Who Controls the Story Controls the Country

From Factories to Broadcast to Algorithms: The New Base of Political Power

The question of what fundamentally drives political power has evolved through three distinct eras, each defined by a different bottleneck.

Era 1: Own the Factories (Marx)

Marx argued that the “base” - the mode of production and who owns it - is the primary driver of political and social outcomes. Whoever controls the means of material production controls the labor process, accumulates capital, and shapes what is politically possible. Ideology, in this framework, is “superstructure” - it reflects and legitimizes existing material relations but doesn’t fundamentally drive them. In the industrial age, this was largely correct: own the factories, and you own the political system. In the industrial age, this was close enough to true to function as a law of motion.

Era 2: Control the Broadcast (Manufacturing Consent)

By the late 20th century, Herman and Chomsky identified a new bottleneck. In Manufacturing Consent (1988), they showed how mass media systematically produces consent for elite-compatible outcomes by filtering what becomes thinkable and legitimate. A handful of gatekeepers - major newspapers, TV networks, wire services - decided which stories existed, which frames were credible, and who counted as a “serious” voice. Propaganda wasn’t occasional lying; it was the normal operating mode of institutional media under certain structural incentives. The ruling advantage shifted from owning factories to owning the megaphones.

Era 3: Beat the Algorithm (Today)

The dominant bottleneck has shifted again. In modern conditions, the key lever is no longer controlling centralized broadcast infrastructure - it’s controlling the means of ideological production in a distributed, algorithmic environment. And crucially, the means of ideological production is now distinct from both traditional capital and legacy media ownership. Not because money is irrelevant—because money no longer has a monopoly on the megaphone.

The carriers of ideology don’t need to be capital holders or broadcast gatekeepers anymore. They can be:

• A foreign government running election interference through social media

• Influencers on YouTube with no institutional backing

• A swarm of ordinary people pushing the same message in TikTok videos

• Think tanks funded by a handful of donors

• Litigation shops that reshape law through strategic case selection

What these actors share is not ownership of the means of material production or control of broadcast licenses. What they share is the ability to manufacture and distribute perception at scale - to shape what people believe is real, who they think they are, and what they think is possible.

Once you control that, you can win elections with voters acting against their material interests. You can capture courts, agencies, and institutions. You can rewrite the rules that govern ownership itself. The material outcomes follow from ideological control, not the other way around.

The throughline across all three eras is the same: power flows to whoever controls the dominant selection function of their time - which goods exist (factories), which stories exist (broadcast), which content becomes reality for millions (algorithms). The ruling advantage has shifted from owning factories, to owning the megaphones, to controlling the selection function that decides what becomes real—and therefore who gets to own everything else.

The Industrialization of Ideology

The key insight Marx couldn’t fully anticipate is that in modern conditions - mass media, professional political marketing, algorithmic distribution, legal-institutional pipelines - ideological production becomes an active, engineered power system, not just a “reflection.”

This actually tracks a line Marx himself gestures toward: the ruling class controls not only material production but also “mental production.” What’s changed is the scale, precision, and centrality of that mental-production apparatus - and the fact that it can now be operated by actors with no traditional economic power.

From Manufacturing Consent to Distributed Consensus

Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent identified five “filters” through which mass media systematically aligned public discourse with elite interests: ownership concentration, advertising dependence, reliance on official sources, “flak” (organized backlash), and dominant ideology.¹ Their model was powerful for explaining the broadcast era - but it assumed a relatively centralized media landscape where a few gatekeepers controlled the information environment.

The current era extends and complicates their model in important ways:

What remains true: Propaganda isn’t occasional lying; it’s the normal operating mode of media systems under certain structural incentives. Perception-management is a power system, not a side effect. The same core dynamics - filtering what’s thinkable, deciding who’s credible, manufacturing consent - still operate.

What’s changed: The gatekeeping function has become hybrid. Production is decentralized; ranking is centralized. Platform algorithms, recommendation engines, and viral mechanics now perform much of the selection function that broadcast editors once monopolized. This creates a many-to-many propaganda environment where:

• Operators don’t need to own the infrastructure to use it

• Decentralized creator swarms can contest elite narratives

• Foreign intelligence services can rent the same platforms as corporations

• The bottleneck shifts from “who owns the megaphone” to “who can beat the algorithm”

The means of ideological production are no longer permissioned by capital owners or broadcast license holders in the way they were in the TV era. In the broadcast era, editors filtered reality; in the algorithm era, incentives select reality—at machine speed. The claim is not that money is irrelevant. The claim is that money is no longer the binding constraint on ideological power—because ideology can now be manufactured and distributed without owning the channel, and can subsequently commandeer capital by shifting identity and legitimacy.

Ideology Production as Its Own Industry

In contemporary conditions, the production of ideology/attention has its own:

• Infrastructure (media networks, platforms, data centers, but also decentralized networks of content creators)

• Labor processes (journalists, PR professionals, content creators, lawyers, but also volunteers, activists, foreign operatives)

• Technologies of distribution and targeting (algorithms, recommendation engines, viral mechanics)

• Institutional interfaces (courts, agencies, parties, credentialing systems)

• Reproduction mechanisms (cadre pipelines, think tanks, legal networks, clergy networks)

The critical difference from both Marx’s era and the broadcast era: you don’t need to own the infrastructure to use it. A teenager with a phone can reach millions. Money can amplify a message, but coordinated people pushing the same message can achieve equivalent impact without it.

This is why the “base” has shifted. Ownership of material production still matters as a resource. Ownership of broadcast infrastructure still confers advantages. But neither is the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is who can manufacture consensus, identity, and legitimacy - and that’s a different game with different players.

The Power-Conversion Framework

Ideology as Base

Because the barriers to the megaphone have been effectively removed, ideology itself is now the base. Individuals and coordinated groups can reach audiences directly - bypassing the gatekeepers who once controlled access to mass communication. The means of ideological production are no longer locked behind capital requirements or broadcast licenses.

This doesn’t mean money is irrelevant. Capital can still amplify messages, fund infrastructure, and sustain long-term campaigns. But the bottleneck has moved. What matters most is not who has resources, but who can convert attention into identity, identity into coalition, and coalition into institutional control.

Power-conversion capacity is base. Ideology is the logic of that capacity, and institutions are its organs.

The Conversion Pipeline

The power-conversion routine operates through:

1. Recruitment: how much power flows into your camp (voters, donors, elite defectors, institutional allies)

2. Conversion efficiency: how well you turn power into institutional control (courts, agencies, party machinery, media agenda-setting, curriculum/pro credentials)

3. Attrition: how well you cause the other side to lose power (splits, stigma, confusion, procedural traps, cynicism, “nothing can be done”)

4. Retention: how well you keep your coalition aligned across shocks and contradictions

An ideology “wins” only if it solves retention + conversion + counter-attrition - not just recruitment.

The Selection Effect

Over time, the winner is the ideology that (a) attracts the most usable power and (b) has the best theory of power for converting that power into durable advantage while depleting the opponent’s power (through defections, demobilization, fragmentation, illegibility, exhaustion, etc.).

This creates a selection effect: the set of ideologies that can become historically decisive is strongly filtered by who can scale them. But “scale” here doesn’t mean “who has the most money.” It means who can most effectively convert attention into identity, identity into coalition, coalition into institutional control, and institutional control into durable rule-setting.

Money helps. But it’s not the bottleneck anymore.

Case Studies - The Mechanism in Action

Case 1: The Powell Memo and Infrastructure Building (1971-present)

Powell didn’t create “ideology leads to machinery” out of nothing. He provided a coordination blueprint that unlocked an already-existing resource reservoir and redirected it into a durable ideological-production apparatus.

What Powell changed was the coordination problem. The memo was explicitly a call for a multi-front, long-horizon campaign (education, media, courts, politics) to defend business power.² Big capital often has a collective-action problem: lots of actors with money, but no shared operating plan for turning it into state power + cultural hegemony.

Powell becomes a focal point: “here is the plan; here are the arenas; here is the time horizon; here is the commitment.” Then you see the emergence/acceleration of institutions that openly describe themselves as policy/ideology engines (Heritage 1973, Cato 1977, Federalist Society 1982).

After Powell, the game changes - because the dominant “base” variable becomes control of power-conversion capacity (ideological machinery + theory of power), which then reshapes ownership downstream.

Case 2: Weyrich and the Abortion Wedge (1970s-present)

Weyrich and allies used abortion to mobilize evangelicals politically (after other issues failed to do so).³ By simply artificially modifying Christian identity to include being anti-abortion, the GOP literally increased the total ownership under its “control” by bringing in Christians who before were not there.

The ideology literally took ownership that was outside of one group’s control (including some people that were pro-labor) and caused them to now be on the GOP side (often against their own material conditions).

This demonstrates the “effective command shift” mechanism:

• Re-coded identity (”Christian = anti-abortion”)

• Which re-coded loyalty

• Which re-coded political action (votes, donations, activism, institutional participation)

• Which then made state power available

• Which then did transfer material outcomes (through tax, labor, regulation, courts, privatization)

The ideology didn’t need to own the Christians’ capital to bring it under coalition control. It just needed to make “being on our side” feel like who you are.

Case 3: McConnell and the Court Capture (2016-2020)

In 2016, McConnell said the Senate would not act on Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland and argued the next president should fill the seat.

By 2019, he was on record saying if a vacancy happened in 2020, “Oh, we’d fill it,”⁴ i.e., the opposite posture.

In 2020, the Senate did move quickly and confirmed Amy Coney Barrett on Oct. 26, 2020 (recorded Senate vote).⁵

That sequence is hard to explain as “norms and traditions constrain power.” It looks much more like: norms are tools - invoked when they help, discarded when they don’t - in service of an institutional capture strategy.

This demonstrates that even what people treat as “constraints” (Senate norms) are often soft constraints that only bind if:

• Elites feel reputational cost, and

• Their coalition punishes norm-breaking more than it rewards the win

A disciplined ideology can rewrite soft constraints by:

• Reframing norm-breaking as righteous necessity (”the other side started it,” “save the Court,” etc.)

• And rewarding the win more than it fears backlash

Case 4: DEI Rollback (2020-2025)

What it had: enormous peak support in 2020 after George Floyd protests, massive corporate pledges ($340B+ between May 2020 and Oct 2022).⁶

What happened: support fell substantially by 2023. The right ran a vicious ideological campaign to take it down, and despite airtight arguments that DEI is moral, rational, and economical, it has now been almost completely reversed - losing traction even with centrist Dems (essentially pushing the Overton window). All ideologically driven.

Why it collapsed: DEI (as it existed in most institutions) functioned like:

• A program suite (policies, trainings, hiring goals)

• Plus a moral language

• But without a single coherent “theory of power” and defensive institutional moat

So it was vulnerable to a disciplined counter-ideology that knew exactly how to:

• Reframe it (from “responsible management” to “politicized discrimination”)

• Attach legal risk to it (SFFA v. Harvard⁷, Muldrow⁸, state laws, DOJ investigations)

• And make defection socially safe

The money, the ownership, went with it - once public opinion shifted, entirely controlled by ideological levers, the whole thing collapsed. It didn’t matter where the money was or where ownership was. Once the ideological environment changed, the money and ownership followed.

Case 5: The New Deal Coalition (1933-1970s) - A Control Case

The New Deal coalition offers a powerful test of whether material power automatically generates ideological defense. If it does, the New Deal should have built durable cross-domain reproduction infrastructure. It didn’t.

What it had: The New Deal coalition possessed enormous material power - a growing middle class, popular legitimacy, decades of momentum, and the highest tax brackets in American history (upwards of 90% marginal rates). This was “base” in the traditional Marxist sense: organized labor, redistributive policy, regulatory power, mass prosperity.

How it organized: Mostly through unions. Unions are valuable, but they span only one realm of society - economics - and even there, only a subset: labor. They collected dues, built strike funds, negotiated contracts. But they never built:

• A central think tank for policy development (no Heritage Foundation equivalent)

• A legislative coordination mechanism (no ALEC equivalent)

• A judicial pipeline (no Federalist Society equivalent)

• A cultural/identity institution (no Moral Majority equivalent)

What this reveals: The New Deal coalition treated its gains as policy outcomes rather than as an identity and worldview requiring institutional reproduction. It never articulated itself as an ideology - never answered the question “what does it mean to be American?” in a way that made rolling back its gains feel like an attack on identity itself.

When the counterattack came (Powell Memo, Reagan Revolution, etc.), there was nothing to defend. The coalition had material power but no ideological moat. It had policy but no story. It had unions but no reproduction system.

The implication: If material conditions reliably generated their own ideological defense, the infrastructure should have emerged. It didn’t. This falsifies the naive Marxist claim that “base auto-generates superstructure defense.” The New Deal coalition had the base. What it lacked was the ideological machinery to reproduce itself - and that’s exactly what the Powell project set out to build.

Case 6: TikTok, Gaza, and Algorithm Sovereignty (2023-2026)

If you want a “beat the algorithm” case study that practically writes itself, it’s TikTok.

What happened formally: The U.S. passed a divest-or-ban regime aimed at “foreign adversary controlled applications,” with TikTok/ByteDance as the obvious target. The stated rationale was national security: foreign control over data and the recommendation system. The Supreme Court upheld the law’s basic structure.

What made it politically combustible: During the Gaza war, TikTok became a mass pipeline for intensely pro-Palestinian content - and, more importantly, for a youth identity shift around Israel/Palestine. One study found a roughly 17-to-1 imbalance in posting activity (pro-Palestinian vs. pro-Israel) in the U.S. TikTok environment.⁹

Crucially, key politicians said the quiet part out loud. Mitt Romney explicitly linked the ban momentum to the “overwhelming” volume of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.¹⁰

The tell: The resolution wasn’t “make coverage balanced” or “fact-check harder.” It was: change who controls the selection function. TikTok ultimately restructured its U.S. operations into a new entity (TikTok USDS Joint Venture) to comply with the divest-or-ban regime - explicitly framed around securing U.S. data, apps, and algorithms under a U.S.-governed structure.¹¹

The mechanism in action:

1. Algorithm produces a narrative environment at scale

2. Narrative environment shifts identity (especially in a key demographic)

3. Identity shift threatens elite consensus and foreign policy default settings

4. State intervenes at the control plane (ownership/governance of the algorithm)

5. “National security” becomes the legitimizing wrapper for changing who steers the feed

You can argue about motive - security concerns are real, geopolitics is real, foreign influence risk is not imaginary. But the structural point stands: the establishment behaved as if algorithmic recommendation is a strategic asset that must be brought under friendly governance when it produces the “wrong” identity outcomes. That’s exactly what “means of ideological production” looks like in the recommendation era.

The Synthesis

The Core Claim

When Marx was writing, controlling the means of material production was the dominant bottleneck for power. Today, the dominant bottleneck is controlling the means of ideological production.

This is not because “ideas matter more than money.” It’s because:

1. The means of ideological production are now distinct from the means of material production - you don’t need to own factories or capital to manufacture perception at scale

2. Whoever controls perception, identity, and legitimacy can reliably capture the state

3. Once you capture the state, you can reshape material outcomes downstream (ownership, distribution, rules)

So ideology is upstream of ownership in the causal chain that matters for politics. Material production still exists, still matters as a substrate. But it’s no longer the bottleneck.

The Updated Framework

• Base (in the updated sense): The means of ideological production - whoever can manufacture consensus, identity, and legitimacy at scale

• Substrate: Physical reality, productive capacity, coercive capacity - these remain real constraints that ideology can route around but not abolish

• Ownership: A state variable that ideology reshapes through institutional capture

Why This Matters for Competing Ideologies

The Selection and Carrier Problems

Two key bottlenecks determine which ideologies achieve durable institutional power:

1. Selection problem: Why do these moral panics, at these times, succeed - while other ideologies (pro-labor, anti-monopoly, universalist solidarity) routinely fail to institutionalize?

2. Carrier problem: In any given model, what’s the material mechanism that turns ideology into durable rule - media ownership, donor networks, courts, party infrastructure, platform algorithms, something else?

The answer to both: it’s not primarily about who has money. It’s about who can most effectively run the power-conversion pipeline - recruitment, conversion, attrition, retention - over time.

The Myth of Right-Wing Homogeneity

A common explanation for the left’s failures is that progressive coalitions are more heterogeneous and therefore harder to coordinate. This is false.

The right-wing coalition is at least as heterogeneous as the left. It includes:

• White supremacists and multicultural conservatives

• Evangelicals and Catholics (with deep theological differences)

• Corporatists and economic populists (in direct material tension)

• Neocon warhawks and America First isolationists (opposite foreign policies)

• Libertarians and social authoritarians (incompatible visions of government)

These factions have massive internal contradictions. Libertarians and Evangelicals disagree on almost everything except opposition to the left. Corporatists want cheap labor and open markets; nativists want closed borders and protectionism. Yet they cohere. Coalition unity is manufactured the same way public consent is manufactured: by controlling what’s salient, what’s punishable, and what counts as betrayal.

The key insight: right-wing homogeneity is output, not input. The apparent unity is an achievement of ideological production, not a natural condition. They’ve agreed - implicitly or explicitly - to prioritize the identity war over policy fights. Capture the country’s general identity first, sort out the spoils later.

The left does the opposite. It tries to deliver for its silos (labor gets labor policy, civil rights groups get civil rights policy, environmentalists get environmental policy) without ever fighting the meta-battle of “what does it mean to be American?” As a result, the country’s identity has slowly but surely shifted rightward - to the point where a felon who incited an insurrection can win the presidency twice, and 90% marginal tax rates from America’s “golden age” seem unthinkable.

Why the Left’s Ideologies Often Lose

The left does identity work - but it’s fragmented. There’s LGBTQ identity. Black liberation identity. Environmentalist identity. Labor identity. Each silo has its own story, its own enemies, its own definition of what it means to belong. But there’s no overarching identity that unifies them - no answer to “what does it mean to be American?” that makes attacking any of these groups feel like an attack on the shared identity itself.

The Powell network understood something the New Deal coalition didn’t: you’re not just fighting for policy, you’re fighting for the default settings of how Americans understand freedom, government, merit, and identity. That requires building across every domain where meaning gets made - courts, schools, media, churches, professional networks.

Being uncomfortable with institutional capture isn’t moral high ground - it’s a refusal to do politics. Politics is the contest over who gets to set the default terms of collective life. If you opt out of that contest because it feels manipulative or antidemocratic, you haven’t preserved your purity - you’ve handed the field to people who have no such reservations.

The tragic irony is that the left’s own frameworks should have predicted this. If you believe power matters, that institutions shape outcomes, that the ruling ideas serve ruling interests - then building counter-institutions to contest ideological power isn’t a betrayal of principle, it’s the obvious implication. But somehow the left convinced itself that being right should be enough, that good policy would generate its own constituency, that identity politics was a distraction from “real” material concerns.

What a Power-Competitive Ideology Actually Requires

An ideology, properly understood, is not just a set of beliefs or policy preferences. A power-competitive ideology requires:

1. Anchor: Foundational values from which all else derives, and the means through which they’re implemented - not prescribing personal outcomes, but establishing baseline conditions that must be guaranteed: boundaries and floors for what the rules are allowed to produce.

2. Intentionality: An explicit commitment to building toward the anchor over time - not merely reacting to crises, but deliberately constructing the institutional infrastructure needed to reproduce the ideology across generations.

3. Systemic approach: Coordinated action across domains (law, education, media, labor markets, courts, elections, civil society) - not isolated policies, but a multi-front campaign that reinforces itself.

4. Theory of power: An account of how power actually works (coalitions, incentives, veto points, capture, enforcement, narrative) and how it must be wielded - understanding the power-conversion pipeline and how to run it.

5. Commitment to outcomes: The anchor materialized throughout society, with processes to measure progress and iterate toward it - success defined by whether system-level floors and constraints are realized in practice, not by whether you won an argument.

A competing ideology would need to be structurally resistant to the weaponization routine (moral panics, wedge issues, identity attacks) without resorting to lying or manufacturing its own panics. It would need to make its worldview feel like identity - such that attacks on its policy program feel like attacks on who people are.

Constraints That Remain Real

Even with a dominant control plane, there are still “hard substrates” that ideology can only route around, not rewrite on demand:

1. Physical reality (energy, ecology, thermodynamics): Ideology can delay consequences (deny, externalize, displace), but it can’t vote climate physics away or extract forever without instability.

2. Productive forces and time-to-build constraints: Even with total ideological control, you can’t instantly manufacture skilled labor pools, resilient infrastructure, chip fabs, energy grids.

3. Human psychology (non-negotiable inputs): Ideology exploits stable features of human cognition (identity, fear, status, belonging, motivated reasoning). But those features are also constraints: you can’t build any durable ideology without solving for those inputs.

4. Geopolitics and external constraint systems: An ideology operating inside one state still faces rival states and capital blocs, trade/energy chokepoints, military realities, migration pressures.

5. The “world pushes back” problem (truth as constraint): Even in USOS power theory, the answer to “who decides?” bottoms out in: “reality decides, through the accumulation of observable evidence... the data comes from the world, not from preferences.” Propaganda can suppress/warp feedback for a while, but if the system’s material outputs stop matching the story (living standards, stability, legitimacy, solvency), reality eventually forces a correction - either reform, collapse, or coercion.

So we can say the base isn’t only ideology because constraint substrates remain real. But we should say the decisive base variable (politically) is now the means of ideological production - and that’s distinct from who owns the factories.

Conclusion

The synthesis:

The means of ideological production has become the dominant base in modern conditions. This is distinct from Marx’s “means of material production” because:

• You don’t need capital to wield it (ordinary creators, foreign governments, volunteer networks can all play)

• It operates through identity and perception, not labor and ownership

• Whoever controls it can capture the state and reshape material outcomes downstream

What changed is that ideological production became industrialized and distributed - deliberate, scaled, continuous, and accessible to actors with no traditional economic power. Once that happened, controlling the means of ideological production became the dominant bottleneck for political power.

But diagnosing how ideological power works is only useful if you’re willing to build the machinery to contest it.

We built this publication to equip you with the tools to fight back—the frameworks, the messaging, the strategies that actually work. See the links below. But we can only keep doing this with your help. If this matters to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You keep the fight alive.

• Fighting Fascism: How We Charge Ahead and Win — The strategic playbook for reclaiming power

• The Trump Regime Messaging Guide — How to talk to people who’ve been captured by the machine

• The Freedom Illusion — How we got here, and the counter-ideology that gets us out

1. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, 1988.

The foundational text identifying five structural “filters” through which mass media systematically manufactures consent for elite-compatible outcomes: ownership concentration, advertising dependence, reliance on official sources, “flak” (organized backlash against dissent), and dominant ideology. Herman and Chomsky demonstrated that propaganda is not occasional lying but the normal operating mode of institutional media under these structural incentives — a framework this article extends into the algorithmic era, where the filtering function has shifted from human editors to recommendation engines.

2. Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Attack On American Free Enterprise System“, Confidential Memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., Chairman of the Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 23, 1971.

The foundational strategy document that launched the modern conservative institutional apparatus. Written two months before Powell’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the memo argued that the American free enterprise system was under “broad attack” from academia, media, courts, and politics — and called for a coordinated, long-horizon counter-campaign across all of these domains simultaneously. Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce to fund dedicated institutions for policy research, media monitoring, campus intervention, and legal advocacy. The memo became the coordination blueprint that unlocked capital investment into what became the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the broader network of right-wing ideological infrastructure — directly supporting the article’s argument that the dominant “base” variable shifted to control of power-conversion capacity once Powell solved the collective-action problem for conservative capital.

3. Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right“, Politico Magazine, May 27, 2014.

Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer documents how the religious right’s political mobilization was catalyzed not by Roe v. Wade but by the IRS’s threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian schools, including Bob Jones University. Weyrich himself admitted at a 1990 conference that he had spent years “trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed” — including abortion. It wasn’t until 1979, six years after Roe, that Weyrich and Falwell seized on abortion as a more palatable rallying cry than defending segregation. Directly supports the article’s argument that Weyrich artificially re-coded Christian identity to include being anti-abortion as a deliberate act of ideological production — manufacturing a coalition through identity engineering rather than responding to organic moral conviction.

4. Brian Naylor, “McConnell Would Fill Potential Supreme Court Vacancy In 2020, Reversal Of 2016 Stance“, NPR, May 29, 2019.

Reports McConnell’s response at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Kentucky when asked what he would do if a Supreme Court vacancy opened in 2020: “Oh, we’d fill it” — delivered with a grin. This directly contradicted his 2016 position blocking Merrick Garland on the grounds that “the American people deserved a voice” in an election year. McConnell’s office attempted to distinguish the situations by claiming no vacancy had been filled by the opposing party since the 1880s, but the naked reversal confirms the article’s argument that Senate norms are soft constraints — tools invoked when useful, discarded when not — in service of institutional capture.

5. Barbara Sprunt, “Amy Coney Barrett Confirmed To Supreme Court, Takes Constitutional Oath“, NPR, October 26, 2020.

Confirms the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Barrett to the Supreme Court on October 26, 2020 — just eight days before Election Day and 30 days after her nomination. Susan Collins was the lone Republican to vote against confirmation. Senate Minority Leader Schumer called the process “a cynical power grab” and labeled McConnell’s reversal from 2016 “glaring hypocrisy.” The speed of the confirmation — contrasted with McConnell’s 293-day blockade of Garland — demonstrates how a disciplined ideology can rewrite institutional constraints by rewarding the win more than it fears backlash.

6. Megan Armstrong, Eathyn Edwards, and Duwain Pinder, “Corporate commitments to racial justice: An update“, McKinsey & Company, February 21, 2023.

Third installment of the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility’s analysis of Fortune 1000 corporate racial equity commitments, finding that “companies pledged about $340 billion to driving racial equity between May 2020 and October 2022.” The report reveals that the pace of new commitments slowed 32 percent year-over-year, that 60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies made no public statement at all, and that the financial sector accounted for 93 percent of commitment value. Supports the article’s argument that DEI had enormous material support but lacked a coherent theory of power and defensive institutional moat — making the entire $340 billion apparatus vulnerable to ideological counter-attack.

7. Ishan K. Bhabha, Erica Turret, and Peggy Xu, “One Year Later: The Implications of SFFA for Corporate America“, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, August 6, 2024.

One-year retrospective on the Supreme Court’s landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), which overturned fifty years of legal precedent by striking down race-conscious admissions. Documents the decision’s spillover into corporate America: EEOC workplace discrimination charges increased over 10%, DEI job postings declined 23%, and well-funded organizations like America First Legal and the American Alliance for Equal Rights launched a wave of lawsuits challenging diversity fellowships, grants, and training programs under civil rights statutes — turning laws enacted to protect minorities against the very programs designed to benefit them. Over 100 anti-DEI bills were introduced in more than thirty states, and attorneys general began citing SFFA in warning letters to corporations. Directly supports the article’s argument that the right attached legal risk to DEI through strategic case selection — using the courts as an institutional interface for ideological production.

8. Julian Mark, “DEI ‘lives on’ after Supreme Court ruling, but critics see an opening“, Washington Post, April 19, 2024.

Reports on the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 601 U.S. 346 (2024), which lowered the bar for Title VII workplace discrimination claims from “significant harm” to “some harm.” America First Legal general counsel Gene Hamilton stated the organization would be “citing this decision in cases as we continue to dismantle so-called DEI programs,” and Trump-appointed EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas called leadership development programs restricted to certain racial groups “high-risk” under the new standard. Employment attorneys predicted the ruling would make previously safe DEI programs — including diverse hiring slates like the NFL’s Rooney Rule — newly vulnerable to challenge. Directly supports the article’s argument that the right attached legal risk to DEI through strategic litigation, using court decisions as institutional interfaces for ideological counter-attack.

9. Naomi Nix, “TikTok posts on Israel-Gaza war are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian“, Washington Post, October 7, 2025.

Analysis of a report by the nonpartisan Cybersecurity for Democracy research center at Northeastern University, directed by Laura Edelson, finding a roughly 17-to-1 ratio of pro-Palestinian to pro-Israel posts on U.S. TikTok based on hashtag analysis. Crucially, the study found that median views per post were comparable (472 pro-Palestinian vs. 565 pro-Israel), suggesting the imbalance reflects the political composition of TikTok’s user base rather than algorithmic manipulation — supporting the article’s argument that decentralized ideological production can generate massive narrative environments without centralized control or capital ownership.

10. Erin Alberty, “Sen. Romney links TikTok ban to pro-Palestinian content“, Axios, May 6, 2024.

Reports on a forum at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona, where Sen. Mitt Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S. had “been so ineffective at communicating” justifications for the war in Gaza. Romney then said the quiet part out loud: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.” The admission directly links Congressional support for the TikTok ban to the platform’s pro-Palestinian content rather than the stated national security rationale — supporting the article’s argument that the establishment intervened at the algorithmic control plane because the platform was producing the “wrong” identity outcomes.

11. David Shepardson, “TikTok seals deal for new US joint venture to avoid American ban“, Reuters, January 23, 2026.

Reports on ByteDance finalizing the deal to establish TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a majority American-owned entity (80.1% American/global investors, 19.9% ByteDance) designed to secure U.S. user data, apps, and the content recommendation algorithm. Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each hold 15% stakes, and the venture will retrain and update TikTok’s algorithm on U.S. user data within Oracle’s U.S. cloud. The restructuring — framed entirely around “securing” data and algorithms under U.S. governance — confirms the article’s core argument: the state intervened at the algorithmic control plane to bring the means of ideological production under friendly governance, after the platform produced narrative outcomes that threatened elite consensus.