In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservatives have moved quickly to consolidate power and attack their political enemies, whose relative impotence and penchant for capitulation to power and decorum have been on full display this week.

“You have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they’re going after everyone who doesn’t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning,” said Adam H. Johnson, a media analyst and co-host of the “Citations Needed” podcast.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Johnson about the White House’s weaponization of Kirk’s death and the broader rightward tilt of the media ecosystem.

“I think what they’re doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them,” says Johnson. “They’re basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that’s being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they’ve long wanted to jam in.”

Johnson also noted that part of what we’re witnessing with the increasing alignment between corporate media and Trump is the end of the “veneer” of liberalism among the billionaire class.

“You have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina, this kind of veneer of universalism, and everything is just about the exercise of raw power, the exercise of pure racist propaganda,” he said. “So yeah, things are bad. But I think what we’ve learned is that they can get worse.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

The war on free speech continues in the wake of Charlie’s Kirk’s killing.

On Wednesday, ABC announced that it was taking Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show off the air indefinitely because of comments he made about the MAGA movement politicizing the death. The move came after the FCC Commission Chair threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney.

This was just the latest domino to fall as the Trump administration works to punish critics and silence the left more broadly.

Earlier in the week, in a broadcast of the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House and hosted by Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, vowed vengeance for Kirk, painting anyone who dares to criticize the administration or the right as criminals and terrorists.

Stephen Miller: It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God and as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

JW: Other White House officials have made similar remarks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had denied visas to people “celebrating” Kirk’s death. President Donald Trump also threatened the press, suggesting on Tuesday, that the attorney general would go after the media outlets who criticized him for “hate speech.”

Donald Trump: Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.

JW: All of this is happening against a wider backdrop of media censorship and a push to remake news in the president’s image. From President Trump suing the New York Times for questioning his record, including if he was responsible for making “The Apprentice” a TV hit. To journalist-provocateur Bari Weiss reportedly being poised to effectively run CBS News, to the Washington Post allegedly firing its last remaining full-time Black columnist, Karen Attiah, for highlighting racist remarks from Charlie Kirk, media independence to report reality feels deeply imperiled.

Joining me now to break all of this down is Adam H. Johnson. He is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.

Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Johnson: Thank you so much for having me on.

JW: And just because this is a quick-moving news story, I want to tell everyone that we’re speaking on Wednesday, September 17.

So in the aftermath of the Kirk killing, there’s been a real dichotomy in the administration’s response. They eulogize Kirk as a defender of free speech, but want to restrict what people can say about him.

Just a few days ago, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and others made threats about targeting the left and the media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting. How could they go about punishing people and organizations?

AJ: What’s important to understand is that there’s obviously a very long history of exploiting traumatic moments to ram in preexisting agendas using the emotion of the moment to exploit people, right? You have obviously the creation of all kinds of draconian laws post-9/11, many of which are, by the way, still being used today to execute so-called war on terror. And in fact, Trump’s blowing up of boats in Venezuela recently — in the Caribbean rather — have used the same legal authority that was established on September 14, 2001. Obviously, after Katrina, charter school forces and the super wealthy who use that to privatize and to bring under state control schools in New Orleans.

There’s all kinds of examples we could list — the shock doctrine, right? It’s 101 stuff of how moments of trauma and heightened emotion are used to push preexisting agendas. In this administration and those in its orbit, specifically anti-Palestinian groups, pro-Israel groups especially, have been wanting to go after certain segments of the nonprofit world, the foundation world, take away their nonprofit status, thus kind of rendering them no longer viable, and then going after free speech more broadly in conjunction with this more avert right-wing takeover since Trump got in the office.

With respect to Jeff Bezos explicitly moving the Washington Post to the right: They no longer have any Black columnists in a newspaper that’s called the Washington Post, a city that is the largest Black city in the country in terms of percentages. You have the takeover at CBS of the Ellison family. The Ellison family will now own — very soon will own — CBS News, CNN, and TikTok. These forces have been brewing for a while in terms of snuffing out dissent.

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You know, there’s a kind of conventional wisdom in some parts of the liberal and left world that Trump does not plan on having an election in 2028, if not 2026. And I think that’s partly true, but I think that kind of misreads what he’s actually doing. I think what they’re doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them as part of these kind of brown-shirt campaigns, which we can get into, of doxing people based on their comments on social media, most of which are fairly benign.

And so you have this gathering storm, as I wrote In These Times, of all these anti-free speech, anti-assembly, anti-worker, anti-Palestine forces that are all coalescing, and they’re basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that’s being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they’ve long wanted to jam in.

And, and to be clear, they’re not coy about this. They’re fairly explicit about it. Stephen Miller especially is speaking in these kind of Marshall terms. These we’re gonna come get them — I mean, again, very sort of generic milquetoast George Soros funded liberal groups as terrorists, which anyone on the left would obviously smirk at because these Ford Foundation and Soros Foundation, they largely exist to, for want of a better term, co-op the left to sort of bring it into the partisan chum machine. They’re not there to promote extremism. Billionaires don’t typically promote extremism as a rule.

It’s all rather goofy, but really what they want to do is they want to get rid of any partisan opposition. And so that’s why they’ve been working to gut the administrative and liberal state since they came into office. Obviously Musk did this under the pretense of DOGE.

What this administration is doing and what they’ve done from the beginning — unlike the first time, which was obviously far more restrained by other elements — they continue to test the fence, right? Like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They’re testing the fence to see what they can get away with repeatedly, over and over and over again. And even someone who’s as jaded and as cynical as I am is surprised by how utterly weak and facile the liberal state has been in opposing Trump. The courts especially, which are supposed to be this kind of bulwark against authoritarianism, have mostly kind of rolled over with some notable exceptions and kind of let him do what he wants to do.

The opposition from Democrats in Congress, they are sleepy. Remember when Trump called Jeb Bush, low energy Jeb? They’re low energy Hakeem Jeffries and low energy Chuck Schumer. They don’t really seem like they’re up to the task. They have people like David Shor in their ear telling them, just focus on the economy. And it’s like, yeah, that’s generally true, but also like we should also focus on the authoritarian takeover that he’s planting. It’s kind of urgent, and by the way, it polls well too if you frame it the right way.

JW: You know what you mentioned in terms of the lack of opposition, and you wrote about this a little bit, a lot about this, in your piece. You said “This increasingly goofy harassment campaign would be bad enough if it weren’t married to tremendous state power.” And I guess, do you think the kind of goofy nature of the Trump administration of Trump in general, do you think that hides what he’s really doing? Or do you think that the media and the Democratic kind of larger apparatus is comfortable to hide behind the goofy nature of what he’s doing?

AJ: Well, I suppose what I meant by goofy in that context — although they are goofy and to some extent is, I mean, again, going after NFL teams for not doing a Charlie Kirk moment of silence — that you have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they’re going after everyone who doesn’t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning.

I mean, again, people throw the F-word I think kind of lightly, but this is a feature of fascism, which is absence of deference and absence of humiliation and obsequiousness rituals, is itself seen as suspect. So if you’re not towing the line and doing the obligatory kind of Ezra Klein mopey-left — left flagellation — piece, like we all need to do better, the left is partly responsible for this.

If you don’t run through these kind of motions of venerizing Kirk as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out, right? Ezra Klein wrote this 2,000 word piece on Charlie Kirk and didn’t once actually quote any Charlie Kirk words. And there’s a reason for that because he wasn’t the person he was making him out to be. But if you don’t go through this veneration process— This kind of faux morning. I mean they were baseball games. They were doing moments of silence right? In the Bronx. Like what does that have to do with anything? Again, you know, people die every day, right? School children, people in the Bronx are killed in gun violence, none of that merits this kind of response.

And this is all, again, pursuant to an effort to kind of 9/11 this situation. There’s no way that this group of people, right, there’s no way that Stephen Miller and JD Vance — these demagogues, these ideologues to a great extent — are going to let an opportunity like this pass up.

And so, I suppose what I meant by goofy harassment campaign is that it took on an element of organic vigilantism that was working with the White House, which is unprecedented. I mean, people want to talk about some of the vigilante elements of MeToo, or post-George Floyd, or people were getting fired for this or that comment. And we can talk about maybe, some of the ways in which that was not necessarily rigorous, but it was never in a million years backed by the White House. It was never backed by the Department of Justice. It was never backed by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Secretary of State.

I mean, these are, and this all started again with the Secretary of State working with Canary Mission, a shadowy Zionist group that has been trying to get people fired and doxed for several years now. Now they’re embedded in the state apparatus. Canary Mission was how they decided who to deport, who to rip away from their families, who to put in jail for months on end.

And you see this combination of brownshirtism, which is what these vigilante doxing efforts are. Going after random nobodies. There’s people with 1.2 million followers posting the names of the wife of a Texas Roadhouse manager in Boca Raton, Florida.

JW: Yeah, I remember you mentioning that.

AJ: Right. So these are nobodies. This is not any one of relative import. And they built this list of, as of Monday, it was 63,000 names. I’m sure the list is a hundred thousand. And they kept moving the goalposts. It started off with, oh, these are people that made light of, or supported the killing of Charlie Kirk.

And then it was people who were mean to him. Well, OK. And then it was people who misattributed a quote. And it’s like, well, the goalpost has to keep moving because what they realized very early on is that, despite what JD Vance kept insisting and kept insinuating in his three hour demagogue fest when he hosted Charlie’s Kirk show on Monday, that there’s no one in the media who made light of Charlie Kirk killing. Nobody.

No publication ran anything that did that. So what they had to do is they have to go do what’s called nut picking, right? This is kind of the Bernie bro formula of find a random person who supports you and then say, look, you’re responsible for this random person online. The left, the sort of George Soros Foundation, the Nation magazine, all these sort of left people are responsible for like a random Texas Roadhouse manager.

I mean, it’s absurd. And then you go into this demagogue cloud of rhetoric — and then the person listening says, “Oh my God, the media, the quote unquote media”— is making light of Charlie Kirk’s death or supporting it because they don’t make a distinction.

Vice President Vance did the exact same thing the week prior when he claimed that the media said that Trump was on his deathbed. The media never said that. It was just random shit-posters on Twitter. And so here you have this idea that there’s always this dark unnamed ill-defined left-wing conspiracy out to get them, and then that there justifies their state clampdowns.

The response from a lot of leftists and liberals is to say, “you’re hypocritical.” Here’s JD Vance saying you shouldn’t fire people for their speech two years ago. Here’s Elon Musk saying, you shouldn’t fire people for their speech on Twitter four years ago. It’s like, yeah, they know they’re hypocritical. They don’t care. They’re complete nihilists. They just care about one thing and that’s power.

And they will turn on a dime with the supposed free speech, which is why everyone knew in 2022 and 2023, all the free speech stuff from the right was bullshit. Of course it was inconsistent. Of course they didn’t care. Of course it was just because they were tired of being called racist and being called sex pests. Right?

JW: I think what you’re saying about power is really important. That what we’re talking about is, you know, the Trump administration is throwing all of this language about hate speech and who they’re going to go after. And in some ways it feels silly, but it’s also very real and it’s real to them clearly. I wrote about this in February and it still feels really applicable now, but I get this sense from the Trump administration that what they believe is that the role of government is to protect the American public in this really narrowly defined way, which to then means white Christian conservatives.

AJ: Yes.

JW: And so also what we’re seeing to me is also an effort to normalize the really extreme form of anti-Blackness that Charlie Kirk practiced and kind of punish those who call that out. What do you think both about how the Trump administration perceives their role and then also specifically with Charlie Kirk’s anti-Blackness and the normalization of that?

AJ: Yeah, I mean when “conservatism” — such as it is when it morphs into, and its popular domain, perhaps, again, I think there’s more systematic forces of capital at work here — but in its kind of popular domain it is literally devoid of any coherent intellectualism. It is literally just triggering the libs and putting bisexual baristas at Starbucks that you envision in your head and uppity Black women who you have as a manager at your shitty email job in the suburbs, putting them in their place is the entire animating force of conservative media and has been since the rise of Trump. And obviously you have anti-immigration as well.

When you see them talk. When you see them discuss these things, when you hear Elon Musk talk about it, there’s this idea that the white man was displaced. He was removed from his pedestal. It’s most manifested in terms of gender. It’s a hatred of women. But then when you have the kind of double whammy of a Black woman, then that visceral hatred is so raw and so real and traffics so well. I mean, and you see this with the whole Cracker Barrel dust up — which I think in some ways, again, speaking of goofy — that this really portended, I think this latest effort because they would always talk about it and then post this picture of some woman with glasses who looked like this avatar of woke and political correctness and the whole thing was so fucking dumb. As if these investment banks give a shit about social justice. They were just trying to appeal to younger demographics. But their whole world is animated by this idea that there’s these globalist forces — they traffic in anti-Semitic tropes a lot — that are conspiring with sort of high status Black people and high status women to remove you from your position.

And I’m not, again, I’m not saying anything particularly novel here — but you see the ways in which when you point that out with someone like Charlie Kirk — it does not comport with the facts. And you see that Kirk is a smart businessman. Although he is astro-turfed by billionaire and multimillionaire Republican donors, he knows full well where the base is going.

And he knows that this kind of going after MLK day trying to be edgy or trying to be more raw. And this is an element of, we’ve seen in conservative media, accelerated under Trump, which is how edgy can you be? How politically incorrect — “politically incorrect” — it can be. And when that becomes your animating force and then of course sort of marries with this idea that you’re going to preserve the white Christian man in more explicit terms, that you lose all pretense like you did say under the Bush years where like, I mean, go back and watch the 2004 Republican National Convention and it is an alien party.

I think the fundamental forces remain similar, remain the same, but the ways in which it speaks and talks about things like racism, like the way it talks about what the vision for society is. It used to be some modicum, some patina, of moral vision of like Black entrepreneurship, right?

It was horseshit, but at least it was something that felt inclusive.

JW: They pretended.

AJ: They pretended. And now they don’t even pretend it’s just raw white nationalist power. And maybe if you’re lucky, if you’re like South Asian or you’re sort of a polite Black person, you know, maybe they’ll let you in the club as a kind of token.

But broadly speaking that’s their entire animating force at work. And the whole administration’s been staffed with these nutters, which simply wasn’t the case in the first Trump administration. And you know this because, you know, my wife’s a reporter for Workday Magazine, and she repeatedly will send questions to the EPA or send questions to OSHA or send questions to the labor department. And the responses you get are batshit insane. They are like, “Trump was elected by the people.”

JW: Yup.

**AJ: “**These unelected bureaucrats and liberal journalists trying to do blah, blah, blah.” And you’re like, oh, like this is no longer even remotely a civil servant. They’ve replaced everyone with people that are in this cult.

People say it’s a cult of personality. It’s not. It’s a cult — it’s a cult of power. And whether that avatar is Trump, or whether it’s Vance — who’s of course, who’s seamlessly stepping into the role as demagogue in chief and is far more sophisticated than Trump — it is about power and it’s about the punishment of enemies.

And you’re seeing that on display here in a way that is going to be so overreaching and so overarching. And they are going to their allies in Congress and they’re working on passing laws that means the judges to the extent to which they provide any check to this power grab will basically be null and void.

And the Kirk killing and the disciplining of liberal media post that — and again, all the sort of mopey like, well, we need to do better kind of nonsense people do to fill space — that is being exploited to push through these preexisting agendas. Which again, I know the Intercept has reported a lot on it, specifically the nonprofit killer bill.

JW: Yeah.

AJ: Which saw a lot of support last November during the lame duck session, and then they tried to bring back in May, but it was killed. But I’m pretty convinced they’re going to take another swing at this thing along with other power grabs. Again, you have Marco Rubio, who wants to take away people’s passports based entirely on their — American citizens — based entirely on their ideological so-called support of terrorism, whatever, as Marco Rubio unilaterally deems fit. They’re coming and they’re coming hard for these groups, and they’re going to come hard for the liberal nonprofits who will not be safe.

And you saw this with a lot of the ways universities responded to these authoritarian bullying campaigns. There’s one thing I know about Trump is he knows how to size up weakness.

JW: Yeah.

AJ: He sees weakness in the liberal institutions and he knows how to exploit it. As does Stephen Miller, as does their team of 25-year-old Adderall fueled fucking Heritage Foundation interns who are all hardcore believers, is that people are looking to cover their own ass and their own institution’s ass. And they say, OK, well I’ll compromise here. I’ll just compromise here and he’ll leave us alone.

[Break]

JW: Thinking about narrative control and I’m thinking specifically media — the industry that we’re in. On Monday, President Donald Trump filed a $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times for their reporting on him. And to me, it seems like the president was likely emboldened by his success suing Paramount earlier this year.

AJ: Correct**.**

JW: Where the company agreed to pay him $16 million to settle a dispute over a 60 Minutes interview that he felt was unfairly favorable to his opponent, vice President Kamala Harris. I guess my question is, why do you think Trump is dropping this lawsuit now?

AJ: It’s a power play. He knows that if you sue these media companies, just like when you sue universities, it’s leverage. You have leverage over them to get other things from them. It’s not about the money. The money doesn’t even go to him, right. And what [Trump has] realized is that there’s no such thing as a unified liberal or left institutional system in place. There’s no cohesion. And this is what happens when your institutions get increasingly taken over by mercenaries, PR agents and lawyers as the Democratic Party and many of their institutions have, is that they don’t have any sense of solidarity.

There’s no coordination between anything. Everybody’s looking for their own ass. And it’s like what, you know, Picard says about the Borg, they invade this planet. We retreat, they invade this planet. We retreat. You know, the line must be drawn here, and there’s no sense that there’s ever a line drawn anywhere.

You know, occasionally you’ll get some pushback. You’ll get maybe a big lofty op-ed piece in the New York Times. But what he understands is that these institutions — since the liberal institutions got divorced from labor in particular — they don’t actually have any muscle. They don’t have any ideologues.

They don’t have any socialist in their tent anymore. These institutions at their top echelons are run by people in public relations. They’re run by pollsters, they’re run by mercenaries, they’re run by lawyers. They’re run by people who have no institutional sort of pedigree in solidarity as a concept.

And so he knows he can keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away. And unfortunately, I believe he’s wagered correctly. And the only meaningful bulwark one can hope is that the liberal state, such as it is, the sort of deference to the rule of law is at least something, whether it be the courts or separation of powers with respect to the states or some of these governors that are standing up here and there. I mean, that’s pretty much the big hope.

And you saw it. You saw it when he tried to bring in the National Guard to Chicago and Brandon Johnson and JB Pritzker told him to jump in a lake and he balked. Like all bullies, he probably is a paper tiger. The problem is there’s very little coherent — again, aside from these blue state governors really — there’s not really coherent opposition to Trump in any meaningful sense. And I think that’s what people are looking for. And I think that’s why your kind of random MSNBC-aunt has become so radicalized in the last six months because they’re seeing that.

Again, I mean the responses from the two most powerful Democrats in the Senate — whether it’s Trump bombing Iran, whether it’s Trump going after Gaza protestors — they’re just sleeping through this. There’s these lukewarm statements that come out. There’s again, all this language around compromise and bipartisanship. And they’re just not up to the task. Because again, I think that these institutions have become so atomized and so disparate that there’s no sense that they have any shared stakes here. And he knows this, so he is just picking off people one by one.

JW: Yeah, no, I think that’s really interesting. I think about it a lot. I live in D.C. I think about it a lot in the D.C. context, thinking about how we saw Mayor Muriel Bowser continuously capitulate to Trump. Obviously we saw Columbia University. I mean, pretty much everyone who has laid down has suffered.

But I want to get back to Paramount because there’s a lot obviously that’s happening with them. They’ve been the center of a lot of controversy. Last month regulators approved the merger of Skydance Media, founded by billionaire Larry Ellison’s son David Ellison and Paramount Global, which owns CBS in a highly criticized move.

After the merger, CBS canceled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who had obviously been an outspoken critic of the president. Paramount is also reportedly in talks to purchase the Free Press and install its founder, conservative media commentator Bari Weiss as the editorial advisor for CBS. What do you make of the direction CBS is going and do you think it says anything more broadly about the media landscape?

AJ: Yeah, I mean, look, you know, David Ellison is someone who donates millions of dollars to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. When he announced his purchase of, or his attempt to purchase Paramount a year ago, he put out a press release in the Jerusalem Post saying that this was going to be good for Israel. It’s not his only motive.

He obviously, as a conservative, has other ideological preferences, but clearly one of the motivators here is that Israel’s losing the PR battle. You look at Israel’s support among people under the age of 40, it basically doesn’t exist, especially among Democrats. Jewish people in the United States below the age of 40, almost uniformly say it’s a genocide, not uniformly, but overwhelmingly say it’s a genocide. And overwhelmingly we don’t care about Israel. They are losing the PR battle. Everybody knows this. You can’t commit a genocide in 4K in 2023, 2024, and 2025 without losing support. So, you know, the effort is, I think, largely just to kind of control the narrative more.

The Ellison family is buying TikTok. They’re buying CBS and they’re buying CNN. That’s a lot of media right there. And obviously you have MSNBC kind of shedding its liberal appearance. It fired its, you know, primary pro Gaza personality Joy-Ann Reid. And she says explicitly it was over Gaza.

So I think part of the goal is from these mega billionaire pro-Israel media owners is to just control the narrative. I mean, they’re quite open about it. You know, Shari Redstone, who owned CBS prior to that, who actually sold it to the Ellison family herself, was a funder for the IDF. And herself intervened twice on behalf of Israel, scolding 60 Minutes to the extent to which longtime producer Bill Owens left over that. And 60 Minutes is really what they want. 60 Minutes is considered a gold standard of journalism. So if you can have 60 minutes, produce a bunch of stories about, you know, Hamas sleeper cells in Columbia [University] and human shields over hospitals or whatever kind of nonsense, and give it the kind of veneer of serious journalism— I mean, that’s what Jeffrey Goldberg did to the Atlantic, right? It’s again, another former IDF prison guard who turned the Atlantic Magazine into a totally one-note pro-Israel propaganda rag.

You lend it this kind of liberal veneer — this credible veneer — and that’s ultimately what you’re paying for. And so people have framed Ellison’s takeover as a kind of pro-Trump thing, and it’s true to an extent, but it’s also very much about helping Israel finish out its genocide over the next year or two in Gaza, and then eventually the annexing of the West Bank as a kind of ideological project, which is why you hire Bari Weiss.

Bari Weiss is not a journalist. They keep referring to her as a journalist. I mean, name me one piece of journalism Bari Weiss has done that’s notable or credible. Can you do it? I can’t. It doesn’t exist because she’s not a journalist. She, like me, is a pundit and that’s fine. I’m a pundit. I tell people at parties, I’m a pundit. I have no shame in that. But I’m not a journalist and neither is she.

JW: Yeah.

AJ: She does not produce journalism. The Free Press does not produce journalism. It produces commentary and demagoguery and genocide denial first and foremost. If you use the math of subscribers, which they allegedly are worth $150 to $200 million. My guess is that The Intercept would be worth about a hundred million dollars. And I think we can all agree that there’s no one willing to buy The Intercept for $100 million dollars.

JW: Not that I know of.

AJ: Obviously this is an artificial valuation. Obviously it’s to bring in Bari Weiss to take the CBS news brand and turn it into a Zionist propaganda rag. Ellison also wants to buy Warner Brothers, which is CNN. Again, it’s not like these things don’t make money on their own anyway, but if you can have an ideological play toy and buy the brand — because ultimately you’re just buying the brand, right, you’re buying the name — and turn it into your own ideological play toy, then that’s what you do. Because if I have, you know, $40 billion, what’s $2 billion to me? It’s nothing. It’s pocket change. It’s going to align with other things that benefit people like the Ellisons in terms of low taxes. I’m sure they’ll do stuff against labor. I mean, name it. But the thing is that CBS had institutional power. CBS News had institutional power within Paramount, 60 Minutes, especially, had institutional power. People that worked in there for decades and even if you wanted to, they were hard to purge. And it’s very clear you bring in Bari Weiss to do that, to purge out the sort of last vestiges of independence.

Again 60 Minutes is already not good. 60 Minutes already has David Simon doing Pentagon press releases and you know, denied U.S. participation in the mass killing in Yemen in 2016 and 2017. I’ve written about this, but, so they’re already not great. But like everything in the Trump era, you take things that are already bad and you make them much, much worse.

And you say, oh, well look at that. It got worse. And I think that’s the gambit here. The gambit is to take Trump aligned billionaires and then you add on the extra layer of helping propagandize on behalf of Israel and trying to sort of recalibrate public opinion in favor of genocide. You own TikTok, CBS and you’re halfway there really.

Within six months to nine months, we’ll be getting all sorts of stories about, you know, Hamas sleeper cells inside of the Intercept.

JW: [Laughs.]

AJ: I mean, whatever. I mean, I’m not even joking. I mean, this is the kind of schlock that the Free Press pumps out. And this is the kind of schlock he wants to— That’s why you buy this stuff. And again, this is by his own statements.

Skydance published a press release in the Jerusalem Post saying this was what’s going to happen. They didn’t phrase it in those sinister terms. They said like good for Israel, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it’s basically what he’s doing.

And so you know, that is obviously very, very ominous because our liberal institutions — and I’m writing a book on this to be published in March, about the failures of liberal media, so-called liberal media or center left media, you know, MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS — not the failures, I would say the sort of deliberate attempt to help and The New York Times, et cetera, to promote the genocide in Gaza.

But there was always this kind of liberal veneer. This kind of liberal performance of objectivity. And I think we’re sort of just going to see that more and more go away. We’re going to get this more overt kind of cartoon propaganda that is not very sophisticated, but I think what people realize is that it still kind of works as long as it has this sort of trappings of real journalism.

And again, this is what the Free Press is. I mean, the Free Press published a story about the “myth of famine” in Gaza in May of 2025, and then turns around in July of 2025, once these images started to appear — these horrific images of emaciated children — saying, actually there’s starvation, but it’s not that bad.

So you have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina, this kind of veneer of universalism and everything is just about the exercise of raw power, the exercise of pure racist propaganda. So yeah, look, things are bad. But I think what we’ve learned is that they can get worse.

One could make the argument that, OK, well once this sort of liberal veneer is erased from a lot of this performance, can we have a discussion about what it means for the left, such as it is, to have power? What does it mean to exercise power? Why are we always the one to defer to the referees? Why are we always the ones to refer to the parliamentarians? Why are they always the ones to act like, you know, oh, sorry, there’s some mysterious rule we can’t do it. You know, maybe at the very least, this could invite a conversation about what it means to live in a world where one side cares deeply about power and the other side cares deeply about playing by the rules. And those are two totally different criteria for success.

JW: Yeah. And I want to— Obviously I have heard on this podcast things are bad, but things are about to get a lot worse multiple times, and it never gets any less scary. But one question I did have kind of on the media power grab from the billionaire class that you’ve been talking about, that you’ve been writing about that I think is really important. I mean, do you think we can put the alleged firing of Karen Attiah from the Washington Post within that kind of larger billionaire class power grab

AJ: Yes. 100 percent. This is literally— I’m surprised she lasted that long, to be honest.

JW: Mm-hmm.

AJ: I think back in February when Jeff Bezos published that open letter saying he was going to support patriotism and free markets, you know, very thinly veiled codes for here’s our new right-wing ideology, both to sort of suck up to Trump, but also, I mean, again, he’s worth $500 billion. You don’t really have to twist a guy’s arm hard who is worth $500 billion to be a right-wing racist, right? That was the position they were going and they brought in editors from The Economists, you know, a kind of pseudo highbrow right-wing rag, and that was the direction they were taking. I know, you know, people like Perry Bacon left, who again we’re familiar with and lived within the milieu of progressive politics. There was a reason why he did it in February of 2025. You know, billionaires are good at adapting to the winds. They were never going to be liberal or God forbid, left or anything like that.

But under Biden, they kind of knew where the political winds were, and they played ball. And now once Trump takes office, then everyone can sort of drop the act. You know, Zuckerberg doesn’t have to act like he wants to be your friend and do these bullshit little world tours. Once Trump takes office a second time, everyone can say, oh, finally I can just kind of come out as a right-winger.

And you saw that. And you know, it’s like with the Columbia stuff. People kept referring to Columbia as capitulation with respect to Trump. But look, a lot of those things that they supported were things that the administrators and the donors and the deans they wanted to support anyway. To some extent, I feel like a lot of these wealthy center, center-left types like Bezos, like Gates, like the, you know, Columbia donors, they don’t necessarily agree with the far-right — everything in the far right agenda, especially all the kind of red meat stuff — but they believe that Trump is useful in disciplining their mutual enemies: A, Gaza protestors; B, the sort of “woke left,” the nonprofit types who they thought got way too big for their britches post George Floyd. And they wanted to instrumentalize Trump to go after their mutual enemies. That’s what they’re doing. So like, yes, are they capitulating? Are they bending the knee? To an extent, but I think one doesn’t want to overplay that dynamic.

I think that a lot of people in the ruling class, again, this is why he raised more money from the Republican Party in 2024, raised more money from billionaires than Democrats did. I think they know that they can use Trump to their own ends. They can use it to gut the federal government. They can use it, of course, to lower taxes. They can use it to bloat the military, all kinds of typical Republican stuff.

He does it, he just does it with a little bit of vulgarity that they had to kind of distance themselves from, but ultimately, like they believe that he can be instrumentalized to discipline their mutual enemies, and I think a lot of those on the fence don’t necessarily realize that they’re not going to stop at just mutual enemies. They’re going to keep going. And this is, I think, where you do see this bend the knee element more and more where it’s like, oh, well they’re going to just keep going and going. They’re going after, you know, when they said they were gonna go after immigrants, they were being sincere.

JW: Yeah.

AJ: I mean, again, look at tariffs like something that nobody, like most of the ruling class does not support tariffs. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t like them. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hates them, but Trump does them because he ideologically believes in it. He also has this weird thing where he treats politics like he’s playing a game of Risk. Like it’s very weird, right? Take over Greenland. It’s absurd.

But to the extent to which they will indulge the ridiculousness of what Trump does because he’s so effective at snuffing [out] the mutual enemies — of labor, of the left, of nonprofit people — of these left-wing constituents who the ruling class uniformly hates. Environmentalists, you know, climate change activists, you name it. Everyone’s running around putting out fires. No one’s got time to protest Jeff Bezos anymore. So it’s like, yeah, it’s a little bit of capitulation, but I think that can be overstated.

I also think Trump ultimately — idiosyncrasies around tariffs and stuff aside — he largely, 90 percent, just carries out the wishes of the very rich in this country and they’ll deal with the other weird psychodrama around that.

So if they can, you know, get rid of the Color of Change and Palestinian Youth Movement and all these groups that give them a big fucking headache —that they don’t like —that’s what they’ll do.

JW: And I want to ask about the role of the media. We tend to be really careful about how we’re perceived. Most of us who call ourselves journalists — but even those who call ourselves pundits depending on how you see yourself — we don’t want to seem biased or emotional or angry or insensitive. Objectivity is this really core tenant of our industry. But do we have what it takes to meet this moment with all of that kind of fear and anxiety and all the things that we have that hold us back?

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