Andrew Sage

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 erring 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 right-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 Trump.

you know, the untrammeled rule of billionaires, it's now been converted into just racist slop 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 to this 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 going 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.