Summary
The Pentagon announced a new annual media rotation program, removing established outlets like NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico from dedicated workspaces.
The memo orders these organizations to vacate their offices in two weeks, while replacing them with outlets such as OANN, New York Post, Breitbart, and HuffPost.
NBC News expressed disappointment over losing long-held technical capabilities essential for timely reporting.
The move follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s narrow confirmation and signals a broader effort to reshape Pentagon media access, transforming U.S. government communications permanently.
This is a very basic authoritarianism playbook. I’ve watched my home country fall in a similar fashion. Just be mentally ready.
We are legion. Argentina is going the same route.
Which country?
Turkey. I had to flee the country since I was part of the military, but whatever they’re doing now is very similar to what happened there. Erdoğan has been in power since basically 2002 (and still going).
They replace the media with their followers. They replace the government with their followers. They blame minorities for all the problems and they wage war on them. They falsely claim the economy will get better (although everyone sees it’s not getting any better). Then they change the constitution to allow the current power to stay in power for longer.
Everything I mentioned above is currently happening. After a while the power consolidates so much at the top that nobody can do anything about it.
Remember this post everyone. This user is 100% correct. If we dont act soon there will be no more acting.
Are there enough of “us” to act and not be destroyed?
Edit: I should add:
- economic destruction
- civil rights destruction
- health destruction
- actual death and destruction
All feel probable to possible in the current environment. They just escorted all FBI agents who may have investigated Trump out of their offices for instance.
if you want to act most effectively you need to distribute the action across any many avenues as possible, to ensure as many people engage as they possibly can.
Ah yeah, I remember watching it happen. I’m sorry that it happened there, and now here as well. We really are just an incredibly gullible species.
Thank you for relating your personal experiences. I feel like a lot of people don’t really have a good sense for how the authoritarian playbook works in the modern day.
If anyone wants a more professional analysis, Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian with a background in Italian fascism, and specializes in modern authoritarianism.
Welcome to the Ünited Republic of States!
Indeed and I call it AmeriKa.
Not a great move, but maybe a spark might go off in some of these orgs and they will stop worrying about putting facts behind “access” to these assholes.
They’re gonna fold and fo whatever they have to to please the fascists.
I am a frog in a pot, yet to boil.
My take is that we have entered the apex of the MAGA phase.
Now that the incompetents have achieved power, they will start to destroy themselves through stupidity.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of damage will be visited upon the heads of the innocent. But it is going to take this destruction to demonstrate just what a terrible idea it was to install these dickheads in the first place.
After all, the voters were warned, and also got a taste of chaos in the first series. They still voted him in.
Ok, let Trump set the electorate’s hair on fire and see what happens next.
Apathy. Apathy is what happens next.
“I have bills to pay, I’m not taking time off to protest”
“I’m not the one being deported, sure, I feel bad but it’s not like one voice will make a difference”
Etc…
“they’re just being deported not murdered it’s not that bad”
The new outlets rotating in are One America News Network — which will take NBC News’s spot — the New York Post, Breitbart News Network and HuffPost.
This is obviously 100% political. And the way of the new administration. They are excluding any opposition however moderate, everywhere they can, and then replace them with political supporters.
Welcome to the new authoritarian antidemocratic America!
I know you didn’t highlight it but HuffPost is just as bad as the others nowadays…maybe even worse because it tries to hide behind supposed “balanced” coverage
OK I didn’t know they’d become that bad.
Replaced with Pravda and the Wochenschau.
Let me guess: they’re going to “rotate” in actual propaganda like NewsMax and OAN…
This rotation appears to be OAN, New York Post, Breitart, and Huff Post. So, three conservative organizations plus Huff Post.
Huff Post is an organization that has no credibility on the right and no experience covering the Pentagon. They’re removing the outlets that might actually be able to make a difference while still giving themselves the cover of “Well, we added Huff Post!”
I’m waiting to see them start banning NBC, ABC, etc from Whitehouse press events.
huffpost is currently owned by buzzfeed. buzzfeed, afaik, has not kissed the diaper (yet). buzzfeed shuttered their news division, which was actually ‘ok’ (and different than the click-chasing junk on buzzfeed itself), after they acquired huffpost. huffpost is their news site now. the wildcard here is that comcast is a major shareholder (around one-third, iirc) of buzzfeed.
huffpost’s inclusion could go either way:
they (comcast) flex their muscles and ‘encourage’ buzzfeed to keep their left-leaning site quiet and ‘under control’
they take offense at nbc getting kicked out and use nbc and nbcnews (which are not included in the planned spin-off of cable properties that includes cnbc and msnbc) to help huffpost report the real news and get it on the air.
That is what it said in the summary, yes
Oh, I didn’t read the summary. So obvious what they’re doing, yet still infuriating…
And HuffPost.
Why the fuck are we letting them do this‽
It’s not really a “we are letting them do this” situation. It’s more of a “he’s essentially captured and removed any and all options we have to stop him from doing it.”
The “we are letting him do this” argument was valid prior to the election when everyone tried warning the non-voters/protest voters how it would go. Let’s refer to this as the “fuck around phase.”
And we are now here with him doing it- because they refused to listen. We’ll call this the “find out phase.”
Apathy…
the US really needs to take a page from France
Also, half the population that voted wants this to happen. They are on board because they watch and listen to those propaganda outlets and think the mainstream news isn’t telling the truth*. They want their propaganda.
*mainstream news does omit a lot of stuff and absolutely has an agenda to further their capitalist objectives by promoting stuff that gets reactions and trying to both sides everything. But they still try to make sure what they do report is accurate.
Not half. Not even a third.
But more than a third just didn’t vote…
That is all people eligible to vote. I said population that voted.
While slightly less than literally 50% of voters voted for Trump, it is close enough to be rounded to half.
That’s all people who are eligible to vote. The infographic is on par with a normal election. There’s always a majority of the nation that does not vote. Many of them are lower class people who can’t afford to take a day off to vote.
I’d bet the percentages are the same all over the world where the right has won and is doing similar atrocities.
In Argentina the vote is mandatory and you only need to be a citizen and have a valid national ID to vote (and we vote on Sundays). The percentage of non-voters is around 20-30% every election.
Because people are still telling us this is better than violence. We also don’t have organization. “Lone wolf” attacks will not work and just justify further erosion. We need a pack but no one knows how to form one.
“Lone wolf” attacks will not work
And also won’t happen. In the US all the “patriots” who have guns to “fight the tyranny” actually want their guns to kill the dark skinned people they don’t like.
So what does 21st century resistance look like? It seems that the bystander effect Germany experienced 100 years ago is happening in the USA now. What would have prevented the rise of the Third Reich? Protests are ineffectual, and I have no idea how to organize or resist - I’m just trying to stay informed in a horrified and helpless kind of way, which accomplishes nothing more than my passive complicity.
Do we need a modern Black Panthers movement? If a brilliant and charismatic leader like Malcolm X were to come forward and lead us, would we be inadvertently accelerating the inevitable martial law or creating the excuse for Civil War II Red vs Blue? Is it even feasible to envision an effective plan from a demographic that prefers pacifism?
the problem here is a fundamental of what i call the “slipping down the mountain” problem.
You start with shit like rotating in media outlets, scummy, fucky, and definitely shitty, but is it illegal or straight fascism? It’s not direct enough to quantify unfortunately.
It’s going to take something on the level of the holocaust for people to go “oh shit wait this isn’t good”
Right. It isn’t illegal, afaik. But what’s going on with the CBS 60 Minutes transcripts demand, the investigation into PBS and NPR, and this legitimizing disinformation sites that claim to be news, the agenda is obvious - and it’s straight out of the authoritarian checklist. I believe it’s also laid out in Project 2025?
I’m just struggling with the complete absence of a grassroots plan for the people who oppose where this is going. Is there nothing we can glean from other countries that went through authoritarian or fascist takeover in the past century, so that we can anticipate and effectively resist a USA version of the holocaust?
Whatever action is made peaceful or not will be used to accelerate martial law. What happens following will not be entirely peaceable but the degree of fighting is unknown.
The alternative is holocaust II so…
A general strike (which is a peaceful method) beats martial law, not the other way around. Not easy to organize by any stretch, but historically effective.
No general strike has ever been allowed nonviolently. How do we organize a general strike when 32% support the shit, 36% don’t care, and the other 31% are trying not to be the ones that get shuffled off to camps first? I’m not trying to be defeatist I’m genuinely asking.
Other people being violent towards you does not make your actions violent. Also, there’s actually been many general strikes that were not attacked by state forces at least. There have probably been hundreds of general strikes through history. They’re common enough that they’re not really covered in history classes past a sentence or two, if at all. It was actually a general strike that staved off the first coup against the German civilian govt post-WW1.
Organizing, I’m not sure.
We need to get guns and enforce our will. That’s the only solution left sadly
NBC needs to express more than disappointment.
Glad to see those
legal settlementsbribes are paying off. /sMaybe if I just bend the knee harder daddy will stop beating me. Maybe just once more.
Almost like for profit “news” is antithetical to journalism.
Can’t wait for Saturday Morning Propaganda! /s
“Rotation program”? More like “sit on this and rotate”
Not sure why they’re highlighting NBC News, they’re the one I’m most okay losing.
I think in this case it may be because this particular post was from NBC news, I imagine the other outlets will focus on themselves as well.
This is terrible no matter how you look at it, but the current group occupying those offices are not particularly looked at as non biased non politically motivated agencies either.
They are better than what’s moving in, but they lost their way a while ago IMHO.
Since they cater to their shareholders instead of the unbiased truth, they won’t get universal or even the majority of public support.
