I learned that Charlie Kirk was dead by seeing a video of his assassination on social media. It is an unfortunate sign of our times, when “If it bleeds it leads” has been replaced with “Monetize misery.” I hate it. I also hated the feelings of the next few days, of watching so many professional thinkers, writers and public figures serve, whether intentionally or unwittingly, the president’s agenda.
A text from a smart, well-informed friend snapped me out of my emotional paralysis. “Who,” she asked incredulously, “was this guy?” She had never heard of Kirk, his organization or the political infrastructure that had produced him, but his grand public funeral rites and the lionization that accompanied them were inescapable. With few exceptions, people looking for an answer to that question found that broadcast, legacy, print, digital, cable, streaming and independent outlets were speaking with a remarkably singular voice.
Her confusion was a sign of the times. Whether you want to call it authoritarianism or not, the president is criminalizing dissent, from regular people and comedians to political rivals. The culture of retribution breeds a natural but regrettable human impulse to self-censor in our public squares. Some of us fight that impulse by anxiously learning vocabularies to track Trump 2.0’s destruction — tariffs, shadow dockets, self-deportation, unitary executive theory. But we must acknowledge that it is becoming harder to be informed, and that is by design.
For years, I’ve taught students how to vet the quality of information, how to check sources against their biases and how to triangulate competing facts. It is part of being a responsible citizen, I tell them. If you want to consume a balanced media diet, you might read international news through your local library’s online platform. Or you might tune into public radio or television. Maybe you would contextualize today’s news with the long perspective at a museum, a university lecture or a deeply researched book.
Reading and research aren’t yet illegal or impossible. But they are in danger of becoming so. President Trump has defunded museums, libraries and public media. He has directed public parks, memorials and cultural institutions to remove historical references to slavery, Indigenous people, women, trans and queer people and anything else that he doesn’t like. Conservative activists have criminalized reading lists in schools, backed conservative centers on university campuses to sanitize critical thinking and funded social media influencers to promote right-wing talking points.
Intellectuals once mocked the campy partisanship of Fox News, but the joke’s on us. Corporate consolidation and deep-pocketed tech executives are making it so we’re all living in the information world that Fox News built.
Of the 19 centibillionaires on Forbes’s wealth tracker, at least six have significant control of American media. Some of them want more. One of them is Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and a certified friend of Trump. The Ellison family is poised to make a series of deals that would make it one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of corporate media. The question of who will own TikTok — a platform that has more than 170 million users in the United States — looks as though it’s finally going to be resolved, after Trump signed an executive order that will hand control over to a coterie of his admirers that will probably include Ellison.
Ellison’s son, David, took control of Paramount this summer in a deal that reportedly came with political concessions. The Paramount portfolio includes CBS, among other media brands. Credible reporting says another merger is on the horizon, between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns — among many things — CNN. If this merger goes through (and industry watchers expect it will face little opposition), CNN, CBS News and a host of lifestyle stations will all be under Ellison family leadership. They aren’t pitching this deal as the MAGA Media Empire industry analysts see it as, but the Ellison family also hasn’t signaled a commitment to remain nonpartisan or independent.
Major media changes usually sound like just inside baseball. But the consolidation happening now — which used to be anathema to antitrust regulation — is bigger than simply industry gossip. It is part of a larger trend of monopolistic control that weakens our civic health. It is also a sign of this administration’s direct influence over the press, of citizens’ First Amendment rights and our very sense of reality. This consolidation wave isn’t only about amassing wealth; it is also part of a political project to make all information partisan.
The past two weeks showed us what that future looks like. The administration and its deep-pocketed allies sent up a trial balloon: Mourn, or else.
Trump is known for saying a lot of things that he can’t or won’t back up. This time, the threats are real.
The president of the United States said that he believes critical stories about him are “illegal.” (They are not.) The State Department gave that message teeth, with its leaders saying the United States would penalize visa seekers and holders who celebrated or rationalized Kirk’s killing. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to target protesters for speech acts she considered hate speech, before walking that back a few steps. Universities fired professors. School districts fired teachers. MSNBC fired an analyst. JD Vance condemned so-called leftist celebrators for dividing a nation. A now defunct website appeared with the name Exposing Charlie’s Murderers, marking for harassment or doxxing ordinary people who did not, in someone’s opinion, appropriately grieve. And we can be almost certain that an army of accounts — some controlled, presumably, by China, Russia and other countries — sprang into action to stoke our national division.
What we have seen in the wake of Kirk’s assassination is an old Red Scare playbook, when corporate antagonism to New Deal reforms dovetailed with political witch hunts. Once again, state forces are colluding with corporations to erase ideas they do not like by harassing people who represent ideas that they don’t want to exist. This time, the witch hunt for bad people with bad ideas is guided by an unhinged theory of unitary executive power, a rapaciously illegitimate Supreme Court and corporate interests that control both the medium and the message. If you have not experienced the kind of supercharged harassment this environment breeds, count yourself lucky. But don’t count yourself safe. Academics, professors, teachers, librarians and other civil servants have been living under the censorious threat of defamation, stalking and politically motivated violence since Red Scare techniques went digital. Trump is promising to do the same to anyone else he considers an enemy.
For at least the past 15 years, my colleagues in academia have grappled with angry letters to university officials for doing their jobs. They have weathered campaigns for their firing. They have contended with an internet army obsessed with doxxing them, their parents, their kids. I’ve been contacted by the F.B.I. more than once in my career. Not because I hold any important state secrets or know a biker gang but because one of my colleagues has lived with so much sustained harassment from right-wing “activists” that it has become a matter of federal concern. Watch lists (one of which was constructed by Kirk’s organization) do not distinguish between public intellectuals at wealthy enclaves and hoi polloi who teach popular classes at cash-strapped schools. In either case, an army of trained provocateurs stands ready to destroy their lives to prove their bona fides as conservative activists. That threat has been chilling speech on campuses for years. Now it’s coming for all of you.
That anyone with a rudimentary understanding of history, politics, economics or even pragmatic common sense would call the way these provocateurs operate civil debate says just how poorly prepared any of us are for what lies in front of us.
Debate is a luxury of norms and institutional safety, two things that Trump’s second administration has systematically destroyed. So many Americans love the idea that debate solves tough political problems because we love the idea of American exceptionalism. Forget the bloody wars of independence, secession and expansion and remember the epistolaries. We flatter ourselves. There was never a time when rank-and-file Americans perfected the ideas of the Republic without violence or oppression. Debates among founding fathers were games among similarly classed white male property owners. Women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, disabled people, poor people, some immigrants — they were all excluded from the civic sphere we valorize now as the height of American civility.
If our obsession with debate was merely a romantic delusion, it would be one thing to misapply it to our current political reality. But it is worse than that. An obscene amount of money has turned debate into a weapon, deliberately honed to punish good-faith participation by making us feel like fools for assuming the best of an ideological opponent who only wants to win. Since the days when the conservative scion William F. Buckley Jr. started planning for a conservative resurgence, activist organizations have spent millions of dollars to teach conservative foot soldiers the art of coercive “debate.” Over decades, the right has methodically built institutional safe spaces for conservative thought, poured millions into training young conservatives, legitimized first talk radio and then conservative TV news and then the alt-right blogosphere. This machine built, in some respects, Charlie Kirk, and then he built others like him.
The weaponization of debate is so well known that it is a meme: a guy with a table and a sign that says “Change my mind.” On the day he was killed, Kirk was sitting in a tent with a similar label, “Prove me wrong.” Sounds harmless enough in theory, but performative debate metastasizes. Whether in the form of abortion opponents who show up to “debate” women about why bodily autonomy is a sin or scientific racists who show up to “debate” Black and Indigenous thinkers about the rational arguments of their human depravity, the aim isn’t debate but debasement.
You can be forgiven for not knowing this. Professional intellectuals and political observers cannot be forgiven for pretending not to know this. It is not hidden history.
The conservative apparatus that went on to write the authoritative Project 2025 weaponized “debate” to hijack institutions. Its strategy holds centrist liberals to their romantic notion of themselves as rational (and, yes, their hubris about their superiority) while it is committed only to sowing chaos. Steve Bannon, the alt-right’s major-domo, once called this “muzzle velocity.” Create chaos at all costs. Confuse people as to the difference between ethical objections and legal claims. Confuse them about the bounds of womanhood so as to capture their angst about changing expectations of manhood. Confuse people about whether the sky is blue or the grass is green while you shape their fear into rage and then commodify their rage into profit.
If you were someone who had long lived with the consequences of this kind of debate, then you recognized it for what it is: its own kind of political violence.
But if you were someone who was just trying to understand what some people thought was so bad about Kirk, you were largely out of luck. The best evidence of what Kirk wanted to talk about were his own words, conspicuously absent from so many of the hagiographies that followed his killing. Instead, you almost certainly would have heard the loudest claim: that the left and the Democrats and the professors and the universities are violent, irrational anti-Americans mocking the death of a good old boy who just wanted to talk.
If you are more sophisticated than the average media consumer, you probably turned to social media. Your internet feeds are probably curated, even vetted for legitimate news sources. But that vetting is also wholly ineffectual in a world where algorithms have their thumb on the scale of media dissemination. And when those algorithms are controlled — or are poised to be controlled — by deeply conservative social media conglomerates, what could once have been a digital public square becomes a battleground for ideological intimidation. Every good-faith questioner is now a dissenter. You either open yourself up to harassment or, like most people, you choose silence. And if silence is the only logical choice, then authoritarianism has arrived.
I’ve not wanted to say this next bit. It should be someone else’s job. Someone who has not been living for the better part of 15 years with the violence of a well-trained, deeply financed army of gotcha ideologues who hijack classrooms, comment sections, corporate-controlled social media and now many of the biggest and most powerful media and political institutions in the world. Frankly, I feel I have written enough about the way culture shapes political power, why the internet is not a twee political concern and how much violence is trucked into the discourse by ironic humor.
But I feel compelled to tell you that if the past two weeks have unsettled you, there is a very good reason.
The president of the United States has both direct coercive power of the state and, by and large, indirect power over communication institutions. He has shown how he will use that power. He will punish enemies, yes. And if you agree that teachers, librarians, professors, left-leaning journalists and anyone who isn’t white, conservative and Christian are enemies, you may enjoy this comeuppance. But he has also shown that he will punish people who agree with him — but not enough or not in the right way or just because it is a Tuesday.
The merging of state power and economic power around one man who accepts that power as his due would not be possible without the algorithmic grift that has so all-consumingly captured our attention. The internet and the people who, for all intents and purposes, now own it have excelled at making Trump good at authoritarianism. They commodified information. They quelled regulation. They escaped blame for degrading collective action while raking in profits for spectacles of violence that degradation predictably produces. Now, via their president, they are using it to crush the First Amendment, to supercharge the Second Amendment, to stand up bot armies and real armed militias to defend their ownership of your civil liberties.
They turned that power against the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Many of you will have taken heart in the fact that Disney’s suspension of him shocked the public’s sensibilities enough that users could change his fate. After he was yanked off the air, a consumer boycott of Disney+ and Hulu followed, as people canceled services en masse. Reporting by Marisa Kabas suggests that Disney reinstated Kimmel because the company was poised to raise subscription prices for those streaming services; a consumer boycott would have impeded those plans.
But at the risk of harshing our high, even with Kimmel back on the air, we should still contend with how the right used media’s many affordances — the algorithms, the manufacturing of consent, the suppression of dissent — to carry out a presidential grudge.
A rage farmer who monitors late-night shows for supposed liberal bias harvested one of Kimmel’s milquetoast comedy bits and posted it on X, where it was amplified by a network of conservative influencers and radio and television hosts until the administration had an opportunity to silence its enemies. The message, delivered by an F.C.C. chairman and overreaching broadcasters, was simple: Shut Kimmel up, or we will shut you up. Disney made the cool, calm, rational decision to violate this country’s most deeply held beliefs in First Amendment speech because the company read the room. Trump is the state, and the internet is the market that gives Trump his power to rule it. To rule all of us.
Now imagine that power being wielded by a family — certified friends of Trump — that owns the news you consume, the entertainment you watch and the social media platform half of Americans use, which a substantial portion of them use as their primary source of information. That threat is still looming.
So by all means, celebrate a burst of collective action that reinstated a TV show host and vote the bums out if you get the chance. But voting won’t be enough, just as canceling the Disney app won’t be enough. When I look at the consumer response to Disney censoring Kimmel, I don’t see an allegory for America’s salvation. I see a threat — that we will see ourselves as the authoritarians see us, users whose only power is in our pocketbook.
We can’t just reject the threat. We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks. That’s a desecration of civics, as corrosive as the idea that debate is the pinnacle of civil discourse. It cheapens our actions by degrading what we believe is possible. Our power isn’t in making one of the choices that are presented to us. Our power is in shaping the choices available to us.
The fusion of corporate control and government power that empowered this administration will need to be unmade. Courts will need to be reconfigured. Market power will need to be subsumed to electoral power. Bureaucratic legitimacy will need to be restored. Information will need to be competitive and available.
To achieve any of those goals, we will have to become far less complacent and far less scared. We also will have to organize. Because no citizen who simply settles for being a consumer of democracy should expect to have a real democracy ever again.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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