this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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It's an interesting point you raise. The media has mutated since the list was written, now encompassing anyone with an opinion and an internet connection. Where in the past the media was more centralised and therefore more easy to control totally, now it's very difficult to eradicate dissent completely - the media has become more aligned to the masses than to the elites. So a different approach is needed to get to totalitarianism.
My take is that they're already applying pressure to the new media, and it might be the last thing to buckle. Perhaps left wing content creators will be criminalised soon (NSPM-7 could be the first step, or indeed the only step, in practice to this end) and then we only have to wait until the 2028 election to be able to shout "Bingo".
And that aporoach is widespread use of disinformation.
Another key point is the ongoing attack on the autonomy of societal institutions, like universities. Timothy Snyder has written about the importance of them in On Tyranny, and Trump behaves as if Snyder's book was an instruction manual.
There is a German Nazi term that is perhaps useful to describe what's happening, it is Gleichschaltung.
One popular approach is alignment of businesses and government in creating an ecosystem that is the internet for most people, like everything-apps. Musk did claim to create a WeChat-alike from X but it didn't went far.
Weird acquisitions though are increasingly more alarming. First, Musk got Twitter as a whole company, and although we didn't initially know who co-paid for it, there weren't explicit commentary on what exactly Elon would do with it, you needed to read between the lines. Recent TikTok USA purchase by Ellison though not only helped by the government, it's publicly aknowledged that it would become a propaganda tool for MAGA to affect genZ and genA.
It seems to me like the media is about the same as it was in 2017, as even in 2017 anyone with an opinion and an internet connection could gain throngs of followers online. The difference I see is that major news organizations have shifted to be moderately more conservative (previously ~centrist organizations are now moderately trump-approving, and previously conservative organizations are now far right, previously democrat-favouring organizations are now hedging their bets). MAGA is pressuring or threatening to pressure social media organizations to shift toward more MAGA content, but I think we're not even at the inflection point for this yet.
Fully agree, but I wrote my comment with the context that the original post was of an exhibit from at least decades ago, not in this presidency.