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Guaranteed human 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
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This is where mindset comes in.
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Someone will be eliminated.
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Pressure is coming down.
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This is Trainer.
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Watch it on prime video. Starting January 8th. The world's best ski and snowboard athletes are chasing medals. Now you can follow their every move. Join Insider, the official US Ski and snowboard fan loyalty program, and get premium viewing at World cup ski events, exclusive athlete meetups, discounts from brands you love, and a custom welcome gift mailed direct to your doorstep this winter. Show your support as they race for the podium. Head to insider.usski and snowboard.org and join today.
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Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new Whimsound Smart Speaker. Get high resolution Audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control and modern design in one powerful speaker for just $299. From Quiet Mornings to lively holiday gatherings, Whim Sound makes every moment sound better and feel better too. Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself. Whim Sound Beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search Whim sound. That's wiim S O u n D.
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Wanna sell your car your way? Who wouldn't? That's why CarMax offers a car selling experience designed just for you with online and in store options. Want to know what your car is worth quickly? Get an online offer in under two minutes. Want to think it over? Use OfferWatch to keep tabs on your car's value over time. Plus, CarMax offers flexible selling options with express drop off in store or pick up at home. Selling your car is in your control with CarMax with want to drive CarMax pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. See carmax.com for details. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how freedom is a joke and our lives are the punchline. I am your host, Mia Wong, long ago 2013 In a galaxy basically exactly where this one is now. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and now a terminal fascist, purchased the Washington Post. This was a sign of things to come. The danger of the American free press is and has always been that we do not have a free press. We have a capitalist press. Writing and especially reporting is a material product. Journalists have to eat, they have to travel, they have to go places, they have to meet people all of this requires capital. And the problem with all of this requiring capital is that capital is not a neutral entity, and the people who possess capital have interests. Fast forward to 2020. As protests and uprisings raged across the United States against the police and white supremacy. A battle broke out inside of the New York Times newsrooms and editorial staff about the newspaper publishing an opinion piece called Send in the troops, calling for, you guessed it, sending in the troops to attack protesters, published by a member of the American government named Tom Cotton. Editors resigned in outrage debates raised across journalist slacks. It was the culmination of decades of battles about the direction of politics and race in the United States, fought simultaneously in the streets and in the newsroom. 2020 was a significant danger to the ruling class. The actual ideology that was so dangerous it had to be destroyed was this. If the premise of 2020 is true, which is that the US is a structurally racist country founded on slavery and genocide, and that reproduces those same violences through the prison system, which, you know, has legal slavery in it from the structure of the 13th Amendment and reproduces it again through the police, then the American project is indefensible and here there be dragons. The ruling class needed to move to stop it. And so they created what they would call, I guess, a new ideology, but was really a continuation of centuries old strategies, this time rebranded as Anti Woke. One of the avatars of Anti Woke was Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss was at the New York Times at the time was an ideological diversity hire, which is to say affirmative action for white conservatives, as affirmative action has only existed in the figments of the minds of conservatives. She was given a cozy make work job at the beginning of the Trump administration as an opinion staff editor and writer for the New York Times. She was hired specifically to bring in more Trumpian figures into the opinion section. This is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is the fever dream of affirmative action in the conservative mind, right? And these are going to be a bunch of people who really hate affirmative action. But again, what they are being given, they are being handed by the most important newspaper probably in the entire world. You know, she was handed a job because she was a fucking right winger. Now, Weiss was part of the, shall we say, conversations at the New York Times about again, whether or not a newspaper should print a letter from a sitting U.S. representative calling for the deployment of U.S. soldiers against the American people. She saw this as an opportunity not to resist a obviously tyrannical program by again, a sitting member of the United States government. She saw this as her moment to do a grift. Now, in this moment, she resigned from the New York Times in a huff, raving about the, quote, lack of ideological diversity, who had a giant rant about how the Twitter is not the masthead of the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which again, I cannot emphasize this enough like that he was brought in as a right wing affirmative action hire in order to appease the demand from the ruling class. I guess for pro Trump people, they already had a bunch of right wingers. This is completely unhinged. But she resigns and she has this big press tour in the right wing press trying to talk about how she was canceled. And of course none of this ever even happened, right? We can debate the effect to which cancellation ever was even really a thing or did anything at all. But she was not canceled. She literally resigned of her own free will. She was not forced out. She chose to leave in order to pursue a career as a right wing grifter in other fields. Namely Substack, where she ran a newsletter that was sort of rebranded as like, oh, it's a media outlet called the Free Press. It's like, no, this is Barry Weiss's substack. Come on, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? Now, Weiss is not a journalist. She is a right wing ideologue. She's also a hardline Zionist. If you want to go into all of the absolutely unhinged shit that Bari Weiss has said and done over the years, all of the just unbelievably Islamophobic shit, all of the weird racist shit, all of the anti immigrant shit that she said. There's a very good John Oliver thing about her. She is part of this story. But if we spent this entire episode just talking about how much she fucking sucks, we would be here for like two decades now. In a jest world, none of this would matter at all. This would just be a conservative walking off from the free job that she was given by the New York Times, stomping off at a huff and going to start a substack. Whatever, who cares? This is not a jest world. This is the United States. She now controls one of the most powerful and important news organizations in the United States. The story of how she got there is the story of the future of the American media. Unfortunately for all of us, the story is distressingly simple. Bari Weiss and her outlet, I'm using that in immense quotations. Again, this is just a substack. Was bought out by one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison, then appointed Weiss to be the ideological hatchet woman for his takeover of Paramount, which owns cbs. There was no secret plan. There was no weird strategy. There was no Illuminati cabal behind the scenes. It didn't require any effort at all. All you have to do in order to install a right wing hack as the editor in chief of CBS News is by the company. The results have been devastating. I would call what happened resegregation. There was a large scale firing of non white employees. NBC eliminated the editorial teams for NBC Asian America, NBC Black, NBC Latino and NBC Out. NBC out was the queer one. They fired Gayle King. They did some stuff that frankly sounds like a joke. I'm just going to read this quote from the Root. And the CBS News bureau in Johannesburg, South Africa has been shut down with coverage of Africa shifting to London. That is. Again, they closed the South Africa bureau, this is CBS bureau in South Africa, and moved their coverage of Africa from Africa to London. If a hardline Marxist ideologue had written this in 1967, no one would have believed them. And in the process, what they've done here is they've destroyed the NBC outlets that were responsible for doing a whole bunch of coverage for different groups of non white people. Right? NBC blk, which NBC Black, did a whole bunch of very good coverage of the uprising in 2020. Right? NBC Asian America did a bunch of good work. NBC out was a place where you could occasionally find a trans person who was allowed. Right? And all of that is gone because one man, Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison, bought the fucking media company and installed this unhinged right wing hack as their ideological secret police. I don't even know what you would call this position. The ideological purge executor, I guess you could call it, of cbs. Now, obviously there are multiple aspects to this. We'll talk about Larry Ellison himself in a second because he is a very important figure. But first, before we talk about the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies, let's go hear from some of those monopolies. Products and services. Let's go.
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10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness. That will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract worth $250,000.
C
This is where mindset comes in.
B
Someone will be eliminated.
A
Pressure is coming down.
B
This is Trainer Games.
D
Watch it on prime video. Starting January 8th, the world's best ski and snowboard athletes are chasing medals. Now you can follow their every move. Join Insider, the official US Ski and snowboard fan loyalty program, and get premium viewing at World cup ski events, exclusive athlete meetups, discounts from brands you love, and a custom welcome gift mailed direct to your doorstep. This winter, show your support as they race for the podium. Head to insider.usski and snowboard.org and join today.
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Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new Wimsound smart speaker. Get high resolution audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control and modern design in one powerful speaker for just $299. From Quiet Mornings to lively holiday gatherings, wind sound makes every moment sound better and fun. Feel better too. Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself. Whim Sound Beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search Whim Sound. That's W I I M S O.
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U n d this holiday season, give the gift of incredible sound with Vizio's full Soundbar lineup available at Walmart. Transform any living room into a home theater with rich, immersive audio that brings every movie, show and song to life. Whether you're gifting a loved one or or upgrading your own setup, Vizio soundbars deliver powerful, crystal clear sound that turns ordinary watching into extraordinary experiences. Stream your favorite holiday Playlist with the iHeartRadio app and discover how good your music can truly sound. Head to Walmart.com and find your perfect Vizio soundbar today.
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We are so back. One of the obvious driving factors behind what has become a right wing fascist takeover of the media has been the consolidation of capital into increasing monopolies. Now, it's been a very, very famous thing in the US to say that most of American media is controlled by five companies. But here's the thing. Even those five companies, those can always be consolidated into fewer and fewer companies, right? As the companies start to struggle and as any one of them sees weakness in the other ones, you get attempts to buy them out. And this is what happens with Paramount, which is again, the parent company that owns NBC. So the way that it's framed, if you read it in the press, is, oh, it was a merger between Skydance, which was Ellison's sort of outlet, and Paramount. But that's not really what happened. Really what happened was Paramount was bought by Ellison and Skydance, and they were merged together after that. And this is a problem with the concentration of capital, right? As capital becomes increasingly more and more concentrated and as there are individual people and also entities that control more and more capital, their ability to simply swallow the rest of their competition and consume it increases. And this is a significant advantage to the companies who get to swallow this capital. They get to absorb all of the intellectual property. So now they have control over the property regimes that allow them to control cultural production. And as a sort of incidental bonus, they can take control of the media. Now it's worth getting into the Ellisons themselves. Now, Larry Ellison, back in the halcyon days of 2020, was merely the 11th richest man in the world when he, quote, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote. According to court documents. And a participant, the November 14 call included Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Jay Sekolow, an attorney for President Donald Trump, and James Bopp Jr. An attorney for True the Vote, a Texas based nonprofit. True the Vote was a completely unhinged organization dedicated to overturning the 2020 election by doing all these weird voter fraud things. And they had a strategy call like their attorney had a strategy call with a bunch of Trump supporters, including one Larry Ellison. Now, again, that was back in 2020, here in 2025, and now fighting with Elon Musk for the title of the richest person in the fucking world. Ellison said, and I quote, we're going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times. And, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on now in that intervening time. Larry Ellison is one of the people behind Oracle. And Oracle has benefited enormously as a company that got really in on the cloud storage boom. They've benefited enormously from selling a bunch of shit to AI companies. Larry Ellison is also a huge AI supporter, a huge backer of AI, a huge someone who wants to spread AI and someone who wants to spread AI, you know, very specifically, and this is very important into surveillance technology. He is also one of the people who, as 2020 went on and as the last half decade has come on and as the giant sort of backlash against, against the uprising and as his attempt to reassert racism as the dominant ideology of the United States and to make sure that capital's hold over this country and that white supremacy's hold over this country would be maintained, he has become one of the large drivers of this entire project. He's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, as we started this program with, already owned the Washington Post in 2025. He went in to very seriously change it. Jeff Bezos on the now fascist Twitter, and we will get to that in a second too, wrote. And this was a, this was a letter that he was sent to his staff. And this is, this is the editorial section. I'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. David Shipley, who had been his handpicked editor, resigned rather than lead the effort. It's not like Shipley had been like a leftist, right? But, you know, I'm going to read another part of this letter. Quote, I offered David Shipley, who I admire greatly because, you know, he was a Hampton guy, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn't hell yes, then it had to be no. After careful consideration, David decided to step away. So, okay, what was actually happening here, he came in was like, our board is not fascist enough, and if you're not going to make it more fascist, then get the fuck out of the way. And the guy he had picked to run the editorial board like three years ago went, this is unacceptable. I cannot be involved in this. And left. And now the Washington Post publishes pieces with titles like, quote, pam Bondi's Welcome Woke Rollback, the Justice Department Rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences. You know, and you can in some ways see all of the things that are coming together. Obviously, Bezos was a major supporter of the Trump administration, is a major supporter of the Trump administration, put a bunch of money into the unhinged Trump ballroom. And when he says, justice Department rescinds regulations encouraging racial preferences, they're talking about anti discrimination ordinances. Right? That's what they're actually talking about. But these people have been so cooked and have stewed so much in the ideology of countering the ideology of 2020, that they're now doing all of this reverse racism stuff where they think that if you're not allowed to discriminate, that's anti white discrimination. And the Washington Post has been tanking effectively in the wake of a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of right wing editorial changes. Its audience has significantly declined since this. A whole bunch of people who subscribed to the Post called it in. Their subscriber count is just absolutely pitiful. Now the reach has been contracting. The paper is going to shit. But that doesn't matter because the Washington Post is not a money making outlet. The Washington Post is a chance to shape the way that the country thinks. And it is better that seven people in Washington D.C. who are all identically minded conservatives, read the Washington Post and agree with it than it is for there to be any sort of independence whatsoever from anything on the shop floor or from any of the people writing for it. We've also seen in recent months the elimination of Teen Folk. Conte Nast, Teen Folk's parent company, eliminated Teen Vogue as an independent outlet. Teen Vogue had been the furthest left of the even sort of mainstream outlets in the US it had carried a bunch of extremely good and radical work on race and gender. It was also one of the few outlets with consistent trans writing. And of course, the other aspect of all of these purges has been unbelievable unhinged transphobia. And this was them just destroying what had been a very, very important outlet on the left for telling the stories of non white people, telling the stories of workers and telling the stories of trans people. And they just destroyed it. Even though, and this is actually very interesting, ever since Teen Vogue had shifted to doing a bunch of leftist coverage and covering the protests against Donald Trump in his first administration and had gone towards actually talking about labor and talking about struggle and talking about unions and talking about, you know, like the experiences of people living under white supremacy, its readership had exploded. But again, that doesn't matter because it's bad for Donald Trump. And so we're seeing the ideological tightening, consolidation of the media as what had been an outlet that allowed people to talk about shit was just destroyed. Now, speaking about outlets destroying things ideologically. Hey, products and services, please don't destroy us. Woo.
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10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
C
This is what where mindset comes in.
B
Someone will be eliminated.
A
Pressure is coming down.
B
This is Trainer Games.
D
Watch it on prime video. Starting January 8th, the world's best ski and snowboard athletes are chasing medals. Now you can follow their every move. Join Insider, the official US Ski and snowboard fan loyalty program, and get premium viewing at World cup ski event, exclusive athlete meetups, discounts from brands you love, and a custom welcome gift mailed direct to your doorstep. This winter, show your support as they race for the podium. Head to insider.usski and snowboard.org and join today.
E
Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new Whimsound smart speaker. Get high resolution Audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control and modern design in one powerful smart speaker for just $2.99. From Quiet Mornings to lively holiday gatherings, Whim Sound makes every moment sound better and feel better too. Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself. Whim Sound Beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search Whim Sound. That's W I I m S o.
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Now, as we covered on this show a few weeks ago, Conde Nast also fired several union workers illegally for, you know, staging a again, protected workplace action, demanding to know what the fuck was going on with these Teen Vogue firings. And that's another aspect of all of this takeover, which is that these outlets just viciously and radically hate. And this is, this is the ruling class, it's the people who run these outlets viciously hate unions. And this is something that's very important to understand in terms of media unions, because media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity because as it turns out, workers, and this is true, I could say this is someone who's part of a media union, less racist than the bosses, and in fact would like there to be more non white people and don't like it when non white people are discriminated against. And this is one of the things that these media unions and that unions in general do is try to help you not get fucking discriminated against on racial grounds. So of course a part and parcel of this has been the targeting of the union. And that's what we've been seeing at Conde Nast, where they also fired workers who had nothing to do with Teen Vogue and also one of whom was on the show and is trans. And you should go listen to that episode because it's very good. But that's another Aspect of this right wing consolidation is that media unions are able to push back against the untrammeled power of these fascist billionaires to turn news coverage into whatever the fuck they want. And that's what's happened at cbs, where they're now doing giant specials with like, Kirk's Widow and all of these just absolutely deranged, unbelievably bizarre right wing pieces that they're just sort of airing now. And in order to, you know, stop that shit, you need powerful media unions. And this is one of the things the ruling class is trying to crush. Now, it's also worth mentioning that these fight wing billionaires are trying to consolidate their hold on social media as well as the traditional media. And obviously the largest example of this is Elon Musk, who's purchased Twitter and has, you know, effectively turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront. It is a just unhinged stew of racism and conspiracy that is now effectively unusable if you don't want like the most racist shit you've ever seen in your entire life, just in every single one of your replies. And it's also become a major vector of targeting for the Trump administration, where what Twitter is used for now, instead of being a platform that at one time actually was able to play a role as a thing that does resistance, as a tool of protesters and as a tool of people who opposed the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now been converted into just racist slopes and a way to track down anyone who's sort of vaguely center left and just put them in the eyes of the administration so they can be targeted by the state. And it's also worth noting that one of the people who helped bankroll the purchase of Twitter because Elon Musk couldn't just purchase it directly, was one Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is also part of a massive attempt to buy TikTok. Listeners of the show are probably familiar with the whole extremely weird story about how TikTok was banned last year under the Biden administration, sort of bafflingly. And then Trump sort of just broke the law and made it still be usable, but has been trying to force TikTok to be sold to American buyers. And the conglomerate that's supposed to buy it is a Larry Ellison thing. So he's also attempting to buy TikTok. And finally, the story we're to close on is that Larry Ellison has been doing a hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Now, Warner Brothers currently is set to be bought by Netflix. Larry Ellison kept on submitting Bids to them and his efforts to actually get the purchase to go through were consistently denied. But in the wake of that, they're attempting to do a hostile takeover bid where they just go to the shareholders directly and try to buy them out at what they claim is a higher share price. I'm not going to go into that whole thing. It's a fiasco. But what is interesting for our purposes is that David Ellison, who's the guy running Paramount, who's the guy who's been directly running the ideological purges, has met several times with Trump. And last time they met, Trump has promised that he would change the coverage of CNN in order to make it better for Trump. Now, it's also worth noting that buying CNN is not part of the deal for the Warner takeover bid. Buy Netflix, right? If Netflix takes over Warner Bros. They don't get cnn. Under Paramount and Larry Ellison's deal, they would get CNN now, even though CNN has done a whole bunch of unhinged shit like having Ben Shapiro on to do fucking election coverage. Jesus fucking Christ. Okay, Trump has still been mad at them for reporting even a tiny bit critically about his administration. And Trump has been kind of refusing to pick a side directly in terms of the takeover bid for Warner Brothers and the fight between Netflix and Paramount. But he's now said that he wants to make sure that CNN is sold and that it should get new leadership, presumably along the style of what happened with cbs. And so this is sort of the final phase of all of this, right? Which is Trump administration has the ability to use its quote unquote antitrust power in order to stop one of these two companies from doing this buyout. And the Trump administration is using the fact that, that the media is being bought out by his allies in order to try to get people to buy CNN and simply eliminate negative news coverage of him. And I don't really think I need to explain why it's extremely bad that the President of the United States could simply order a news outlet to be bought out and then suddenly it's bought out. I think it's kind of self explanatory why that's unbelievably bad. But that is the situation that we may rapidly find ourselves in because we don't live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital. And the thing about the press under a dictatorship, even one that's as decentralized as the dictatorship of capital, is that one particularly fascist faction of capital can simply roll in by the media and take control of it. And that's the project that we're seeing now. But these people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can beat them again. And in some ways their project is kind of self defeating in that they have spent a significant amount of time hollowing out people's trust in these institutions. And there is an extent to which, as bad as all of this is, they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused or rot from the inside. And meanwhile, all of these, all of his control of the media that they've been taking has not stopped everyone from fucking hating them. And that's the note that I want to leave everyone here on. It doesn't matter how much of the media these people buy, everyone still hates them. We can fight them and we can win.
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It Could Happen.
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Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
B
10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
C
This is where mindset comes in.
B
Someone will be eliminated.
A
Pressure is coming down.
B
This is Trainer Games.
D
Watch it on Prime Video. Starting January 8th, the world's best ski and snowboard athletes are chasing medals. Now you can follow their every move. Join Insider, the official US Ski, Ski and snowboard fan loyalty program, and get premium viewing at World cup ski events, exclusive athlete meetups, discounts from brands you love, and a custom welcome gift mailed direct to your doorstep this winter. Show your support as they race for the podium. Head to insider.usski and snowboard.org and join today.
E
Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new Wimsound smart speaker. Get high resolution audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control and modern design in one powerful speaker for just $299. From Quiet Mornings to lively holiday gatherings, Whim sound makes every moment sound better and feel better too. Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself. Whim Sound Beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search Whimsound. That's W I I M S O U n D How do I do.
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It all during the holidays. Four words Shipt. Same day delivery. With Shipt, I can order groc, groceries from Albertsons, decor from Michaels, even gifts for my furry friend from petsmart. Plus, my personal shopper brings everything I need that same day. That makes it a breeze to decorate, get my shopping done, and make time for all the holiday parties. Do it all this holiday season with Shipt. Download the app or visit shipt.com that's S H ipt.com this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Episode: The Tech Fascist Takeover of the Media
Date: December 15, 2025
Host (main speaker): Mia Wong
This episode of It Could Happen Here explores the rapid and alarming consolidation of American media into the hands of right-wing tech billionaires, focusing on how figures like Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and others have increasingly controlled major news institutions. Host Mia Wong traces how this consolidation pushes a reactionary, anti-democratic agenda, resulting in ideological purges, dismantling of diverse media outlets, union-busting, and the wholesale reengineering of both traditional and social media to serve fascist interests.
On the U.S. Media System:
“We do not have a free press. We have a capitalist press.” — Mia Wong [01:47]
On Editorial Purges:
“The ideological purge executor, I guess you could call it, of CBS.” — Mia Wong [10:35]
On Social Media Transformation:
“Effectively turned Twitter into another arm of Stormfront...” — Mia Wong [25:35]
On Union-Busting:
“Media unions were also a very powerful force for encouraging diversity...so of course a part and parcel of this has been the targeting of the union.” — Mia Wong [24:33]
On Democracy and Capital:
“We don’t live in anything that even sort of looks like a democracy. We live in the dictatorship of capital.” — Mia Wong [30:57]
On Potential Resistance:
“But these people are not undefeatable. We beat them before, we can beat them again...they may simply be taking control of a husk that they had already caused to rot from the inside.” — Mia Wong [31:33]
The episode adopts an urgent yet sardonic tone, mixing dark humor with incisive analysis of the current state of American media. Wong highlights the ease with which reactionary billionaires can simply “buy the media and take control of it,” but maintains that this project is not invincible: historic patterns of resistance, unionization, and popular discontent may blunt their ambitions. Wong’s voice is critical, exasperated, but ultimately hopeful.
Essential Message:
The U.S. media landscape is now a prime battleground in a larger struggle over democracy and authoritarianism, where unchecked capital enables right-wing billionaires to reshape both information and ideology. But, despite the scale of the takeover, the potential for resistance and renewal endures.