Brooke Gladstone: Last month, we kicked off a challenge. If we could get 500 listeners to step up and support On the Media with a donation by the end of October, we'd unlock $15,000 from George Hanby, a retired seventh-grade world geography teacher who listens to the show from his home in Castagnaro, Italy. Well, to date, 400 of you decided to help. Fabulous. Now we only need the last hundred, the proud, the strong, the procrastinating. Then we'll meet the challenge, which is a real thing, in case you were wondering, and get the extra $15,000, which is actually a lot. Maybe we can buy some stories or pay for travel out of New York, which we used to do some years back, or most likely and certainly most important, support the show while offering On the Media free of charge to the public radio stations hit hardest by the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To give you an extra incentive, when you give $12 a month, we'll send you an On the Media hat, a light blue baseball-style cap with the On the Media logo stitched on the front. Please go to onthemedia.org/donate. From all of us here at OTM to all of you, thank you so much. Now on with the show.

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President Trump: You look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. It's so bad, it's so crazy.

Micah Loewinger: A federal judge in Oregon has called Trump's spin on Portland "untethered to the facts." From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Amid ICE raids, a journalist recalls the Nazis' dual justice system, where there was a compelling illusion of lawfulness for some.

Pema Levy: However, if you were part of a disfavored group, such as the Jews, you found yourself in a zone of lawlessness.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, meet TikTok investor Larry Ellison and his son David, who just bought Paramount.

Jake Lahut: The Murdochs could have only dreamed of this type of a consolidated media empire.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone with another quick refresher. We're not doing this every week, I swear, but this week the Nobel prize went to not you know who, but to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader now in hiding for her tireless efforts to advance democracy in the "face of ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela." As for news on what looks like ever-expanding authoritarianism here at home, Thursday night, Illinois federal judge April M. Perry, a Biden appointee, issued a 14-day restraining order on the Trump administration's deployment of National Guard troops in the Chicago area.

She said, "I see no credible evidence that there is danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois." The New York Times reported that the Trump administration attorney Eric Hamilton said the troop presence in Chicago was merely a "limited mission of defending federal property and federal agents," but he wouldn't commit to the mission remaining limited to those functions. "I am very much struggling to figure out where this would ever stop," Judge Perry said.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: Donald Trump's deranged depiction of Chicago as a hellhole, a war zone, and the worst and most dangerous city in the world was just complete BS. He clearly has decided to declare war on a great American city that has the lowest homicide rate in 60 years.

Brooke Gladstone: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker described the impact of weeks of increasingly aggressive enforcement actions by ICE called Operation Midway Blitz.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: Families have been snatched up off the streets or removed from their homes, zip-tied and detained for hours, including especially US citizens and legal residents of our state. Peaceful protesters have been hit with tear gas and shot with rubber bullets. Journalists simply reporting the facts on the ground have been targeted and arrested. US citizens, including children, have been traumatized and detained.

This escalation of violence is targeted, intentional, and premeditated. The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city. He wants to justify and normalize the presence of armed soldiers under his direct command.

Brooke Gladstone: On to Portland. President Trump on Wednesday.

President Trump: I don't know what could be worse than Portland. You don't even have stores anymore. They don't even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows, but most of the retailers have left.

Brooke Gladstone: Last week, Karin Immergut, the federal district court judge for the District of Oregon, nominated by Trump, said that his view of Portland was simply untethered to the facts. Though there have been a handful of "inexcusable incidents," she said they were easily handled by regular law enforcement forces. On Thursday, two of the judges on the three-judge panel charged with hearing Trump's appeal of her decision, the two Trump appointees, seemed to disagree.

Judge Ryan Nelson suggested that there was more than met the eye here, and he wasn't sure that if President Lincoln had only judged by what could be seen on the streets, even Lincoln wouldn't have been able to bring forces to Fort Sumter when he did, but by then, 11 Southern states had already formed the Confederacy, so come on. The president, however, believes everything he sees, on Fox and certain other sites.

President Trump: You see it on your network where you have these bombed-out cities and these bombed-out people.

Brooke Gladstone: Last month, he told reporters that he might send National Guard troops to Portland because of the horrible scenes of violence Fox News was airing. Several of those moments actually were from five years ago, recorded during protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, although they weren't labeled as such. Those have been followed by posts from the Oregon Republican Party, widely shared photos of chaos and rage, purportedly taken by reporters on the ground in Portland now, but actually snapped years ago in South America.

President Trump: You see fires all over the place. You see violence. It's just so crazy. Then you talk to the governor, and she acts like everything is totally normal, there's nothing wrong. It's almost like, "Are you waking up from a dream or something?"

Brooke Gladstone: It's so unnecessary, all that exertion of finding images from long ago when you can simply lie about the images depicted here and now. Stephen Miller, the president's deputy chief of staff, has famously recast the terrifying images of ICE rappelling down the walls of an apartment house and zip-tying the residents, all in pursuit of gang members, without offering any real evidence of how many actual gang members were apprehended, meanwhile painting increasingly gruesome images of anyone who would speak in opposition to that or anything.

Stephen Miller: I hate to say it, Sean, but Democrat leaders are siding with the domestic terrorists. Antifa is waging daily violent assault against ICE officers using every means imaginable, including, of course, as we saw just a few weeks ago, attempted murder through a vehicle ramming attack. The Trump plan has brought historic safety to one of the most violent cities on earth, Washington, DC. That's what President Trump wants for Chicago. That's what he wants for Portland. That's what he wants for Los Angeles. Yet Democrats are on the side every night of the gangbangers, the predators, and now even the domestic terrorists.

Brooke Gladstone: Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. He recently wrote the piece, Inside Stephen Miller's Secret Plan to Normalize Trump's Dictator Rule.

Greg Sargent: Stephen Miller has a theory of the politics of this moment, that even if polls show that there's broad public opposition to Trump's military occupation of cities, his invasions, his use of the National Guard, which there is, poll after poll has showed majority opposition to those things, he doesn't think that the middle of the country, meaning moderates and independents, have really strong convictions on this stuff. If he can supercharge the public debate enough around them, he can compel a big chunk of those voters in the middle to ultimately side with Trump's authoritarianism.

Brooke Gladstone: He wants one side to hate the other so passionately that they'll get off their butts?

Greg Sargent: He and Trump are trying as hard as possible to provoke violent responses to these invasions because they want them. To create yet another pretext to escalate further, they will stop at nothing when it comes to the level of propagandizing they'll do to make it seem justified. He thinks if he can just flood the zone, that's a phrase Steve Bannon has used, flood the zone with propaganda--

Brooke Gladstone: He didn't actually use the word propaganda.

Greg Sargent: Right.

Brooke Gladstone: Flood the zone with [bleep] was the phrase.

Greg Sargent: Right. I had forgotten that. Yes, Stephen Miller believes that if they can flood people's brains with numbing agitprop, they will essentially sleepwalk them to a point where they'll start to accept some of this horrifying imagery of militarized vehicles on streets, of children being yanked out of apartment buildings while crying. The middle of the country can be persuaded to see that as a proportional response to the threat that he's depicting, which doesn't actually exist.

Brooke Gladstone: You were saying that a good example was Miller's response to Chicago's ICE raid?

Greg Sargent: Yes. Miller has been all over the airwaves of right-wing media and all over Twitter, saying that this was justified because there's an insurrection going on. In fact, he actually said on Fox News to Laura Ingraham that the building that was just raided on the South Side of Chicago was necessary because the building was full of Tren de Aragua terrorists, trying to create the impression that urban centers are cesspools of terrorism. Even said the Democratic Party is akin to a domestic extremist organization.

Brooke Gladstone: What is it that Democrats don't seem to understand?

Greg Sargent: As a general matter, Democrats are operating from a posture where they're a little reluctant to engage the debate over these hyper militarizations of cities because they think Trump can characterize them as weak on crime. They don't think they can win that argument. I think a number of their consultants are telling them to stick to healthcare and kitchen table issues, but they're not reckoning with how aggressively Stephen Miller is using propaganda to move the middle of the country to a place of complacency about all these authoritarian tactics. I think Democrats should wake up and calibrate their response around a recognition of that.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that two Democrats really have calibrated a response.

Greg Sargent: JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has been very good on this. He recognizes that Democrats are in the middle of what's functionally an information war. So has Gavin Newsom. The two of them realize that they need to be incredibly clear and blunt in warning of the threat that Trump poses and what Trump is trying to do. Senator Chris Murphy has been really, really good on this as well. He's gone out into every conceivable forum he can get himself into to talk about the threat, but not enough Democrats are speaking the way these three are.

They need to get into these big public arguments with Republicans over what's actually happening in these cities, with an eye toward shocking the middle of the country in a way that will move them towards the Democrats.

Brooke Gladstone: Pritzker has used, you say, urgent moral language.

Greg Sargent: He's been bluntly saying that these militarizations are a precursor to something much worse. Gavin Newsom has used the phrase martial law. I do believe that Stephen Miller wants Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to unlock vast new authorities, to use the military on domestic soil. For what? I don't know, but right now we just saw the New York Attorney General Letitia James indicted by Trump's stooge, handpicked US attorney.

Clearly, they are targeting the Democratic Party and the constellation of liberal groups in Washington, they keep characterizing as allied with domestic terrorists. They're going to probably try to do things like IRS investigations and potentially even some criminal indictments by blaming them in some sense for inciting violence against ICE. We're looking at an effort to really maximize authoritarian power and concentrate it behind one man.

Brooke Gladstone: Just going back to something you said earlier. You said that Democrats feel that this may be a trap, enticing them into a losing debate about crime or being soft on crime.

Greg Sargent: Where they are at a supposed disadvantage, but that concedes too much up front. It presumes in advance that the public will actually believe that Trump is sending the National Guard and the military into cities to fight crime. Why would anyone believe that? It's obviously not the case. The bottom line is that Trump is just making stuff up precisely in order to create pretexts for the actions that he's already decided to do anyway. A three-year-old can see through what he's doing. There's no need to assume up front that they win the argument over these things.

What Democrats can do is shift the debate back to where it should be, which is that what Trump and Stephen Miller are doing is abhorrent to anyone who values life in a free society.

Brooke Gladstone: Greg, thank you very much.

Greg Sargent: Thanks so much.

Brooke Gladstone: Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a legal system split in two.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, across the street from the Congress, the Supreme Court began a new term. The Trump administration has been on quite the winning streak at the high court. In June, one such win came when the conservative majority sided with the president's request to stop federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions in most cases against his order denying the constitutional right to citizenship to all born here, as challenges move through the lower courts.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the work of Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who fled Berlin in 1938. After arriving in the US, he published a theory that he called The Dual State, detailing how the German legal system changed as the Nazi regime rose to power. Pema Levy is a reporter at Mother Jones. She recently wrote the piece, The "Dual State" Theory Was Invented to Describe the Nazis. The Supreme Court Could Take Us There.

Pema Levy: What Fraenkel saw was that the law had been essentially divided into two zones. The first, he called the normative state. In that state, the law applies. If you need help with a contract, if you need to get a loan, if you have a dispute with a neighbor, you go to court, and the law prevails. That's where most Germans were, and it enabled life to generally continue as normal. However, if you were part of a disfavored group, such as the Jews, you found yourself in what he called the prerogative state. In that state, the law does not apply. It is a zone of lawlessness. Whatever Hitler wants, he does.

Brooke Gladstone: There's an implication in Fraenkel's argument that there is an illusion that enables the public to look the other way.

Pema Levy: Absolutely. What Fraenkel observed is that the dual state, and specifically the decision to allow the normative state to exist, is a political calculation, which is that if the capitalist economy continues and if people think that their lives will not be too affected by this new regime, then they will not object to it. In the same way that if the economy suddenly went topsy-turvy and none of the rules applied and everyone's rights had disappeared. Even though they were in an authoritarian regime, there was this fiction of a safe zone in which most people operated, so it allowed Hitler to consolidate power and move forward with his project of a fascist ethnostate, because most people thought they were safe.

Brooke Gladstone: In Justice Jackson's dissent against the high court's decision on birthright citizenship, she invokes Fraenkel's dual state idea and accused the majority of facilitating a two-track system of justice. How did she get from the birthright decision to Fraenkel?

Pema Levy: Just take a step back. On January 20th, Trump's first day in office, he signs an executive order that limits birthright citizenship to the children of citizens and green card holders. Suffice it to say, that's not what the Constitution says. Several courts issue these nationwide injunctions, saying, "No, that cannot go into effect. That's not legal." The Trump administration goes to the Supreme Court and says, "Please stop these lower courts from issuing nationwide relief," and the six Republican appointees go along with that.

They issue a decision in June by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that courts can grant relief to the parties that sue, but they cannot simply extend that relief to any similarly situated person across the country. In the context of birthright citizenship, that would mean that if you are an undocumented immigrant or you have a student visa, you can go to court, you can get relief from the court, but someone else who hasn't gone and sued they cannot get that same relief.

Brooke Gladstone: Draw the bead. How does this connect to the zone of normalcy versus the zone of lawlessness?

Pema Levy: Jackson really astutely makes this point. She says, "You have a set of laws that apply to people who go to court, and then a zone where the law simply does not protect the people who don't have recourse to go to court." She also accuses the majority of essentially using a bunch of legal speak to create a smokescreen that makes this all look really normal, like they're just doing the law, when really what they're doing is pushing the law aside and carving out these spaces where Trump can do whatever he wants, and they're calling it law.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you give me some other examples of the zone of lawlessness?

Pema Levy: ICE is truly the face of a prerogative state. We just saw them rappel from helicopters onto a apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago, bash in doors without warrants, grab American citizens and noncitizens alike, zip tie them, drag them out of their homes, ransack their apartments. That is not legal. That is not constitutional. That is not how it's supposed to work, yet that is what they're doing.

The extralegal killings of civilians on Venezuelan boats. There is no law that says Trump can do that. There is international law that says that is a war crime, yet they've done it, I believe, four times. The administration detained foreign students and green card holders, I'm thinking of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, for months, because of their speech. They're firing watchdogs throughout the federal government, firing the heads of agencies despite laws prohibiting those firings, all in the service of creating a state without checks so that it can unleash arbitrary power as it sees fit.

Brooke Gladstone: Which means that the normative state is just an illusion, and a once-favored person disfavored could just drop into the prerogative state at any moment, and God help you.

Pema Levy: I think this is actually really key to what Fraenkel was describing, which is that even though the normative state feels safe, it's not. [chuckles] One of the examples that really stood out to me was Fraenkel's description of what happened to tenancy laws. The tenancy laws protected everyone. When landlords were refusing to rent homes to Jews, the courts initially said, "No, you have to rent to Jews." Then the Nazi press went after these decisions. The courts realized that tenancy law was no longer in the normative state and that they had to get on board.

Fraenkel quotes the Appellate Court of Berlin, which literally says, "The question before the court is not a problem of the law of landlord and tenant, but a question involving a fundamental outlook on life," so put the Nazis' policies above the laws.

Brooke Gladstone: We have three big cases coming up that you say could very well define how far down into the zone of lawlessness we'll go. Case one, let's talk about the tariffs. Trump claimed power to impose them under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives presidents the power to respond to "any unusual or extraordinary threat from abroad," but it doesn't mention tariffs explicitly, so I guess that's going to come up.

Pema Levy: There are two pieces of this. The first one, before the court on November 5th, is whether or not this law actually gives Trump the power to levy tariffs, because it doesn't explicitly say so.

Brooke Gladstone: Tariffs are a congressional thing.

Pema Levy: Yes. It is literally Congress's power, as specifically stated in Article I of the Constitution. That is the second piece of this. Can Congress even give the president this power that the Constitution actually gives to Congress? The bigger question underlying all of this is, can Trump just unilaterally make up this "unusual and extraordinary threat" to then turn on these economic powers?

For the tariffs that he announced on Canada and Mexico, for example, the emergency was fentanyl. Fentanyl is bad, but it's been coming into the country for years. Does it follow that he should be able to call this such an extraordinary threat that he can then levy these 25% tariffs?

Brooke Gladstone: Didn't the Roberts Court actually uphold lower court decisions that the president couldn't unilaterally impose a major policy like that?

Pema Levy: Yes. I think you are referring to the major questions doctrine, which is a recent invention at the Supreme Court that has just been applied to Democratic presidents to tell them that they cannot do things that are not really explicitly laid out in the law. A major example of this is when the Supreme Court said that Biden could not use the emergency provision of a law to forgive some student debt during the COVID-19 pandemic. They basically said, "Because the law in question, the Heroes Act, doesn't explicitly say forgive loans, you've gone too far."

If they are going to be consistent with this major questions doctrine, then there is no world in which the court could then turn around and say, "Yes, even though IEEPA doesn't explicitly say tariffs, you can put tariffs on any and every country you want in an amount that you decide, no big deal." That is a hallmark of what I would call a dual-state Supreme Court is if you think that the major questions doctrine is a thing, and then all of a sudden, when Trump wants to do something, it suddenly disappears.

Brooke Gladstone: Another case. The justices will likely have to confront the question of whether Trump can use the claim of an emergency to round up and deport people. He's invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

Pema Levy: Yes. In March, Trump declared under the Alien Enemies Act that the US is being invaded by Tren De Aragua, which is a gang based in Venezuela, so, notoriously, he rounded up a bunch of Venezuelan immigrants. Many, if not all, of them were not members of Tren De Aragua. They put them on planes and they sent them to a notorious labor prison in El Salvador. Then they tried to do that again with a group of detainees in Texas, but their lawyers got wind of it ahead of time and ended up getting an injunction from the Supreme Court.

Now, Trump's invocation of that act is on hold. The question of whether or not he validly invoked the Alien Enemies Act is moving up toward the Supreme Court again.

Brooke Gladstone: Take us to the third case. This is the one where the justices will have to consider the president's attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, even though her position is protected from firing except for cause.

Pema Levy: For a little context, Trump has put in place a political lackey named Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He pulls mortgage records for people that Trump doesn't like or wants to fire. He finds some discrepancies in their paperwork that could possibly point to mortgage fraud, but are also pretty flimsy and certainly unproven. One of the people targeted through these allegations of mortgage fraud is Lisa Cook, on the Federal Reserve, appointed by President Biden.

Trump takes this allegation of mortgage fraud, and he says, "I'm firing Lisa Cook." Lisa Cook sues and says, "No, you need a real cause. That's a pretext. You just want to lower interest rates, so you're trying to get rid of me. This is unproven, and I haven't even had a chance to dispute it, so you can't remove me." The question before the Supreme Court, they're going to hear oral arguments in January, is whether or not Trump can remove Cook while her case challenging her removal moves forward in court.

This underlying issue is really so similar to what we've been talking about in the tariff case and the Alien Enemies Act case. It is: Can the president come up with literally anything and call it a cause? If the answer is anything will do, it's up to the president, and it's unreviewable, then he essentially has control of the Fed. If he has control of the Fed, he has control of the US economy and the world economy. He can use the Fed to switch off individuals' and companies' access to the financial system. Talk about being in the normative state, and then all of a sudden dropping into the prerogative state. [laughs] One day you can have a bank account, and one day you can't.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, wouldn't this bump up against Fraenkel's observation that the Nazis, for as long as they could, did try to protect stability in the economy?

Pema Levy: Absolutely. It puts the Supreme Court in a really difficult position because a dual-state Supreme Court will try to cede power to the president, but make it look like everything is fine. I have to say, I really started out watching their, especially, emergency docket decisions this year, thinking they're siding with Trump because they agree with him, but then you start to get these cases, like racial profiling, where the court basically said, with no explanation, you can send someone to South Sudan without due process. That is just a violation of everything.

It is a violation of federal law, international law of treaties, and it is a violation of the Constitution. They just said, "Go for it." Then Trump said, "Hey, I don't want to spend this $4 billion that Congress says I have to spend." The Supreme Court said, "It's okay, you don't have to spend." That's crazy. For me, it is really hard to explain those decisions without thinking that the Republican appointees are afraid that if they say, for example, "No, you have to spend that billion dollars, that Trump or Russell Vought at OMB is going to say, "No, I'm not doing it." When that happens, the justices are revealed to not actually be deciding the law.

Brooke Gladstone: What we seem to be seeing from Justice Jackson is a call to defy the administration to uphold the law, even if it brings on the collapse of the Supreme Court in front of the nation, because then at least the public can see it.

Pema Levy: On the one hand, you have Justice Jackson doing public events, telling anyone who asks her, "I'm worried about American democracy." On the other hand, you have Justice Amy Coney Barrett on a book tour right now about how the Supreme Court works, going around saying, "Here's how we do law. We like to have a snack with each other after our conferences on Fridays. Everything is normal. We're just doing the law like justices do."

Justice Jackson knows she can't stop the court's decisions. She can't stop Trump, but she can tell people what's really going on. I think the reason she would do that is to tell people, "You can stand up to this before it's too late." I think that there is a call to action there.

Brooke Gladstone: Call to action. It seems like lately all of our interviews end on that point.

Pema Levy: [chuckles] Not to dismiss the real economic pain and struggle of millions of Americans, but we are not in the position of 1920s, early 1930s Germany after the First World War. Trump is just having to make up emergencies because they're not really there. Full believers in Trump, that's not a majority of the people. He did win a majority of the vote, but a lot of that was people who just said, "Oh, he's going to do something on the economy." He is. It's getting worse.

Brooke Gladstone: He's saying it's getting better.

Pema Levy: You can be in a news bubble that says the economy is great, but if you've lost your job, or maybe you still have your job, but you haven't gotten a raise in years, and your healthcare premiums are doubling, either you are still being left out of this great economy, or it's a lie. We are talking about the Supreme Court having to step in and reverse all of these lower court orders because, again and again, the district courts and the circuit courts are upholding the law.

They haven't gotten the message that the Supreme Court has. They haven't gotten the message that this is a prerogative state, and you have to do what we say. They're still applying the law and saying, "No, you can't just fire people. No, you can't just send people to South Sudan. No, you can't racially profile. No, you can't just not spend $4 billion. No, you can't just fire the head of the Federal Reserve. No, you can't just impose tariffs on anyone you want, whenever you want."

The fact that those decisions are still coming down, it feels like sometimes multiple times a day, means that there really is space to push back. This is not a society that has capitulated. Certainly, the court system as a whole is not the court system that said, "Yes, sure, tenancy laws don't apply to Jews anymore." We're not there yet.

Brooke Gladstone: Pema, thank you very much.

Pema Levy: Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Pema Levy is a reporter at Mother Jones and author of the recent article, The "Dual State" Theory Was Invented to Describe Nazis. The Supreme Court Could Take Us There.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, David and Larry Ellison just purchased the future of news in America. Who are they?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On Monday morning, CBS News and Bari Weiss became official.

News clip: The company has purchased The Free Press, a digital news site, and the founder, Bari Weiss, will now serve as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

News clip: Bari Weiss has very little experience in broadcast TV; The Wall Street Journal writing, "She's known for her outspoken support of Israel and strong takes on polarizing topics, including gun rights, diversity and inclusion programs."

News clip: In a statement from Paramount CEO David Ellison about Weiss's hire, he writes, "We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home."

Bari Weiss: In retrospect, what The Free Press did is uncover an America hiding in plain sight.

Micah Loewinger: Bari Weiss on her podcast on Monday.

Bari Weiss: People who want to be surprised, people who want to learn, people who are open to changing their minds in the face of new facts. People who believe that curiosity is a virtue and who crave common sense in a world that feels upside-down.

Micah Loewinger: Now Weiss will report directly to David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of an entertainment company called Skydance, which merged with Paramount, owner of CBS, this summer. Skydance is also in talks to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which would put CNN in his portfolio as well. All this is happening right as Larry Ellison, David's father, the founder of the tech company Oracle, emerged as a major investor in the new US version of TikTok. If these deals go through, the Ellison father-son duo will have become media magnates in a matter of months, with control over a startlingly large slice of the attention economy.

Jake Lahut: The Murdochs could have only dreamed of this type of a consolidated media empire.

Micah Loewinger: Jake Lahut is a senior writer for WIRED, covering the White House, and is author of the recent story, Larry Ellison Is a 'Shadow President' in Donald Trump's America. "The Ellison family," he wrote, "is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.

Jake Lahut: I don't think we use the Gilded Age comparisons lightly here at WIRED, but that really is the only other part of our nation's rather short history that I think you can look toward for something that situates what this family is going for in terms of the level of ambition. When you look at how much influence Larry Ellison has amassed in Trumpworld, when I talk to my sources about how they fear him, how they respect how he operates, Trump has called him the CEO of everything in a throwaway line before, that is maybe even harder to match from a Gilded Age family perspective with how much more transactional this White House is.

Micah Loewinger: I want to chart a bit of Larry Ellison's backstory. In the 1970s, he co-founded Oracle, an enormously successful software company in the business of databases, cloud computing, and servers. He then begins cultivating a "bad boy" era in the 1990s. He was also a Democrat. He liked Bill Clinton so much he said that Clinton should serve a third term. How did he go from that to being this uber-MAGA guy?

Jake Lahut: This is not as neat of an explanation as you will encounter with a lot of the other Silicon Valley billionaires on my beat who have gotten on the Trump train. For most of them, it often has to do with the very specific moment we were in around COVID and various forms of political correctness or speech policing. For Ellison, this is more of an international affairs kind of trajectory. My understanding is that Larry Ellison didn't hate Barack Obama or anything when he came into office. However, Israel became a more important issue for him as the years went along.

As Barack Obama's relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu starts to deteriorate, so too does Larry Ellison's with the Democratic Party. He simply saw where, in some ways, the party was going to end up by the time we get to 2020 and now, where there is less and less grassroots support for the Israeli military in terms of this carte blanche support. He basically starts to bet his chips on Republicans having a better relationship with Netanyahu. I think that it's 2012 to 2015/16 where Larry Ellison is no longer Mr. Reliable for the Democrats.

Micah Loewinger: Larry is a major donor to the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF. He's cultivated a close friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is a big donor to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is playing an important role in Trump's Gaza peace plan. Blair is set to sit on the so-called Board of Peace that might oversee Gaza, though Hamas is reportedly not super happy with this arrangement. Tony Blair, IDF, Benjamin Netanyahu, tell me about what it seems like he's doing.

Jake Lahut: Now that Ellison is pumping so much money or has at least promised to pump so much money into the Tony Blair Institute, there's no other private donor who has that level of influence on Tony Blair's big post-office project. You combine that with the fact that not only Ellison is close with Netanyahu, but that his son, David, is also close with Netanyahu, and suddenly it's as if Larry Ellison might as well just have a seat at that board of whatever the reconstituted version of Gaza will look like.

This is just another example of decades of planning, relationship building, and keeping the money train going, all working in Ellison's favor with his top, or at least one of his top two, political priorities.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about his long bet on artificial intelligence. I've seen in the headlines news about the Stargate project, a new company that will be building massive data centers for OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT. This past summer, OpenAI announced that they're partnering with Oracle on a huge new data center in Texas, a $3 billion partnership. Here is Larry Ellison speaking last year about the AI race.

Larry Ellison: The desire to be first, the desire to build the most capable neural network in the world, getting there first, is a big deal. You know what it costs to build a frontier model? Anyone know over the next three years? Yes, $100 billion. That's going to get you in the game. Put in your $100 billion and you're in the race.

Jake Lahut: It's almost more like Larry Ellison owns the racetrack and stands to benefit, no matter who wins at this point. Whoever owns the servers and the software that runs the data on those servers and keeps them going smoothly, and you get that recurring revenue from the companies that are using those servers to pay for the software, you're in good shape, no matter what, as long as those capital expenditures are coming through.

Micah Loewinger: Last month, Trump responded to a reporter asking about whether TikTok's algorithm would prioritize more MAGA content under this new leadership team.

President Trump: If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would, but it's not going to work out that way, unfortunately. No, everyone's going to be treated fairly. Every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly.

Micah Loewinger: Is there a possibility that Larry Ellison, Andreessen, and company would be able to shape the algorithm? Which is, by the way, what lawmakers were ostensibly concerned about the Chinese Communist Party doing.

Jake Lahut: The TikTok algorithm it's really not one algorithm. Right now, the US user data is already on Oracle servers, and he's already been making money off of that.

Micah Loewinger: That's been happening for years.

Jake Lahut: Right. The harder part is what we're about to run into, which is, how do you import and retrain that algorithm on US soil? That can be, one, very expensive; number two, it's not going to be as efficient, and arguably not at the quality that the algorithm has been because you're only going to be drawing from the US user database. The trade-off is, the more you might want to tinker with this algorithm and make it fit some agenda, you can try that, but you also, in the process, might make the algorithm less addictive, therefore less effective, and everyone's going to make less money.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, TikTok's secret sauce is that it learns what you like, shows you more of it, and keeps people on the app.

Jake Lahut: Even though the stated problem for the TikTok legislation and what led us here was all about, "Is there a backdoor that China has to our user data? Is China using TikTok as a psychological operation on the US public?"

Micah Loewinger: Yes. The security issues.

Jake Lahut: That was all there, but then what got this thing moving wasn't China. It was the aftermath of October 7th, and the fact that younger Americans were far more likely to see horrific footage and carnage on TikTok than they were on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, whatever the knockoff competitors were at the time. I think that it might be wishful thinking to think that a tweak of an algorithm will change Younger Americans' attitudes about Israel's role as a military power in the Middle East and how they treat civilians.

Already, if you use the app as a younger American, you'll see a lot of people coming up on their videos saying, "I don't know what's going to happen here. This video might get censored." There's this paranoia already permeating the space about the new ownership, even if a lot of these people don't know who Larry Ellison is or what his politics are.

Micah Loewinger: We've talked a lot about Larry Ellison and what we know about his politics and his activities. Let's talk a little bit about his son, David. He's the founder of Skydance Media, a movie production company. He's had a handful of roles acting in movies and producing them. He was a producer, for instance, on Top Gun: Maverick. What can you tell us about David and what he believes, what he's after?

Jake Lahut: A couple things to know about David, the guy loves flying, loves piloting, aviation just as much as his dad. They've done these father-son dogfights in the past.

Micah Loewinger: As in they fly planes at each other?

Jake Lahut: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Adorable. [laughs]

Jake Lahut: Aggressively. Father-son bonding at its finest, right? I ended up watching all of the 2006 World War I drama Flyboys, where David co-stars alongside James Franco in what was honestly a pretty bad movie. [laughs] I'm a reporter, not a movie critic here, but it was hard to get through. That movie in 2006 was his chance to try to establish a real acting career. It didn't work out that way. David starts telling people that he envisions a career behind the camera. He is looking to run the studio.

David, I feel bad for the guy, almost, because all my Trump sources don't even know who he is. He's the one with the keys to this really important part of the kingdom, and everyone just refers to him as Larry Ellison's son or Larry's son.

Micah Loewinger: Don't feel too bad.

Jake Lahut: You can't root for a nepo baby in this country anymore, can you? [laughter] The thing with David is he's only donated to Democrats in the past, so he's not really seen as an honorary member of the MAGA tribe in the way that his father is. That's where the hiring of Barry Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS and obviously acquiring The Free Press it's helpful to understand that as just a signal to demoralize the journalists in the CBS newsroom and more broadly, to show, "We don't care if this person has experience doing what you do, we want someone here who is going to send the right message."

Micah Loewinger: David Ellison already has CBS. He might get CNN as well as part of the Warner Bros. Discovery deal that was reported a month ago, but hasn't manifested yet. Where is all that at?

Jake Lahut: There is a tight window here because Warner Brothers Discovery is in the process of trying to spin off a lot of these properties. We're talking HBO, plenty of strong intellectual property not at all related to the news stuff. However, if you wanted to merge a CNN with a CBS, it would be much easier to do so if you could acquire Warner Brothers Discovery before they spin all that stuff off.

Micah Loewinger: Is David Ellison allowed to own both CBS and CNN? Are there not regulatory hurdles designed to stop this type of exact consolidation?

Jake Lahut: No, there very much are. This is something that Rupert Murdoch ran into when he was trying to establish his stateside dominance. I think that this is the reality of Trump 2.0. It is more openly transactional and a little brazen on that front. The Ellison family has come to understand this iteration of Trump world, and they've already done the legwork to show, "We're going to do what you would like us to do so that this merger can be approved."

There's been the sacrificial lamb of Colbert at CBS. There have already been the promises of these pro-Trump PSAs. Those are all things that help grease the wheels to get an eventual approval for that merger. It's part of this broader mergers and acquisitions fervor that's taken ever since Trump's return to office.

Micah Loewinger: To summarize, the Ellison family has cozied up to Trump by donating to his campaigns in 2020 and 2024. Now they're helping him secure a MAGA-friendly TikTok. Oracle continues to profit as the American server steward for TikTok. Then there's the new $300 billion OpenAI data center, a deal blessed by Donald Trump himself, along with a bevy of government contracts that are presumably going Oracle's way as well. David Ellison just snagged Paramount, and he's likely to get FCC approval to buy Warner Bros., which would give them CNN and oodles of Hollywood IP if that deal goes through.

Meanwhile, the Ellisons have effectively purchased an unofficial seat at the Israel-Hamas negotiation table. Am I missing anything big here?

Jake Lahut: No. It really does sound legitimately insane when you lay it all out like that, but that's what we're dealing with here. This is bigger than Trump. This is bigger than one administration.

I think what we're looking at here is a family that has played their cards very, very well to position themselves in this media, attention, data behemoth status that's going to be around whatever happens with Donald Trump, whatever happens with the MAGA movement, and that it's not super wedded to the MAGA brand necessarily, but certainly there's been more than enough buttering of biscuits to keep them in this position in the administration right now and to set them on the best footing they could ask for whenever this is all over.

Micah Loewinger: Jake, thanks for doing this reporting.

Jake Lahut: Thanks so much for having me on, and thanks so much for letting your listeners know about Larry Ellison. I think it's really important that more people know who this guy is.

Micah Loewinger: Agreed. Jake Lahut is a reporter at WIRED and author of the newsletter Inner Loop.

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That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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