing circulation and clout. An incredibly selfish person who did not have a concern about how his journalism impacted people. But his model showed how media could bypass nuance, harness emotion and shape what millions of people believe. That's really the foundation of it. Not too much later, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used these same dynamics and welded them into state power. The Nazis didn't merely court the press, they seized it. Within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933, Germany had a ministry of public enlightenment and propaganda. Its job was saturation. Newspapers, radio, theater, film and even school textbooks carried the same line. Goebbels understood that the emotional pull of Hearst was the the really important dynamic. But instead of selling papers, the Nazi machine sold an entire worldview. Radio was the crown jewel. Cheap receivers were mass distributed so that the Fuhrer's voice could be heard in every home. Film projected myths of national destiny and racial superiority. Newspapers printed endless stories framing Jews as corrupting parasite. Repetition was relentless, designed not to inform, but to condition. And there's a curious footnote. Hearst himself met Hitler in 1934. Reports agree that Hearst and Marion Davis sat down with him. And for a time, Hearst's papers ran sympathetic coverage of German's quote, orderly revival. But the later 1930s, Hearst's outlets turned sharply against Nazi brutality. But the flirtation shows the danger. When a publisher is drawn to spectacle and access, they can amplify propaganda without realizing it. Though I think in Hearst's case, he did know. So if Hearst built a circus, Hitler built a prison. They both used emotion as the hook, but radically different ends. Hearst chased attention, Hitler enforced obedience and turning our attention east. Under this, the czars of pre Soviet Russia. Media control was older and clunkier, but still effective in its own way. Newspapers required prior approval. Censors read penciled whole articles and the secret police, the Okrana, infiltrated editorial offices. Freedom of the press Wasn't a right, it was a permission slip withdrawn at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. And when the Bolsheviks seized power, they inherited that instinct for control, but gave it a revolutionary purpose. Lenin declared that the press was a weapon of class struggle. The state organized agitprop departments, literally agitation and prop and propaganda used ideology fused with art, posters, theater and newspapers to sell their propaganda. Mobile trains with printing presses rolled into villages to spread the message. Later came the Glavlit and the Censorship bureau that decided what could be published and even rationed paper supplies. The goal wasn't to win arguments, but to erase alternatives. Remember that history is written by the victor. History would look a lot differently if Hitler had won. Where Hearst competed in a free market and Hitler crushed descent through terror, the Soviets built a bureaucratic machine that institutionalized propaganda as daily governance. Three systems, three styles. Hearst commercialized attention, Hitler weaponized it, and the Soviets turned it into a bureaucracy. It's tempting to think that it could never happen here. I see that online a lot. But in 1917, when Woodrow Wilson brought America into World War I, the government formed the Committee on Public Information, or the cpi, or Creel Committee, after its chairman George Creel. The US was a democracy mobilizing for war. But the methods are striking. The CPI produced posters and films, coordinated with newspapers and dispatched four minute men to deliver pep talks between reels at the movies. They framed the war as a moral crusade for democracy, vilified anyone who dissented as unpatriotic, and encouraged communities to police their own speech. How familiar does that feel? And if you saw. Recently, the U.S. department of labor released a slew of posters that are almost identical to Nazi propaganda posters. It's all burly sharp, jawlined, only white men, very a la 30s, 40s, 50s, very similar in style to the propaganda that was used to keep women in their homes when they needed to drive women out of the workforce from the war and back into the home. So the US uses the CPI to nudge citizens into the Spanish American War. And if you disagree, well, you must hate America. Sound familiar? They didn't. We didn't use secret police. We didn't use concentration camps. Yet. But the architecture. The architecture was unmistakable. A central script. Repeat it over and over and over. Appeal to emotion. You want to be loyal to your country, don't you? You want to be a patriot, don't you? You want to be a good and moral person, don't you? And it left a legacy. Many journalists later admitted that the CPI blurred the line between news and national Advertising. It showed how quickly a free society could build its own propaganda machine when it felt the stakes were too high. Across these example, the constants are emotion, reputation, reputation, repetition and the control of distribution. Change the medium, like whatever medium you want to put in there. Paper, radio, film, social media. The effect is the same. Control, emotion, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and control who gets to see it. Control distribution. What Hearst mastered for profit, Hitler and Goebbels weaponized for power and the Soviets embedded to control government. Even in this country, the government has sometimes borrowed the same toolkit when the need seemed urgent enough. We see that with the cpi. And nothing shows more of these old tricks and how current they are than what's happening now with the Trump administration. Strikes on the alleged narco terrorist boats off of Venezuela. In September of 2025, the US carried multiple strikes on small vessels it claimed were smuggling drugs from Venezuela. The first killed 11 men. Two later strikes killed three more apiece. The administration released drone footage. They seem to have kind of a fetish for snuff films. There's been a lot of disturbing things just willy nilly being shared on the Instagram of the White House. And they insisted that the targets were narco terrorists and spoke of bags spilled all over the ocean. And then came Trump's address to the UN General Assembly. He framed these actions as righteous and existential. Traffickers he warned, would be blown out of existence if they tried to poison Americans. He cast the strikes not as law enforcement, but as the defense of a nation, tying them to patriotism and survival. So let's look at the playbook. The first is the framing. This stark language. Narco terrorists poisoning Americans. You've created this frame of an immediate deadly threat, repetition. The message bounces from the press briefings with Caroline Levitt to social media to the UN floor. And then imagery is proof. Explosions and burning holes serve as this kind of self contained argument. See, there was this immediate threat and we took care of it. And then the last piece is controlling the narrative. To question the strikes is to implicitly side with criminals or weaken Americans. But the problem is most of these people in these boats were citizens. None of them had been convicted of a crime, none of them had been arrested. There was no evidence given that these were anything other than fishermen. And critics have already raised the questions of were these acts legal under international law? The UN doesn't think so. Were the victims truly drug traffickers? We have evidence that they were simply innocent Venezuelans. Or is the story ahead of the evidence? In short, Trump's framing is A live demonstration of Hearst's tricks. When a leader stages military action as moral theater before the facts are settled, we're not watching politics, we're watching propaganda in real time. So here's the thread. Hearst showed how to monetize attention. Hitler and Goebbels showed how to weaponize it. The Soviets showed how to institutionalize it, and the Creole committee. And now the Trump administration showed America, Showed America that they can build a propaganda machine whenever they want to. The tools aren't new and there seems to be another five alarm fire every single day. Which means the most important question for us to ask as consumers is when I feel outrage or fear surging from a story, who benefits from my outrage and fear and why? Hearst understood that emotion could sell more than headlines. It could sell identities. He didn't just teach Americans what to fear and whom to blame. He taught them what to want, how to look and who to be. And nowhere was that more visible than how his empire portrayed women from the front pages of the silver screen. His paper sold a vision of femininity designed to comfort men, sell products and keep cultural storylines a little bit tidier. If you want to see how male run media machine scripts, womanhood, start with the living arrangement. Publicly, William Randolph Hearst stayed married to Millicent Hearst, the respectable philanthropic face of the brand, frequenting charity balls and involved in the free milk fund for babies. Privately in California, though, he lived with Marion Davies, the actress who was also his longtime romantic partner. In Hearst's mind, this was not scandalous. It was control and manipulation. It was two roles feeding one in one image. Virtue at one side, glamour on the other. With both streams flowing back into his media empire, you can watch the control show up on screen in the lights of old Broadway. In 1925, trade notes say that 50 retakes were ordered to Hearst and Davies satisfaction, meaning image management, compliance. By contrast, in a comedic role in Show People, the Library of Congress praises Davies deft touch for light comedy translation. When Hearst tightens the brand control, the production grinds through excessive yells of cut and action. Please redo it. Do the scene again. When he backs off his. His woman, Marianne Davies is allowed to shine. She's allowed to be in her spotlight. When his control is removed after the studio lights, the home becomes the stage. Hearst magazines taught the cues. Good Housekeeping, again controlled by Hearst, was a masterclass in authority with a smile. Its institute tested products and bestowed Good Housekeeping seal so that they could sell them. They even came with a two year limited warranty. If the product flopped the magazine promised a refund or replacement. This could be called authority laundering, turning buying into the right vacuum. Proof that you're the right kind of woman. This keeping up with the Joneses idea. This, these pictures of you want to be a good wife. Well, this is what your house needs to look like. And this is what you need to look like. And these are all the things that you need to buy to be the right kind of woman. You don't want to be the wrong kind of woman, do you? In 1952, the magazine stopped taking cigarette ads years before the Surgeon General's warning, drawing a bright line about what a good home should allow. This magazine is now subtly dictating morality to women. Health, decency and domestic duty were all braided together. Soft power by trust. You trust me, don't you? I just want what's best for you. And of course, as a man, I know what's best for you. Taste was taught to house Beautiful gave readers the look of the ideal post war home. Serene rooms, centered family, modern but not cold. Under editor Elizabeth Gordon, the magazine mounted a splashy two issue package in 1960 on Shibui Japanese restraint and harmony and even took it on tour. Aesthetics doubled as a social script. And this is how a well ordered home and the woman running it should appear. Right, ladies? Yes, you have to take care of the home. Yes, you have to be on call 24 7. Yes, you have to take care of the kids. But you need to look perfect and so does your house. And newspapers, women's pages think recipes, etiquette, decor sat shoulder to shoulder with appliances and grocery ads because that's what women really want. Media historians called it the bargain of ad subsidized content service stories for and about women that normalize a buying and homemaking role. These were specifically built to groom women into consumerism and into buying into a role that the male system had decided they were fit for. It wasn't a memo from hq. It was a business model that made gendered ideal feel normal. Remember that the women working in the factories in World War II had autonomy. They had external jobs. For the first time. They had to create a way to make women buy into this idea of subjugation and before. Calm down, bring your blood pressure down. I'm not saying that being a stay at home mom or a housewife is subjugation. It is when it's your only option. It is when you're told that if you don't do that you're bad. Because there is no situation, especially this time in the United States. When women couldn't have bank accounts, they couldn't own property, you couldn't rent your own apartment without a male signature. There is no way to create those relationships where only one person has leadership, only one person has a voice, only one person has power, only one person has money. Only one person gets to run for office functionally and say that's equal. It's not. The subjugation is not the role. The subjugation is the lack of choice. And they needed women to buy in and this is how they packaged it. Hearst was a pivotal role in selling this to women. Women who were also so hyped up on different types of drugs to get through what they were living in and the unhappiness most of them felt that it was advertised in these magazines as Mommy's little helpers. Uppers to get through the day and then downers to go to sleep at night. Women edited these sections, wrote the service pieces and read them. But the agenda was set by publishers, advertisers and incentives of the page, which were all controlled by men. When the narrative needed a loudspeaker, Hearst had Luella Parsons. Her columns syndicated across the chain, could bless or bury a carrier. Mid century accounts with rival he to Hopper put their combined reach into the tens of millions. Not just friendly advice and information, but norm setting about which versions of femininity get rewarded and which are frowned upon. This is where we get so much of the idea of this is what a real woman looks like, this is what a real woman wears, who gets to decide that femininity is an energy that every human on the planet has and it's expressed differently. But much of these norms were set by these papers controlled by men who wanted an image that was beneficial to them. And they were able to get women not just to work for them, but to get millions of women to buy in by using comparison, consumerism and this idea of being othered or outcasted if they didn't do those things things. So if you swap newsprint for feeds, the logic barely changes. About 1 in 5 U.S. adults say they regularly get their news from influencers. I'm one of them and it's my job to search these stories, read the articles, follow up with information because of that. And in 2025, social media overtook TV as a top news route in the U.S. one megaphone became millions. But the power to normalize how women should live and vote remains the same. We see that in red pill culture all the time. I can't tell you how many videos I see every day telling me, well, real women, you know, want to get married and have kids by 25. I've never wanted kids. I'm kind of on the fence about marriage, to be honest. I see so many videos telling me that because I have tattoos, because I have a nose ring, because I have two colors in my hair, because I work for myself, that I'm not a real woman. It's insanity. Platforms also write our dress code. Strange men on the Internet who have never known the touch of a woman are telling women how they should and should not dress. YouTube says the comment with highly sexualized themes isn't suitable for ads. Instagram restricts monetization of sexual or suggestive content creators learn fast, fit the brand or lose the oxygen. The old respectable edit is now a monetization switch. And I want to say, I'm not saying that we should have highly sexualized themes on social media. I don't. But the difference of I one time got reported for, quote, nudity on TikTok. I was wearing a sweater like I was in sweats. Someone didn't like the video, reported me. My video got taken down. I receive rape and death threats all the time. And every time I report those comments, Instagram comes back to me. It doesn't violate our community standards. I see men online joking about pedophilia all the time never violates community standards. That's what I'm pointing out here. They are legislating a moral dress code for women while allowing men to actually talk about human trafficking in a jovial way. And it's not a problem. That's the distinction. And then there's the trend. The trend. The trad wife aesthetic reporting shows that these accounts package homemaking, modesty, submission and natural living. Quote, natural with warm visuals, aprons, sourdough pastoral light, while also carrying anti feminist messaging about women's work and place. Interestingly, a Media Matters test found that interacting with TradWife video seeded feeds with far right conspiracy content at a high clip, indicating that the warm veneer is an on ramp. When we've talked about this on this show before, TradWife content is part of the of the right wing pipeline. And here's the other thing. This, this idea that they sell women of, this is your natural role, right? They're like, feminism isn't natural. If something is natural, you don't have to use force reminders and violence to force someone to do it. If you let people do what naturally comes to them, they do it what naturally. And this is an abstract conservative youth culture is actively platforming the lifestyle as politics by other means. The Washington Post's MAGA and Single Girl Dispatched from Turning Point USA's Young Women's Leadership Summit shows the formula. Wellness, modest fashion, ethics, early marriage and motherhood as a civic virtue. Save the nation, be a good woman, a tasteful woman. What if you're not married by 30? What's wrong with you? Are you a and then influencers translating this ideology into daily routines is there's nothing wrong, obviously. I worked in Fitness for 15 years. I've lost £90 myself. Nothing wrong with wellness and modest fashion if that's what makes you feel empowered. There's nothing wrong with young marriage if that's what you want and you're ready for it. There's nothing wrong with motherhood, stay at home motherhood. None of those things are bad. It's when you create a norm and then inflict it on people by force that it becomes a problem. So here's the through line. In both of these eras, a male dominated agenda shaped the ideal. And back then with magazine testing, institutes, women's pages, advice columns, now with platforms, policies, feeds and creators. And you'll notice you don't really see a lot of older tradwives. They seem to change their thinking a bit before they hit their 40s because it's not real, it's an illusion. Trad wives are lying to you because while they're telling young women you need to get married and have as many kids as possible and don't work, your husband needs to provide for you. These women are making millions of dollars on these platforms. And one of them, I'm not going to say her name because I don't want to air her private business, but she has to get a divorce for good reasons. She has enough money to save herself, sustain herself, take care of her children. And she made that money off of telling young women not to do that very thing is hypocrisy in its highest order. Again, none of those roles are bad. Not at all. It's when you take away choice and you take away resources and you take away information and you demonize anyone who chooses differently. And in both of these eras, women buy in, made it powerful editors, home economists, readers. And now again women are contributing to this problem of how women are treating and subjugating because women are willing to buy in and disproportionately so white women, because white women have convinced themselves that the proximity to power, even if it is to abuse and convince other women to submit and be subjugated and Put their dreams on the shelf and give up their own ambitions. Always buy in. There's always some of them. There's a reason that the Trump administration has strategically placed women in positions of authority because it helps the spoonful of poison go down. Other women see it and say, oh, well, we are represented. That's just. I guess maybe that's just not my role. They're telling me I'm not supposed to do that. The product is steady. Make a traditional family order feel natural and aspirational, then let the politics ride inside it again, whatever someone's natural instinct is, because some women are just the most incredibly natural mothers. It's gonna happen for people. It's not. It becomes something abusive. It becomes something that creates harm in their lives. It becomes something where they end up in abusive marriages. That's why choice matters, instead of something being curated and sold to us on a shelf. That kind of control over narrative raises a harder question. So what happens to the idea of a free press when one man like Hearst can decide which truth gets airtime? Hearst's reach blurred the line between journalism and propaganda because he had so much reach, a line that democracy really depends on. We have to be able to get the information. And the question of who gets to define the truth is the center of every newsroom, every platform, and every post. And when we talk about freedom of the press, we're usually thinking of the First Amendment. That short sentence, congress shall make no law. Abridging the freedom of speech or of the press is supposed to guarantee that no one in power can muzzle journalists or block information. It is a cornerstone of American democracy. And when James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights, he knew this to be the most important thing. It's why he put it first, the reason freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion are all in the same bill, the same article of that Bill of Rights is because it's so important. But in practice, that freedom has always been contested. In the early 20th century, state governments tried to shutter newspapers they considered malicious or scandalous. It took the supreme court in near versus Minnesota in 1931 to strike that down and make clear that prior restraint, which is, I. E. Stopping speech before it's published, was unconstitutional except in the most extreme cases. That principle created the legal space where publishers like William Randolph Hearst could thrive. And thrive he did. Hearst insisted that the First Amendment guaranteed his right to publish anything he wanted. He was not bound by any law to tell the truth. He wrapped himself in a mantle of this is my free speech, but only when it served him. Inside his empire of newspapers, magazines and newsreels, dissenting voices found little room to breathe. Critics were silenced, advertisers were pressured, and coverage was shaped to fit his views. The contradiction is striking. The Constitution shielded Hearst from the government censorship, but his private power meant that he could act as a censor himself and squash any dissenting opinion of his of against him, whether it was in his organization or outside of it. Freedom of the press in Hearst's hands often meant freedom for one man's voice to dominate the others and be drowned out. Hearst's playbook didn't vanish with him. Over and over, the press faced new tests. When the New York Times and the Washington Post began publishing The Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of classified Defense Department history on America's involvement in Vietnam, the Nixon administration tried to slam the brakes. Officials argued that the leaks endangered national security. Of course they did, and sought court orders to stop further publication. For the first time in American history, the federal government attempted to impose a blanket ban on major newspapers. These were very high stakes. If the government won this argument, future reporting on classified information could have been frozen before it ever reached the public. But in New York Times Company v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government hadn't met the heavy burden needed to justify prior restraint. The court reaffirmed that a free press must be able to publish even when stories embarrass those in power. The decision didn't erase every tension between national security and transparency, but it cemented a defining principle that in a democracy, the government's instinct to hide must always be weighed against the public's right to know. For nearly four decades, broadcasters operated under a simple rule known as the Fairness Doctrine. If you use the public airwaves to discuss a controversial issue, you had to represent opposing viewpoints. It wasn't perfect, and it didn't apply to newspapers or cable. But it created a baseline of expectation, created decorum, that audiences would at least hear more than one opinion. That changed in 1987, when the Reagan era FCC scrapped the rule, arguing that it chilled free speech rather than encouraged it. Giving both sides of an issue apparently is against free speech. The doctrine was formally deleted from the Code of federal regulations in 2011. The repeal didn't just open the floodgates for opinionated radio, it changed the tone of American politics. And Reagan did this on purpose. This because the underhanded newsletter campaigns that were already being handled by the new Moral Majority, the new far right, the Paul Weyrich and the Heritage foundation did not follow the Fairness Doctrine. They did not give both sides of the issue. They were intentionally doing Hearst style headlines to be able to bring in more campaign money, campaign money that they were very rarely actually spending on elected officials or campaigns. Most of it they were pocketing. Talk radio hosts like you've heard him before. Rush Limbaugh and later partisan cable networks found that they could command loyalty by feeding listeners only what confirmed their worldview, telling you only what you want to hear, only what confirms your worldview, nothing to the contrary. And what began as a deregulation, which was the argument they made, soon shaped the public square, paving the way for today's hyper polarized media climate, where balance is a matter kind of, of branding, not, not broadcasting. After the September 11 attacks, the balance between press freedom and national security tilted sharply towards secrecy. The Bush administration framed leaking as a threat to national defense. And the Obama administration carried that stance even further. As I record this, Dick Cheney died three days ago. And how much harm and impact from Cheney and the Bush administration because of their lies, because of their secrecy that put all of us in danger, that put our military members in danger, because they were not held to account, and because the press freedom dial turned towards government secrecy rather than the public's right to know. Relying on the 1917 Espionage Act, a law written for wartime spies, not whistleblowers, federal prosecutors charged more people for leaking to journalists than all of the previous presidents combined. They charged more people, more whistleblowers, with leaking information than all of the previous presidents combined. Reporters covering classified programs suddenly found themselves under scrutiny, and potential sources grew wary of answering the phone. Of course they would. In 2013, the Department of Justice secretly seized two months of phone records from the Associated Press reporters and editors while investigating a national security leak. The AP's top editor called it a massive and unprecedented intrusion, warning that it would chill confidential reporting across the country. It was a sobering reminder that the press freedom can be weakened not just by censorship, but by surveillance, intimidation and fear. We see this now, all these lawsuits from the Trump administration against news sources, not because they lied, not because they misrepresented information, but simply because they said something he didn't like. More recently, Donald Trump took the Hearst paradox to the digital age. He claimed his own right to say anything on television, rallies, and especially on Twitter and now Truth Social. But when the press criticized him, he said, fake news, fake news. And he just kept screaming it until it became a hashtag and he branded journalism journalists as enemies of the people. His administration threatened to revoke broadcast licenses, barred certain Reporters from White House events and encouraged lawsuits aimed at draining the news organization's resources. Do what you can to threaten them so that they obey in advance. His allies even openly called for overturning New York Times vs. Sullivan, the landmark case that protects journalists from ruinous libel suits unless the plain can prove actual malice. Meanwhile, fragile prosecutors secretly obtained journalists phone and email records in leak investigations, bypassing safeguards meant to protect the press. These actions didn't repeal the First Amendment, but they probed its weak points, creating a climate of intimidation and mistrust. And this isn't about reporters or newspapers. Freedom of the press is your right. It's your right to know what's happening in your community, in your country and your world. It is your right to disclosure. We as Americans have a right to know who is in the Epstein files. Freedom of the press isn't just about printing the press. It's about your access to the press. When that freedom is weakened, corruption hides, lies spread unchecked, power escapes accountability and democracy erodes. Hearst's empire shows us that one man can bend the press freedom to his own weapons. And the Trump era shows us that the same tactics can work online. And both stories remind us of the same truth. That the First Amendment is not, not self executing. It survives only if we defend it. And that's why it's also really important to make sure you're not censoring yourself out of fear, that you're not censoring yourself because of the climate. If you are censoring yourself in advance, they are already winning. That's the warning that's built into Hurst's legacy. A fight for a free press never ever ends. And here's the thing, that line didn't stay blurred by accident. This, this idea of, of blurring truth and story. Modern right wing media inherited Hearst's playbook. Almost pay for pay, page for page, fear over fact, loyalty over logic, and outrageous entertainment. And then again, the names have changed, but the formula hasn't. Hearst papers promise it. Drama, villains, heroes wrapped in a single headline. A story. It's juicy, right? I get it. Dangerous though. The formula wasn't about selling newspapers. Well, it wasn't just about selling newspapers. He definitely wanted a lot of money. He had to keep up his habits. But it was about shaping public life. Historians still argue about how much of his coverage of Cuba and Spain pushed the US into the war of 1898. But what's clear here is that Hearst pioneered a model where politics and entertainment fused, where outreach kept readers hooked, where the press claimed Power to mobilize masses at will. That model didn't vanish when Hearst waned in the 1930s. Father Charles Coughlin picked up the same playbook on the radio. He combined grievance with spectacle and broadcasting to tens of millions of listeners every week. He would name scapegoats. Bankers, immigrants, communists. Sound familiar? These are the people that you're supposed to blame. It was mass media as an emotional performance and it gave people someone to blame for their suffering. By mid century, other figures carried the torch. Robert McCormick at Chicago Tribune built an empire of isolationists anti Roosevelt coverage. And then came the Cold War and the Red scares where newspapers and broadcast outlets framed communists as internal fifth column. The formula of suspicion and scapegoating was familiar. Hearst had done it before and it's been adopted ever since in the 1950s. And honestly, it's older than that. We talked about this in the witch trials in the 1950s. Movement conservatives built their own press. Human events launched in 1944. National Review followed in 1955. William F. Buckley Jr. Gave conservatism a sophisticated voice. But he also also leaned on the same idea that mainstream media was untrustworthy and hostile. Come to me. Only I have the truth. This was the start of the explicit counter press identity, sharpening the divide between their news and our news. The Nixon era turned that divide into open warfare. Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked television networks as nattering nabobs of negativism. Which is one of the most amazing phrases I've ever read or written by the way. Nattering nabobs of negativism, accusing them of bias against the middle Americans. His speech sounded a lot like what we hear today. Claims that elites in newsrooms look down on ordinary people and that the only alternative, only the alternative outlets tell the truth. Meanwhile, those same elites are the one profiting off policy change. Regulation shaped what came next. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters in Red lion versus the fcc. That meant radio and TV had to give balanced coverage of controversial issues. But in 1974, the court struck down forced replies for newspapers in Miami Herald vs Tornillo. This split set the stage for a big change in the 1980s. When the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, talk radio exploded. Of course it did. You didn't have to. You didn't have to share different opinions. You didn't have to give a balanced informational review anymore. Right wing figures filled the airwaves, free to hammer on one side of the political spectrum without offering any balance. By the 1990s cable news entered the story. Roger Ailes, who had crafted Nixon's media Strategy back in 1968, launched Fox News in 1996. Yes, it was launched by the guy who did Nixon's media strategy. Fox wasn't just another channel. Studies show that at places where Fox was added to the cable lineups, Republican vote share rose measurably. They had a direct impact on how people would vote. And it's not had a great reputation since its founding. It was the Hearst model scaled up with new technology, partisan framing, emotional drama, crusades against the elites while they write tax law that profits the elites, and constant calls to action. You know everyone's under attack where everything's a danger. The Internet amplified it further. Matt Drudge's website broke the Clinton Lewinsky scandal in 1998, proving that online platforms could set the agenda outside of traditional newsroom. Then came Breitbart, especially under Steve Bannon, pumping out populist nationalist narratives that helped fuel Donald Trump's rise. He's a key figure, the same Steve Bannon that just a couple days ago said we have to win the midterms because if we don't, we're going to prison. He knows he's breaking the law. He doesn't care. By 2016, researchers mapped an online ecosystem where right wing sites were tightly interconnected with relatively insulated spreading stories at high velocity with little correction. Who's going to keep them accountable? That brings us to the present. After the 2020 election, false claims of voter fraud spread against across Fox, Newsmax and OANN and were amplified on social media. The result wasn't just a political polarization. As we learned in our episode with Timothy Hafey, this actually led to the January 6th attack, but it also led to a billion dollar disinformation lawsuit. In 2023, Fox settled with Domillion Voting Systems for 787 because they lied on purpose. And during discovery, it was discovered that they knew they were lying and they did it anyway. By the way, those same Dominion Voting systems have now been purchased by a Republican voter representative, election representative, who is also an election denier. He now owns the machines. In 2025, Newsmax agreed to a $67 million settlement and Smartmatic Reach deals with several outlets. While its case against Fox is still ongoing, these lawsuits expose the inner workings of how disinformation became programming. Internal messages showed hosts and executives knew the claims were false, but they feared losing the audience if they told the truth. So what's the through line from Hearst to today's Right wing media is not that Hurst invented conservative talk radio. Hearst would often waffle back and forth. Sometimes he would be very progressive around things like women's rights. And as he got older, he was more conservative. Hearst was really an opportunist. It was really about what was most efficient for him at the time. But those, his practices, his policies have been very efficiently and effectively repackaged in a lot of our media today. He proved that the business model works and that it could sell and it could buy power. It's not just giving you money, it's giving you power and influence. Father Coughlin used it on the radio. Agnew turned it against TV networks. Talk radio exploited deregulation. Fox mastered it on cable. Breitbart supercharged it online. And now, now a whole network doubles down. Even in the face of billion dollar settlements, even when they're proven to be liars, they just continue to double down. And the story is just continuing and it's constantly being reinvented, it's being redressed, rebranded. And without a doubt, fear has always been the glue. Once you realize that outrage and belonging can be sold in the same package, you don't need new villains, you need new headlines. The core of MAGA, and really any extremist ideology is belonging to convincing people that you're their only hope, you're the only safe space, you're their only community. That is a great way to keep people trapped. A lot of people who find themselves in fundamentalist communities, and I'll use the example of the Church, because that's where I came from, is that when you leave those systems, you know you're losing your whole community. So if they can sell you, whether it's a religion or a political view or those things married together, and they can tell you that if you just do this, you'll belong. Man, that's, that's a powerful way to keep people stuck. And you can see that this formula at work, like in every moral panic, they're taking the Christ out of Christmas, they're attacking us. Us, the in group that I'm a part of, because I've bought into this system, whatever it is. From the red scares to today's culture wars, the same rhythm repeats. Invent an enemy, amplify the fear, and then claim to be the one who can save the country from. And let's talk about the red scares. Hearst brand of yellow journalism trained readers to expect drama and look for enemies. After President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, his headlines made it sound like anarchists were hiding in every corner when workers went on strike. Hearst papers cast union leaders as dangerous agitators hidden during this red summer of 1919 when riots and racial violence tore through American cities. His crime heavy coverage pushed readers to link unremassed with immigrants, people of color and radicals. It wasn't reporting, it was storytelling with a purpose. He had his own racially biased beliefs and he was teaching people what he wanted them to believe. And he was also teaching people that dissent was danger. So by the time World War I ended, the people were primed. When the government started locking up critics, it didn't feel shocking. When Joseph McCarthy started throwing people in prison or accusing people of being part of an espionage for Russia, they didn't. That just wasn't shocking to them or for the Soviet Union. I should correct that. For the Soviet Union, it felt like the script they'd been reading in the papers. This is it. All the things that have been predicted are just coming to life for them. And this is exactly what we saw in the first Red Scare. In my Red Scare episode, I walked through how fear of Bolshevism and anarchists turned in raids, arrest, deportations. The Wilson administration passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Eugene V. Debs, who would run for president five times, went to prison for a speech. Then came the Palmer raids. Federal agents smashing into union halls, arresting thousands of people, deporting hundreds of people without due process. Sound familiar? And the press, Hearst included, were right there fueling the fire. Immigrant radicals were the first targets. Always Italian anarchists, Eastern European Jews, non citizens loosely connected somehow to radical journalism. Many were arrested just for membership or for reading a certain publication. During the Palmer raid, some immigrants were deported on suspicion with weak evidence while many US citizens were swept in by mistake. There was also pushback. People like Louis F. Post, acting Secretary of Labor reviewed thousands of cases and dismissed many arrest warrants. He protested the way arrests were handled, sometimes without warrants, with abusive interrogation and violence. But by then the atmosphere was charged. Sacco and Van Setti's trial were. Two Italian immigrants were accused with very dubious evidence of murder became a symbol of how fear of quote, radicals could warp justice. Now we fast forward to the Cold War. This is where Joe McCarthy steps onto the stage waving the famous list of communists in the State Department. A list that was a blank piece of paper. Remember in the episode when I talked about how spectacle mattered more than facts? McCarthy thrived on the headline, not the evidence. The evidence was never there. All the people he accused, none of them were actually convicted. None of the charges Stuck. None of them were actually guilty of espionage. The vagueness was the point. It's this ominous all present threat. If anyone can be a communist, then everyone had to prove their loyalty. This makes me think of recently calling antifa terrorists. Antifa is not an organization, it's an ideology. And it's quite a statement from an administration that says that whatever is anti fascist is against their administration and is a terrorist organization. But the vagueness is the point. If you can't clearly define it and evidence doesn't matter, then anyone who says anything you don't like can be designated as antifa. And the fallout of McCarthy was devastating. We talked about it. Hollywood actors, directors, writers found themselves on blacklists. And if you haven't listened to my McCarthy episode, I highly recommend it. It's very informative to what we're seeing now. Some of those people that were demonized without evidence and were proven innocent never worked again. School teachers were interrogated about their political views and lost their jobs if they didn't cooperate. Federal employees were hauled into loyalty hearings, asked to account for books they read or groups they joined in college. People lived in fear of their neighbors informing on them. Careers ended not because of what someone did, but because of what someone whispered. We saw the same thing in the satanic panic. It wasn't just Washington either. States and local communities picked up the torch. School boards banned books. Librarians purged shelves. Churches preach loyalty to America as though loyalty to America were more important than loyalty to Christ. The paranoia was everywhere in American culture and it keeps repeating itself because of this creative fear. Create a common enemy, create a threat, get people to buy in that only you can save them. And if they're not loyal to you, well, then they hate America. And here we are. Now it's deja vu. In 2025, after Charlie Kirk's assassination, the Trump administration grabbed a hold of the same playbook. Look, officials are targeting people who criticize Kirk online, myself included. I was doxed with my personal information released. Anyone who spoke out against Kirk or refuted a talking point or debating debated him were called murderers of Charlie Kirk. People, some of whom don't live in the country, never met him in real life. Professors have been suspended for social media posts not being sympathetic enough. Non profits are under threat of investigation. HBCUs received bomb threats. Colleges that had nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. They're getting bomb threats because they're black colleges. Lawmakers are pushing new definitions of what hate speech and domestic terrorism are. Supporters call it the consequence culture, saying free speech doesn't mean freedom from accountability, but critics, they see it as cancel culture backed by state violence where the cost of speaking isn't losing followers, it's losing your job or your freedom. It's very different. Different. I believe you have the right, you know, Charlie Kirk had the right to say what he said, but people have the right to disagree with him. They had the right to debate him, they had the right to prove him wrong. And people had the right to unfollow him or have a negative opinion of him because of those very loud, often really terrible beliefs that he held. But people don't deserve to be arrested because they didn't agree with him. Columnist Jamelle Bouie was, was framed, has framed what we're now seeing as the third red scare. A great name warning that this moment isn't just more cancel culture. This is different. This is state backed surveillance, repression of speech under the guise of national security and morality. And I'll just say this point blank period, because I'm a little salty today that I do not want to hear any comment on morality from people who are openly supporting a fucking pedophile and have no issue with that list not being released. Least you don't get to say shit to any of us. But that's what they're using. That's what they're using to say, oh, how I, you're not mourning enough, you're not sad enough, you're just a terrible person. No, I, I understand that someone, someone passed away. I'm not happy it happened like that. I'm also not sad. I'm allowed to have indifference. That's not the same as being hateful. And for people like using that as their stamp of morality while they back state sanctioned violence by masked men who aren't even sworn in law officers. Give me a break. Perhaps a more apt designation against the current backdrop is the term Blue scare, as Ezra Klein offers. However, even when you look back and you trace these patterns and you see these scares, repeat, repeat, repeat, the headlines, the hearings, the hysteria, you can tell yourself that the, well, look, we got through all of those. But survival is not the same as healing and survival is not the same as is thriving. And each of these, we'll call them all red scares, but each of these red scares has left scars, careers erased, families divided, lives destroyed, mistrust in institutions and education. And now facing this third one, or you could argue fourth one, if you include satanic panic, we can't say how this ends. History doesn't promise things automatically get better. History typically the, the overall arching arc is improvement. But how long does that take? Sake? Let's remind ourselves that the reason that we ended up in the Dark Ages in the first place was because we rejected logic and science and reason in favor of dogmatic religion. And we were in the Dark Ages for hundreds of years. And honestly, that's one of my fears, is that we're headed back into that. We can't just assume it will automatically get better. The one thing it does guarantee is that fear never burns out by itself. The way that this gets better, the way that it improves, is that we challenge it. It. This is why you can't censor yourself. We have to be willing to stand up and to speak out and risk the cost because there is a cost and it's worth it. And in the past they did. The reason we got past these previous scares is because people stood up and they fought for the truth. And a lot of times it didn't come from publishers. Publishers or politicians often never does. It comes from citizens, regular, average people who said I, I have had enough. Look at the grassroots campaigns we're seeing pop up all over the country. James Talariko, Zoran Mamdani. Average people are running these campaigns to success. They are outworking big money. That's how these things change. And not everyone accepted the official story. Like let's remember that during the civil rights era, a new generation of journalists and activists took the same tools that were used to spread fear and turn them towards justice. This, instead of using it to incite fear and outrage, they used it to expose hypocrisy, confront brutality and demand that America finally live up to its own headlines, to its own autobiography that it's claimed it is. And with the civil rights movement, Hearst made for the masses brand of news that thrived on spectacle. Before this thing Hearst didn't just leave us with the Spanish American War or a string of tabloid headlines he helped cement meant a template for how Americans see, read and understand and consume news. That template news is moral theater, something that you could feel. It wasn't just about what you read, it was about what you could feel was still shaping the press 60 years later when the civil rights movement came onto the national stage. And to see how we have to bridge the gap between Hearst's turn of the century papers and the mid 20th century. Hearst again proved early that you could deliver the right kind of story. Packed with conflict, personality, imagery. You could capture attention and you could move policy. You could get politicians elected. Over the decades, his, his empire popularized sensational crime coverage, emotional photo spreads, visual journalism again rehearsed that formula over and over and over. Just repeat, repeat, Repeat. In the 1890s with a lot of. In the 1890s, he used Cuba coverage and even staged the quote, rescue of Evangelina Cisneros from a Havana jail, which was just a front page stunt that turned a single woman's story into National Theater. In 1897, Evangelina, 23 at the time, was imprisoned in Havana's casa de recalditas, which translates to the house of repentance used to reform transgressive behaviors. For trying to lure a Spanish officer into an ambush on behalf of Cuban rebels, Hearst, New York journal splashed her story across the front pages calling her the beautiful girl patriot. Remember, he's trying to stoke the Spanish American war. So this is work. This is great for him. She's beat. She's this beautiful girl patriot held captive by Spain's cruelty. When the pot. When the polite diplomacy failed, he decided to make the news himself. He sent reporter Carl Decker to Cuba to break her out of jail. Decker bribed the garb, staged a midnight escape, disguised her, smuggled her into the United States, rehearsed, then paraded her through New York as a national hero. His paper sold in the millions because of this stunt. With the nation enraptured by the tale of American daring in the face of Spanish villains, accuracy didn't matter. Emotion did. And the public outrage Hearst was able to whip up over Cisneros helped light the fuse that would lead to the Spanish American war. By the 1930s and 40s, his tabloids helped cement our true crime obsession. Hearst has impacted me this larger than life depiction of social conflict like the 1943 Zoot Suit Riot riots in Los Angeles where the US Navy personnel in their uniforms roamed through the streets carrying sticks, targeting the Hispanic population wearing colorful zoot suits which were a protest to racism and conformity. How like it's. It's insane how we've been able to see this carry through all of these different instances. Like this is an instance where the U. S. Military is roaming the streets attacking Hispanic people who are protesting racism. It's so unironically on the nose. And to be sure, these hearse like practices bled directly of course into television and Internet and even our national debates. The training came into play as early as 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas when nine black students attempt to integrate at a central high school. The showdown with the Arkansas governor and the angry white mob was impossible to ignore. Cameras rolled, newspapers filled their front pages and suddenly a local fight was a national crisis. Eisenhower ended up sending the 101st Airborne Division to enforce integration. The lesson was clear images of defiance and violence could move the federal government itself. So one of the beautiful things that comes out of this knowledge that if you can connect to people's emotions, you can affect change in the civil rights movement had a positive impact of if we can show defiance, if we can show courage, if we can show harm, we can show the fights we can show. You know, I think of that, that very famous image where the police officer has the German shepherd and it's lunging and its mouth's open, its teeth and it's lunging at this black man. Such a powerful image of cruelty. You can't look at that image and not think, oh my God, like this officer has to be stopped. What is this officer doing? This man is just standing there. This man is peaceful. Those images were able to shape policy of the civil rights movement. So by the mid-1950s, activists understood that moral appeals alone wouldn't break through. You couldn't just go to the white church and say, hey, we need your help to make sure that we can vote fairly and that the police treat us fairly. The white people didn't give a shit because most of them agreed with the racist practices. Or at very least they didn't want to push against it because it didn't hurt them. Them, they didn't, they didn't want their friends to look at them weird, whatever their excuse was. But using pictures, using this idea of emotion, pictures really changed the front. One of the earliest and most searing examples of this is Emmett Till. In 1955, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that an open casket so the world could see what had been done to her murdered 14 year old son. What a brave woman. Jet magazine published the photographs and suddenly the brutality of Jim Crow was staring readers in the face. It was a picture you couldn't look away now. You couldn't pretend it wasn't there. Those images shocked black communities across the country. But they laid the groundwork for a broader national reckoning. The black press carried much of this weight. For decades, outlets like the Chicago Defender, Ebony and JET had been publishing stories that white owned newspapers ignored or buried, often intentionally. They created a counter public telling stories of everyday dignity and spectacular injustice alike. Like by the 1960s, the mainstream press had little choice but to follow their lead because the mainstream was being held to account for their hypocrisy of not covering these stories. Those images, the images and the narrative that accompanied them were just too powerful. And once television became the dominant medium, Hearst logic deepened. It got even because now it's all images. It's all images. News producers knew that what moved audiences wasn't policy nuance. It wasn't data, it wasn't stats. It was visual. Clash of marchers and police and Birmingham in 1963 made this painfully clear. Charles moore's photograph of children blasted by fire hoses and attacked by dogs ran in life magazine, and the nation recoiled. It caused a visceral emotional response in people. Two years later, TV cameras captured bloody Sunday in selma. Americans watched state troopers beat peaceful marchers on the Edmund pettus bridge. And within days, president johnson was quoting we shall overcome to congress pushing through the voting rights act, the same voting rights act that is under attack right now that is about to be essentially dismantled. And of course, the sensational impulse does cut both ways. Southern newspapers, often openly segregationist, Frame the movement as the work of, quote, outside agitators and communist subversive sound. That sound sound familiar? It was the same can again, same media playbook. Cast your enemies as a menace, Reduce complexity to an easy headline and a singular scapegoat. Only now it was being turned against civil rights. Martin luther king answered that charge directly in his letter from birmingham jail, Pointing out that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. As the decade wore on, the protest dynamic grew more complicated. Nonviolent marches met with violent repression and often generated sympathy. Remember when you protest and we see an increase in state violence, which we will. It will continue to increase. Remember that one of the powers of the civil rights movement was that it was all these nonviolent marches, when they were met with this angry, vitriolic response, that was what made them more powerful. That was what generated. I know, and I say that to say some people are like, oh, what is the point of these, you know, these peaceful marches? Is it really going to do a thing? It does. It does. It doesn't mean we sit down and we take abuse. But they do matter, because these people showing up over and over and over and over and over peacefully, loving their community, loving their neighbors, Showing up even when it was scary, Showing up despite the risk was the. Was the fuel that changed everything. And when the protests turned into uprisings or riots, as they did in Watts in 1965 or Detroit in 1967, the images cut the other way. That though viewers saw flames and looting, the narrative shifted to enforcing law and order. Right. We see that with the. With the George floyd protests. As soon as something Happens even though people there have every right to be angry. As soon as there's a fire, oh, it's looting. We gotta enforce law and order now. Political scientists like Omar Wassau have now shown this shift in coverage helped move white voters toward the Republican Party in 1968. It was the images from the right coming in, taking pictures of any kind of uprising or riot, even though the overwhelming majority of protests in the civil rights movement were peaceful, just like they were in the Black Lives Matter movement, just like they were with George Floyd. But getting those few pictures of isolated incidents helped shift white voters toward the Republican Party in 1968, and the federal government noticed the problem. The 1968 Kerner Commission concluded that media coverage was often too sensational, exaggerated and shallow, focusing on violence while failing to cover the deeper realities of black life in America. How true. So when we look back, it's not too much to say that the civil rights movement lived inside the house that Hearst built. In both directions, powerful images inspiring people to act, inspiring people to fight for justice, and powerful images of isolated incidents to discredit an entire movement. The fight for justice relied on a news culture that craved spectacle. We were hungry for it at that time, still are. That culture amplified the struggle in ways that changed laws, changed politics, changed heart, but also pushed certain groups into extremism. Again, it depended on what picture you saw, what picture got pushed to you, what rhetoric got pushed to you. What could they get you to get angry about? Remember the big question with propaganda. If this is making me feel outrage and fear, who benefits and profits from my outrage and fear? By then, Hearst himself had become more a symbol than a man. He was immortalized and then condemned in Citizen Kane. Orson Welles didn't just make a movie. He held up a mirror. It's such an interesting intersection of Hearst's life and media, and what it reflected was the American dream turned into empire and the loneliness behind it. When Orson Welles released Citizen Kane In 1941, people were stunned not just by the movie's style itself. It's on the top of all lists of the best movies ever made. It's typically number one. It was bold camera angles, fractured storytelling. But by its target. Orson Welles chose one of the most powerful humans in the country and said, I've got your number. Everyone knew that Charles Foster Kane was William Randolph Hearst. And it was a very thin disguise, like, very, very thin. It's just like everyone knows that Logan Roy in succession is Rupert Murdoch. The movie walks us through Kane's life. The poor boy who inherits A fortune young man who buys a newspaper, promises to give readers an honest press. The publisher, who builds a media empire big enough to launch him into politics. He builds palaces, marries a singer, surrounds himself with trophies, but, well, slowly strips that image down. He breaks it down into reality. Kane bends his newspapers to his own ambition. His campaign for governor collapses in scandal. His marriage disintegrates. The palace he built, Xanadu, becomes a lonely monument to his own emptiness. The film ends with Cain dying alone, surrounded not by friends or allies, but by his things, the stuff that he hoarded. All the winning in the world, the money, the headlines, the power, meant nothing if Cain couldn't tell the truth, couldn't admit failure, and couldn't accept loss. Hearst was furious, by the way, about this script and about this movie. He banned the movie from even being mentioned in his newspapers. And he had tried to shut it down prior to it being filmed. Filmed. Couldn't get it done. He tried to bury. He tried to buy and burn every print that had this movie in it. He even launched smear campaigns against Wells himself because he didn't like that the film poked fun at him. He was so mad that it. Someone dared to poke fun of him. Someone. Someone dared to reveal his whole philosophy. Losing was unacceptable. Unacceptable. He went. He was ready to burn the presses down over this movie. And to admit error was to show a weakness to him. And weakness was something that Hearst couldn't stand, which tells me he was deeply insecure. That refusal to lose, the always winning, never losing posture, is one of Hearst's lasting legacies. Nobody wins all the time. Citizen Kane put it on the screen. The whole country saw it. The whole world saw it. American politics carried it all forward. And after Hearst, other media figures picked up the playbook again. Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the 1930s, reached tens of millions by rallying against elites and scapegoating enemies. I mean, what I do hope that you're hearing is that we have been here before. Same playbook, same phrasing, really. And we can overcome these times if we're willing to fight for them. But we have to know when we're being propagandized. We have to know when people are using our own emotions against us. By the 1970s, Richard Nixon again bought the same posture into the presidency. His silent majority rhetoric painted opponents as illegitimate. Well, if you oppose us, you oppose most of the country. You oppose the good people of America, therefore, you're bad. When Watergate exposed wrongdoing, his instinct was to do what? Deny? Cover up Double down to confess would have meant losing. And Nixon was just like Hearst and that he could not and would not lose. And the far right loves him for it. The MAGA we know now comes directly because of Watergate. They liked Nixon more when they found out about Watergate than they did before because they're like, oh, he's willing to do anything to win. We like this guy, understand that morals have not really been a major player in the game in a long time. Money is, power is. Then the 1990s came Newt Gingrich. Gingrich turned politics into a continuous warfare. He told his fellow Republicans to stop treating Democrats as colleagues and start treating them as enemies. Compromise was weakness. Concession was betrayal. Victory wasn't just preferred, it was the only acceptable outcome. He made never back down, never admit defeat, the operating principle of his party. And in doing so, he trained a generation to think of losing not as a natural part of politics, but as moral failure. He even called Democrats terrorists. Again, that word gets thrown around a lot, lot when people don't like someone's opinion. That through line brought us right to the present decade. In 2022, Maryland candidate Dan Cox refused to concede on election night because everything pointing to a Westmore victory was fake, insisting there was still a path forward. Don't believe your lying eyes, folks. In 2024, Senator Mark Rubio said he wouldn't necessarily accept the upcoming presidential result if he judged them unfair. Him personally, you know, because he knows the truth. Truth. And in the current administration, Donald Trump has doubled down on the same posture, pushing executive orders to restrict voting based on unproven fraud claims, fraud claims that are not real, and rallying against the same mail in ballots as corrupt despite little evidence. It has been proved over and over and over. Undocumented people are not voting. Mail in voting is not wrought with fraud. Many of these, these debated elections, there were hand counts done, everything. These people won, but they keep doubling down. And this is where honestly, Hearst and Trump start to look a lot alike. They built empires on ego and media spectacle. You know, Hearst, it was newspapers. Trump, it was television and Twitter. But they always, they both promised to fight for the people while bending the narrative to protect their own image. How much has this administration backflipped to cover up the Epstein files? We all know Trump's office. It just this year, Trump's DOJ and Trump's FBI have said he's in the files so won't release them. And they both reacted to exposure that they don't like, whether in print or on screen. With rage and denial. In Citizen Kane, the fictional Hurst explodes when his campaign collapses, insisting the election was stolen from him. True, Hurst in real life often claimed he'd been robbed when he lost. Hearst made the same claims when he would lose a political election. He would claim it had been robbed, he would claim it was unfair, he would claim it had been stolen. And again, Trump's entire political identity rests on being a winner. So when he's exposed, whether it's business, politics, investigation, he denies, deflects, calls, the system corrupts, doubles down. And the deeper warning of Citizen Kane is not just about Hearst's ego. It's about the danger of a culture that rewards invincibility at all costs. When we elevate these kind of people, we put ourselves in danger. If we elevate the humans who say that admitting wrong is weakness, then we sacrifice the truth because nobody can be perfect. And what we want, we want the kind of people who say, hey, you know what? I was wrong. Hey, you know what? I learned something different. I was wrong about this. I'm gonna change my position. That's what we want. We can't glorify invincibility because it's not real. Real. It's not real. And when the truth collapses, the only thing that we're left with is performance and it just becomes a theater show. The question isn't whether America has Citizen Kanes. We do. It's whether we recognize them when they're in front of us and whether exposure matters. Wells showed us that hollowness behind the myth that if you're not interested in the truth, the show doesn't hold much for you. It's the truth that matters at the end of the day. And Hearst, through Citizen Kane, has become immortal, but not in the way he wanted. He turned into this archetype, the man who mistook influence for virtue. And we see it repeated over and over, and we have to stop glorifying it. And the promise here, with an empire of Prince, simply gave way to new pulpits and new airwaves. The promise isn't moral clarity, it's power. And that's where Christian nationalism enters the frame. And it's the merger of faith and politics that has this undercurrent of controlling the narrative, conviction, spectacle that I think Hearst would have recognized had he been around to see it. When you flip back to those 1890s, you're not looking at calm journalism, you're looking at a pulpit in print. Here's the threat. Only I can save you. Hearst. It was Spanish treachery. Crisis is at hand. Diagrams of torpedo holes. Readers weren't being informed, they were being rallied. This was politics functioning as an altar call. Hearst knew exactly how to weaponize innocence. In 1897, his New York journal ran a front page crusade about again this young, another young Cuban woman named Clemencia Orengo, who had been searched by Spanish officials aboard the steamer Olivet on her way to Havana from New York. The inspection was routine, but Hearst's paper turned it into moral theater. Does our flag protect women? He wanted the Spanish American war. So he took this woman being searched, a routine search, and made it. But we have to protect the women. US men, US American white men are the female protectors. And beneath it. In his article, a dramatic illustration showed Spanish guards ripping at a half dressed woman while American sailors looked on helplessly. Not what happened, not even close. Never mind that eyewitnesses, including a female passenger, said the search was discreet and conducted by women. Women. Facts didn't matter. Virtue signaling did. The journal cast Arango as a damsel violated by foreign hands, the Spanish as predators and the United States is this, this rescuer, this knight in shining armor. It was outraged by design and a purity panic because of course. Right. And this is where women become tools of these type of machines. They don't want women's equality when it serves and benefits women. But if, quote, protecting women gets them what they want ideologically, then it becomes a centerpiece. Well, we have to protect the fragility of women. Within weeks, the story had Americans demanding that someone do something about Cuba, priming the public for war, getting them to buy in. And when a leaked Spanish letter insulted President McKinley, Hearst splashed it as the worst insult to the United States in its history. Treason, purity, women under threat, the wrath of God. Hearst taught Americans to see politics as this moral crusade. And that also ties in Teddy Roosevelt, who became a moral mascot of this time. And Roosevelt's 1899 speech, the strenuous Life is basically a sermon about toughness. In this speech, Roosevelt is redefining what it means to be masculine. He preached not the doctrine of ignoble ease, end quote. But hard work, risk and national vigor. It was a muscular Christianity wrapped in the flag that the idea that manly virtue and national greatness were the same thing. Thing. Because Victorian Christianity had a much different tone. It was about gentleness, self control, restraint, respect, honor. But as we see this transition where men went from working these traditionally masculine, sweaty out in the field jobs to working in a factory, punching a clock, working for someone else, masculinity was Redefined. This is actually where fundamentalism really gave birth. First. Christian fundamentalism arose during this time largely due to the question of who is the new man in the new era. And if you want to read a book that really covers this, well, Jesus and John Wayne or John, something like that is either John Wayne and Jesus or Jesus and John Wayne really covers this in a beautiful way. That this question around what is masculinity in a changing world gave rise to Christian fundamentalism. And Roosevelt stepped to the plate to become the new brand of the masculine. And it would later again tie into John Wayne and how he became this image of the, you know, quote, all American male. And Roosevelt's cadence, his grit is sacred duty, is exactly what today's quote, manly Christian nation voices want to bottle and sell. We hear this all the time. The Christian nationalists are talking about repealing the 19th amendment, women's right to vote. All of this conversation from weak minded men who are single, most of them who are like a woman, just need to submit and get married. Feminism has ruined everything. And they'll sit here and they'll say that we need to take away women's right to vote because everything has gotten bad since women could vote. Meanwhile, we've never had a female president, we've never had a female cabinet, we've never had a female controlled Congress, we've never had a female controlled state legislature. So this entire time men have been in control. So with the when people bring up that question where, well, men built everything you own, so you should be grateful, it's like, okay, well if you don't like the result of men's leadership and building, then maybe that's a reflection on their poor leadership because it can't be both. Women can't be responsible for the downfall and also have no power. That doesn't work. It's cognitive dissonance at its finest. But then came Roosevelt's attack on what he called hyphenated Americanism. In 1915, Roosevelt told the Knights of Columbus that there was no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. To be American, he said meant dropping old identities and pledging total loyalty to one flag and one tongue. And what he means by this is African dash American, things like that. Identifiers that are actually super important in the context of American history. And Christian nationalists still recycle this line nearly word for word that argue that real citizenship means you are fully assimilated to a Protestant coded norm. I'll translate that. It means you speak, dress and adhere to white standards, whatever Those standards are language, speech, hair. Roosevelt didn't just talk, he organized. He signed on with the American Defense Society, spoke at its meetings, and by 1919 was billed as its honorary president. The ads pushed English only schooling, loyalty oaths in school, and 100% Americanism drives. Roosevelt's face gave it moral weight. It was a straight line to today's purity test. Who belongs, who doesn't, dressed in Gilded age clothing. It's the same thing we're seeing now where now they want to give patriotic curriculum to schools, which just means they're gonna whitewash it, just like they're taking away things that mention slavery in museums and state parks. Here's the twist, though. Roosevelt wasn't a cheerleader for slapping God on everything. In 1907, he ordered in God we Trust removed from the new gold coins, calling it irreverent to stamp the divine name on money that circulated in saloons and gambling halls. Congress forced it back within a year. The myth of Roosevelt is this, like Christian nationalist Saint skips this part because he wasn't. He was very much part of the architecture that would lead to it. But he also respected separation of church and state, in part due to his own faith. Still, the usable part of the myth stuck right again. It doesn't matter what the truth is. It matters that you can control the narrative. Fox host turned cabinet official Pete Hegseth. Ugh, literally built a book in the arena around Roosevelt's man in the arena speech. For Hegseth and others, Theodore Roosevelt is catechism. He's courage, he's toughness. No excuses. One nation under the moral arms of the white man. That's the Roosevelt Christian nationalists in vogue. Not the guy pulling God off the coins, but the one preaching grit as gospel. And then we fast forward to what we now call Christian nationalism. What we're now seeing is basically the Hearst Roosevelt playbook. And now they've just put it in Bible drag and stamped Bible verses on it. Let's name the big pillars so that when we track them through history, we hear the echoes loud and clear. These are kind of common. Let's do common themes, common pillars of their movement that they use to manipulate, to massage a story, evoke a reaction, get people out to vote. Here's one quote. Real Americans. They define real Americans as Christians. Being American and being Christian, often white and evangelical are treated as the same thing. Anybody who's outside those parameters, whether you're not evangelical, umbilical, or you're not white, is a suspect. Moral order is the mission. We are The Moral Majority. They use this in abortion, gender, LGBTQ rights, woke culture, not policy debates. But they line it with spiritual war that we're God is on our side. So therefore if you disagree with us, you're the enemy of God. They fuse faith with power. They get Christian belief into law, into schools, into courts, and even the military. There is no reason on God's green earth that as of this recording, the Supreme Court is debating on whether to overturn gay marriage. The government has no business telling two consenting adults that they can get married. The only way you get there is by using religion. And if you're legislating religion and that's the only way you're getting there, you are violating the religious freedom of others. They erode the separation of church and state in practice, elevate Christian norms as national defaults as the only moral choice. They use symbolic culture wars, flags, statues, drag shows, books. Anything small can be pitched into this existential crisis. The demonization of trans people is a good example of that. Martyrdom and persecution stories. They're taking the Christ out of Christmas. Warning of attacks. The Cassie Bernal story, that was a lie. Preaching that America is under siege and needs revival. We see this actually recently with Zoran's campaign. He's gonna put New York under Sharia law. And literally his wife, like their wedding pictures. She's in knee high. She's so cute. She's in knee high black boots, a spaghetti strap, lace, knee length wedding dress and a gorgeous scarf. I'm like, yeah, guys, I can really see where he's leaning into that. In World War I, 100Americanism campaigns demanded total loyalty. German Americans, Catholics, Jews were instantly under suspicion. Schools staged Americanization rituals. By the 1950s, the Cold War wrote it into law. Kids pledged allegiance to one nation under God. That was added in 1954. In God We Trust became the national motto in 1956. Understand we are not a nation founded on Christian principles. Those things didn't exist until the 50s because we needed to politically establish a distinction between ourselves and our new scapegoat, the Soviet Union. And in the 70s and 80s, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson, Return America to God. Policy fights framed as salvation struggles. Heaven or hell access. Because hell is a really good way to motivate people to believe and follow what you have to say. Because people are afraid of death, people are afraid of hell if they've grown up in these communities. By the 90s and the 2000s, the battlefields were courthouses and school boards. Ten commandment monuments, school prayer, marriage equality. Each one pitched as America on the brink of destruction. Today, the crusade energy hearse bottled up in headlines is everywhere. And I'm sure throughout this whole episode, you've been like, oh, my God, this feels like right now. At the Reawaken America rallies, it's almost kind of literal. Organizers talk about raising an army of God to take back the nation. The stage looks part revival, part campaign rally, part wwe. But even when I was growing up, they were talking about, we were soldiers for Christ. We were at war. You had to be willing to die for your faith. Very violent militant language surveys show that people who strongly identify with Christian nationalism are far more likely to say that immigrants, Muslims and non English speakers don't belong here. Pete Hegseth just embodies this. He is the personification of. Ugh. He reposted a video from. Again, pastors arguing women shouldn't have the right to vote. Doug Wilson, his caption all of Christ for all of life. The same Christ who is a Palestinian man, who was brown, who elevated women, who gave women equal parity in his following, who had female disciples who would later become church leaders. That. Yeah, that Christ. I hate how Christ gets hijacked for that. Because even if you strip away all the miracles, all the questions of divinity, what Christ taught is so amazing. And it gets hijacked for things like this. Pete Hegseth claiming Christ shares a post that 51% of the population in the United States shouldn't be allowed to vote. Vote because of the gender we were born into. And then he. And then after this, he led a Christian worship service inside the Pentagon, streaming internally. Imagine the message to rank and file service members. The boss has turned the building into a sanctuary. Ladies, your opinion doesn't count. Beginning in September of this year, US Forces began launching strikes against boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Officials called the crews again. Narco terrorists blending drug cartels into the old war on terror scripts. Hegseth envisions military operations as holy battles, not just bureaucratic branding. It's Christian nationalism in camouflage. Well, not really in camouflage anymore. The word terrorist already carries the flavor of righteous vengeance, right? Good versus evil, light versus dark. Add narco to the front of it, and suddenly you're now in a holy drug war. You're not fighting smugglers anymore. You're fighting the devil. You're fighting to save your children against Satan himself. It's the same crusader logic Hearst used to when he was talking about Cuba and the evil Spaniards. Only now the villains wear cartel insignias instead of military uniforms. And again, we don't even. We don't even have evidence that they were. There's no evidence. Likely most of them, if not all, were civilians. For Christian nationalists, that framing feels natural. They've been raised to believe this, not just in their churches, but in the media we consume. It blurs this national defense with divine duty. And evil isn't just out there. It's. It's foreign, it's brown, it speaks a different language. It's godless, it's corrupt, and it needs to be purged. Because if you oppose me and God is on my side, you're the enemy of God. Therefore I have the right to enact violence against you. That is why a tyrant or a political ideology that is backed by this idea of the one true God is so dangerous, because it gives them carte blanche to do anything they want. When the Pentagon starts sounding like a pulpit, you know the story is doing more than selling war. They're selling salvation through firepower. And then there's the courts. In 2024, Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally children. Not potential life, not medical material, but children. The decision didn't stop at legal reasoning. Chief Justice Tom Parker filled his opinion with scripture writing that embryos bear the image of God, warning that to destroy them invites the wrath of a holy God. And that wasn't just a line for church pews. It's now part of the states case law. In practice, it halted IVF treatments, terrified fertility doctors, pushed families into crisis, all under the banner of divine justice over something that does not have internal organs. And the Bible also is not pro birth. It very much draws a distinction between human life and the life of a embryo or a fetus. They don't. They skip that part, though. They don't like that part. For Christian nationalists, that's the goal. It's not just laws that reflect their theology, but courts that enforce it. That they can legislate their religion on you, because this is not faith. It's about power. When judges started quoting Genesis instead of quoting precedent, the pulpit and the bench have become the same thing. And again, the assassination of Charlie Kirk didn't push the movement back at all. It supercharged it, which. There's so many suspicious things about his death. But the most suspicious to me is that the movement was fracturing over the stance of Israel and the stance on the Epstein files, which Kirk was changing his opinion on. And he suddenly did. What a great way to rally the fracturing communities. In Oklahoma, lawmakers proposed a mandatory Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza in public colleges. The State Department warned foreigners praising killing could lose the visas. Oh, you're not sympathetic enough. Why are you not crying? I. It's insane. The attorney general floated prosecuting hate speech for people who just weren't mourning. Speech itself was being policed through martyrdom. So when the leaders today insist defending America is defending Christianity, it's not new, but it's evil, it's wrong, and it's sinister. It's the same crusade story over and over. Politics as salvation, enemies as heretics, and the pulpit again. Whether it's a newspaper, a rally stage, a courtroom, or the Pentagon, Christian nationalism wrapped politics in the language of salvation. But once you claim divine backing, losing isn't defeat, it's heresy. Do you see that? That once you claim that God is on your side, losing, backing down would be to let the devil himself win. That mindset again has not stayed in the pews. It's now seeping into every arena of power. And if we don't act on it, we won't have the option to act on it. And that's the psychology that Hearst helped pioneer. He didn't just chase victory, he treated it as the only morally acceptable outcome. And that worldview was visible in his journalism and in his politics. During the Spanish American War era, when his papers were criticized for exaggerating or even fabricating atrocities, Hearst refused to back down. Critics said his yellow journalism was reckless. Hearst framed it as righteous, exposing corruption and defending liberty against Spain. Admitting error would have meant confessing it wasn't just a mistake, but a moral weakness. So he doubled down instead. The same is true in politics. When he lost major races, the 1905 New York mayoral contest and the 1906 governor's race, and later bids for national office. In each case, he never publicly accepted that voters had simply chosen someone else. Instead, he claimed fraud, corruption, manipulation by political machines. To acknowledge defeat would have meant admitting his own shortcomings, admitting he wasn't the best. It was better to insist he was robbed, because for Hurst, losing was a stain on his character. And the moral framing didn't stop with Hearst. We see it in Richard Nixon. Modern politics. When Richard Nixon was accused of financial impropriety in 1952, he delivered the famous checker speech, insisting he had done nothing morally wrong, drawing a bright line between himself and the suggestion of failure. Even in his resignation two decades later, Nixon framed his exit not as an omission of guilt, but an honorable sacrifice for the good of the country. To him, conceding fault outright was impossible. Losing meant moral collapse. Ronald Reagan, in turn, adopted the same device in policy battles. If his ideas failed, which many of them did, it was because elites obstructed the people's will. Reagan was the elite. For Reagan, opposition itself was a sign of his righteousness business. The pattern only sharpened in today's. Today's politics. Carrie Lake's refusal to concede after her 2022 and 2024 as Arizona losses wasn't just a political spin. It was moral positioning. She implied that to concede would be to betray her supporters and that the real moral failing lay with corrupt officials or broken machines. Of course, Josh Hawley, objecting to the 2020 election certification, used the language of integrity. Accepting Biden's win in his tell would not only mean political loss, but a moral one. And then there's Donald Trump, who crystallizes Hearst logic kind of in every way. To him, losing is unthinkable. It would be morally weak. The election was stolen. He'll cast blame on judges, state officials, even his own vice president. His we're gonna win so much, you'll get tired of winning was more than a boast. It's his worldview. He can't admit that that's just not reality. He's created his own reality, and it shapes our policies. And when policies become theater and policy becomes this script that we're following and we're not actually caring about data or science or what helps people, then we end up here. Project 2025 is that instinct in blueprint form. This plan to consolidate control, punish dissent, stage government is the ultimate spectacle. Is all of this written out in a playbook that nobody wanted to believe? This same playbook, that is the reason that right now families are going hungry. Because Democrats don't want to give up Americans health care, American citizens. And again, Republicans are saying they want to give health care to undocumented migrants. That's not true. The only health care that undocumented migrants qualify for is emergency room care, which was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. This is about Democrats saying, hey, we're not going to let you cut Medicaid and kill people. We're not going to let you cut the Affordable Care act and bump millions of people off their health insurance. All of this was in Project 2025. Nobody wanted to believe it. Nobody wants to admit defeat. The Republicans won't admit these policies don't work, not if you actually care about the people. And as we talked about earlier, the red scares picked up spectacle. First, in the late 1940s, teachers were forced to swear loyalty oaths. And in Hollywood, the Hollywood 10 were blacklisted. These were writers and directors who couldn't get work simply because they refused to snitch to Congress, probably because they didn't know any communist spies. Civil servants were told to prove their patriotism or lose their job. And we have this idea of loyalty being sent out to federal employees now from the administration testing their loyalty. You have to be this loyal or you need to be replaced. This is also called for in Project 2025 where it calls for the mass layoffs of federal workers who are then to be replaced by loyalists. It's the same thing Hitler did. Barry Goldwater sharpened the Blade in 1964. He warned that Washington wasn't just inefficient, it was dangerous. He has campaign framed. The federal government is a creeping threat to freedom. This again the same script. Goldwater's message was clear. Real Americans were under siege. And by real he meant white because he also promised that he would overturn the Civil Rights act and only conviction, not compromise, could save them. And then came Phyllis Schlafly with the playbook to match. Her self published book, A Choice not an Echo became a grassroots phenomenon. Sold out of living rooms, church basements, Repub women's clubs across the country argued that a secret network of kingmakers controlled both parties, feeding voters a pre selected illusion of choice. Millions of copies circulated, turning conspiracy into community. It wasn't just a book, it became a rallying cry. She would later carry this over into advocating against the LGBTQ community having equal rights in the states. Reagan also in his time for choosing speech aired on national television in October of 1964 in support of Goldwater's presidential campaign. A slick studio lit monologue, he looked straight into the camera and warned Americans that they were facing a thousand years of darkness if they continued to expand the government. The horror wasn't taught. Not real sold a story. Freedom versus tyranny, good versus evil. The state is the enemy and the individual is the hero. Meanwhile, under the Reagan administration, up until the big ugly bill, the Reagan administration did more to transfer wealth from the bottom, lower the two bottom classes of wealth, wealth to the upper class than had ever happened before in American history. Until the big ugly bill. That's the largest upward transfer of wealth from the lowest financial class to the wealthiest. By the 1980s and 90s, the fight shifted into culture again. Rush Limbaugh fills the airwaves sneering about feminazis mocking AIDS victims, spinning cruelty into entertainment. Fox news again. 1996 made outrage a Nightly format with wall to wall coverage of the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. Scandal. I mean, it's. It's all the same. The Tea Party in 2009, a movement that started as anger over bailouts and ballooning debt, but quickly turned into something bigger. It's the performance of outreach. Protester flooded the town halls waving Gadsden flags, which is the Don't Tread on me flags. Homemade signs that read, keep the government out of my Medicare. The messages didn't have to make sense. It just had to sting, just had to make people angry. The new conservative darling, Sarah Palin stepped onto the stage and gave it a face. On the 2008 campaign trail, she talked about the real America. Small town, church pews, family values. Nine times out of 10, when someone says real America, real American, they mean white. And they drew this bright line between those who belong, those who didn't. Right now, we're hearing that from the Heritage foundation and JD Vance. When they say heritage American, they mean white. They mean white. Oh, well, if your family's been here for X number of generations, they mean white because they somehow always conveniently neglect, oh, I don't know, first nation, Native Americans. Donald Trump saw the opening, he took it, and he had the media savvy to make it work. Pattern keeps evolving. And then now with social media, we have that line that we talked about in the Timothy Hafey episode of where does freedom of speech and misinformation somehow regulate in a way that protects people, people from being driven further and further apart, from being propagandized and pushed into these roles? So Project 2025 is really where this story comes to full circle. This isn't about rhetoric or ratings. It's infrastructure. It's. It's an effort to hardwire Hearst's blueprint, even if no one will admit it, into the machinery of government itself. Every headline, every broadcast, every algorithm trained people for this moment where spectacle becomes policy and the truth is kind of a suggestive guy. And let's look at some specific examples from Project 2025, Schedule F, which was rebranded as Policy or Career, reclassifies thousands of federal workers as policy influencing so that they can be dismissed and replaced more easily. The White House order of the Office of Personnel Management Guidance details how positions from policy analysts to agency counsel can be shifted into this category. In practice, this means that scientists at the EPA or defense analysts could lose protections and be swapped out for loyalists who will give the administration the numbers and the results they want, even if they're not true. We saw that with the head of the Department of Labor being fired because the numbers weren't good. Hearst thrived on portraying experts as elitists who couldn't be trusted. He demonized education and expertise. Project 2025 echoes that. Example number two is the DEI rollbacks as an organizational purge. A sweeping executive order halted diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. Government within days, agencies scrubbed DEI from websites, canceled trainings, and began shutting down offices for workers. This meant losing reporting channels for harassment, mentorship programs and fair hiring pipelines. So for the public, it meant fewer efforts to ensure government serves everyone. Hearst weaponized newspapers to cast immigrants and radicals outside the circle of legitimacy. Project 2025 uses that executive power to do the same with women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. Example number three Loyalty screening and hiring filters. Applicants for federal jobs now face aggressive political vetting. Associated Press reporting describes questionnaires probing past activism and resumes flagged for ideological signals. Those who don't align with MAGA priorities are quietly or sometimes loudly cut out. These converts hiring into a loyalty test, reshaping who makes decision on public policy. You have to be a loyalist to get in. Give us the numbers we want. Give us the results we want, regardless of if it's true and regardless of if it's right. Case study number four attacking the referees in January of 2025, Politico reported that Trump fired multiple independent inspectors general in a Friday night purge, bypassing traditional notice to Congress. Inspector generals are the watchdogs who investigate fraud, waste and abuse in the government, removing them from collapses overnight, leaving agencies to police themselves. And then DOGE came in and got rid of saved us what, $35 million in cuts is what they made. And then we gave, sorry, 35 billion. And then we gave 40 billion to Argentina. It's a show. It's a clown show, but it's a show. And then there's women's roles in Project 25. Project 2025 reports from the National Women's Law center show Project 2025 aligned policies restricting access to abortion and contraception. This is happening in Tennessee. It's happening in South Carolina, where they are trying to reclassify IUDs and oral contraception as a board of fashions, narrowing legal definitions of sex and gender, pushing women back in traditional caregiving roles by eliminating access to equal job opportunities and education, Reuters noted. The blueprints call for rolling back reproductive rights and reasserting traditional family structures. These moves shrink autonomy and opportunity for women. Hearst papers also treated women as spectacle in beauty contests and gossip pages while sidelining them from participating in real power. And that is exactly what Christian fundamentalism does. It pretends to elevate women. It will make claims it does because Christ did. They don't. They will sideline them from any access to real power that is not subject to a man. Put these together. These aren't isolated moves. It's a system. And the story turns back to us because every era has a Hearst. Every era has an audience. We get to decide who owns the narrative. What happens if we stop paying attention to who's writing it? Can I always ask the question that if something is making me feel outraged and afraid, who's profiting and benefiting from my outrage and my fear? The story of William Randolph Hearst is not just about one man's hunger for power. It's about how easily we confuse spectacle with the truth. He mastered the art of turning headlines into weapons. And every new technology and every new platform has found faster and faster ways to do do it. We like to think we're savvier now, that we'd never fall for the tricks of those old newspapers in 1898. But you can scroll through Facebook for five minutes and you'll hear those echoes. This is the part of the story we get to rewrite the way that the civil rights movement did. A free press isn't guaranteed by law. We have to fight for it. It's sustained by the people who still care that that's true, even when it's uncomfortable that the truth wins, not the narrative. Hearst built a machine that taught America how to feel its news. And for those of us who want a better America for everyone, how can we help people feel that calling? The question is now whether we're willing to think again, to slow down a little bit, question the performance notice. Who benefits when we get caught up in emotion and speed instead of taking a breath, digging deeper? Because in the end, that's the power that Hurst never counted on losing. That's our power, and that's the power that Hearst always lost because the people never chose him, not when it came down to it. We get to choose who we believe and what we believe. And thank you. I know that this was a longer episode today. I just felt that his Hearst and his legacy was really important to what we're experiencing today. I really want to issue again a very special thanks to Charles Harvey for the initial research, really helping me get a couple episodes ahead on each of the podcasts. Thank you to Seeger and Phoenix Studios for producing the episode. To battles Lara and Patrick for keeping the machine behind me running. To all of my patreon supporters@patreon.com montemater who of course always get these episodes early, completely ad free. And those upper tiers, get those gift boxes. The Christmas one is already being built for December. And just really quickly before I wrap up, I want to give some shout outs to new Patreon subscribers. I'm still working through this list. Thank you to Libby, Dee Ranza, Kevin Woodall, Jackie Barrett, Lily Klusenik, Leslie Stevens, Chris Reeder, Becky Dragon, Grandma. I love that one. Heather Swink, Fope Badamosi, Kirsten Reed, Michelle Hardy, Elaine Elmore, Zach W, Johanna Ruiz, Sarah Charrett, Bessie Maggiano, Court Maclean and Laura Wooten challenge the rhetoric today. Flip the table. Do not let deception become part of our story. We know the lessons. The education's right in front of us. We can make a different path. We can fight for the freedom we want because we only lose our democracy. We only lose our rights if we give them up. And we can choose not to. And if you'd like more reading on what was talked about today, all of the sources between myself and Charles Harvey are listed in the show notes. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables. Sam.