If corporate US media outlets had platformed my 2024 coverage of Project 2025, they might not be writing screeds about how unfairly they’re being treated today. Because I told everyone what Project 2025 planned for journalism. It was clear. They spelled it out.
It isn’t enough to look at what’s happening and shriek *How dare they do that!? *Many of the same US journalists failed to take Project 2025 seriously or report on its contents when it might have made a difference. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect another outcome.
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Everyone is writing about the regime’s attacks on media and the free press.
Like it’s shocking.
A surprise.
A new low no one ever thought this crowd would plumb.
This coverage is especially tone deaf coming from a press corps that had Project 2025 fully available to read and question in the lead-up to the 2024 election. I begged more than a couple of the outlets who are now treating us to navel-gazing outrage to feature my P2025 work. If anything demonstrates the utter worthlessness of a good swath of the United States media system, it is this story. I include many purple-checkmark Substack refugees from that compromised, broken system in my assessment.
For the balance of the week, let’s review the various media and entertainment connections I made in 2024 and connect the dots to what’s happening now. Because this isn’t just about certain reporters and news teams being banned from the White House.
We’re going to look at how the following events are linked:
A president/dictator banning news outlets from the White House because of reporting he doesn’t like.
A mammoth media/entertainment merger green-lighted by this regime with a complicit opposition party governor helping the president/dictator’s son-in-law broker 49% ownership of the new entity by three wealthy Muslim countries governed by Sharia law.
A “romantic comedy” that imagines what the US would be like if everyone was chipped and could only have extra-marital sex one night per year.
Meta banning ads in Europe that feature the themes of “civil rights” or “feminism.”
But to connect these dots, we must go back and read my 14 October 2024 newsletter: WHAT IF LEONARD LEO BECAME KING OF HOLLYWOOD?
Source:
[ProPublica We Don’t Talk About Leonard by Andy Kroll]In late 2021, Leo took over as chairman of a
[“private and confidential” group called the Teneo Network]. In a promotional video for the group, Leo sits on a couch in a charcoal jacket, no tie. Over upbeat music, Leo says: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. At some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘Well,where things are really messed up right now?’” Leo went on to say his goal was to “roll back” or “crush liberal dominance.”if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life
What * other areas of American culture and American life* might Leo be talking about?
I speak this language. I KNOW WHAT HE’S GUNNING FOR. Bear with me while I lay this groundwork, because the bullet-pointed events I highlighted earlier relate directly to Leonard Leo and this week’s media manipulations.
I grew up in a Christian Nationalist household where all of the following were forbidden:
**All movies.**I couldn’t see a Disney movie because some not-saved soul might see me in line and think I was going to see The Exorcist. What kind of Christian testimony would that be?**All secular music.**My church hosted the propagandist who toured the country playing rock albums backwards and finding demonic messages everywhere. All secular music was demonic and Satanic. My pastor often claimed its evil beats came from devil-worshipping African jungle tribes (because that wasn’t racist at all.) While I was famously busted at summer church camp for having a Duran Duran tape and Walkman in my bag, I had to sneak listens to Tears for Fears and George Michael and Elton John and Talking Heads.**All books that included intimacy before marriage or endorsed ideas that were not Biblical (as defined by Christian Nationalists.)**I wasn’t allowed to read VC Andrews. Or Judy Blume.Or any of the books on this Young Adult Book list from the 1980s.Christian Nationalists’ objection to any physical intimacy and non-prudish plot lines made the careers of “inspirational” romance writers like Janette Oke. I accidentally bought a modern version of one of these books several months ago. I almost threw it across the room after the tenth time the female protagonist thought about kissing a man to whom she was attracted and went to church instead to purge her lustful mind of dirty thoughts.**Video games.**While my sibling had a basic Atari, we weren’t allowed to spend much time playing it. We couldn’t have certain versions of PacMan because they turned into ghosts and ghouls (aka demonic). And we weren’t allowed to go to arcades because they were dens of satanic science fiction, gratuitous violence, and nudity.**If any area might get the attention of Gen Z men, it’s this one.**It doesn’t matter that Elon Musk has basically turned his Nazi site and AI platform into a 24/7 porn generator. This objectification and vilification of women in young male spaces is crucial to remaking a white male supremacist Christian world.**All art.**Museums are packed with naked paintings and sculptures, photographs and films that glorify the debauchery and depravity of their creators. A Florida school didn’t only ban images of Michelangelo’s David because it is nude; Michelangelo was also a rumored homosexual. They believe art is evil because the people who make it are craven and perverse.**All sex except for procreation between heterosexual married couples.**I’ve written extensively about how I knew nothing about sex. My mother believed birth control pills caused abortions. I was told to abstain until my wedding night. Christian Nationalists deem any intimate act outside of heterosexual marriage for procreation to be pornography.
Still, many Americans roll their eyes and laugh and go They want to ban porn. Riiiiiiiiiiight. Good luck with that one!
In
[an interview with the], Leo—the founder and cochair of the Federalist Society—said he expects this initiative will take up $1 billion of the $1.6 billion that Chicago electronic device heir Barre Seid used to bankroll the Marble Freedom Trust, Leo’s ambitious new nonprofit foundation to[Financial Times]spread right-wing influence across the cultural landscape.Leo told“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,”FTreporter Alex Rogers.“So we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.”
ENTERTAINMENT = HOLLYWOODENTERTAINMENT = MUSICENTERTAINMENT = STREAMINGENTERTAINMENT = PUBLISHINGENTERTAINMENT = GAMINGENTERTAINMENT = THEATREENTERTAINMENT = ART
Source:
[ProPublica We Don’t Talk About Leonard by Andy Kroll]Leo’s own rhetoric has grown more extreme. Late last year, he accepted an award from the Catholic Information Center previously given out to Scalia and Princeton scholar Robert George. Rather than strike a celebratory tone, he reminded his audience of Catholicism’s darkest days in history starting with the Siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. Today, he continued, Catholicism remained under threat from what he called “
” who he calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan.” These opponents, he said, “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigotsAnd after Dobbs, these barbarians were “conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.”
I have no doubt Leo is at the heart of headlines like this one from yesterday’s AP:
Or this one from yesterday’s Guardian:
Anyone who produces, writes, draws, paints, films, stars in, designs, or otherwise creates entertainment that goes against the Christian Nationalist interpretation of the Bible. AND anyone who consumes it.
Look at everything Leonard Leo learned from corrupting our courts. It won’t take him several decades to strip our entertainment of anything interesting or varied or meaningful. His silent partnership with the Ellisons, Jared Kushner, and the Saudis/Omanis/Qataris is convenient, because it unites groups already steeped in systems of authoritarian information control and targets every aspect of how Americans find and consume information and entertainment.
At the same time Leonard Leo was amassing billions to take over US media and entertainment, the Heritage Foundation was writing Project 2025. Its sections on free speech and US media are relevant today, because THEY TOLD US EXACTLY WHAT THEY WOULD DO. What most Americans still dismiss as chaos is very much the planned total destruction of journalism and reliable yet inconvenient-to-the powerful information.
We’ll revisit those sections tomorrow to divine what might lie ahead. Since I was right about everything I said in 2024 on this topic, maybe more Americans will take this threat seriously now.
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