The Few and the Worst

Corporate consolidation and the necessary fight for independent media

Larry Ellison’s terrifying media portfolio

I found out yesterday that I was permanently banned from TikTok. I don’t really know why. Two days ago, I was informed that I had two strikes for content violations against me . Apparently in the 24-hour period following, I got another strike. What happened between then and now? I can’t tell you because I went from being locked out of my TikTok account to not having one anymore.

This isn’t exactly surprising. We knew that things at TikTok were going to get bad for left-landing accounts when Donald’s buddy, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and now in control of a mind-boggling share of American media. When the Ellison deal finally went through, the U.S. Treasury (ostensibly) received a “transaction fee” in the amount of $10 billion.

The fix was already in and I suppose it was just a matter of time. But TikTok really had to dig deep to find “offensive” content in my account: the first video they flagged was posted back in October 2024. I incurred the second strike for a recent video in which I criticized FCC chair Brendan Carr for threatening to pull the licenses of networks that report the news about the Iran war accurately.

It’s increasingly the case that creator content critical of Donald and the Trump regime is getting suppressed across many platforms—I’ve been dealing with suppression on Twitter since Musk took over in 2022— but the suppression ranges from a slight but noticeable downtick in views and overall engagement to absolute throttling.

There are certain things the powers that be at TikTok don’t want people talking about. Jeffrey Epstein, for example, and the fact that Donald is mentioned in the Epstein files over a million times with only half of the six million documents having been released by Donald’s corrupt DOJ, which, in this instance as in many others, is acting as Donald’s personal defense firm.

In the wake of unprecedented media consolidation, the sands are shifting rapidly in the American media landscape leading to changes some of which we should have a anticipated—the skewing of coverage, the siloing of information, and the creation of something that increasingly looks like state run media. What we can’t yet foresee are the ways in which the capitulation of corporate media, the failures of traditional media, and the silencing of critical voices will impact the future of our democracy.

This is a five-alarm fire. Many of those who control the biggest and most influential media platforms, like Ellison, Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are complicit with the Trump regime because they know the only way to retain or acquire lucrative government contracts is to stay on Donald’s good side through compliments and coverage that is favorable to him. As a result, it’s getting harder for people to get easy access to verifiable facts.

I fully believe that independent media is the future of media in America. A robust, flexible, unafraid independent media universe is what is going to get us through these dark times. We need an array of voices out there making the case for our country, presenting people with facts, and giving them an unfiltered but deeply considered perspective.

The question is, with more power being concentrated in the hands of those with an agenda that aligns (or pretends to align) with a fascist regime, what are the rest of us going to do about it?

While its getting harder on some platforms for Mary Trump Media to get our content in front of our subscribers, we recognize that when we cannot get the kind of reach we want in one place, we have to go other places. When we get locked out of TikTok, we have to turn our attention elsewhere.

Our goal is to be show up in as many places as humanly possible. That, of course, requires resources and it requires the thoughtful deployment of the resources we have. These are times that require flexibility and creativity with an eye to having as much impact as possible during what is the most critically important period we have ever lived through.