As somebody who has covered the telecom and media industries professionally for decades, there’s simply of no limit of problems in both sectors competent federal regulators could be taking aim at. Broadband price gouging by monopolies, widespread telecom privacy and security failures, or the obvious harm of unchecked media consolidation all come quickly to mind.
Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion’s share of his first months in office engaged in erratic zealotry, whether it’s abusing FCC authority to harass journalists who refuse to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, or investigating Verizon and Comcast for not being racist enough.
Last week Brendan took a break from abusing government power to abuse government power in a slightly different way — harassing Google for not including enough religious programming in its YouTube TV live streaming television lineup:
“FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sent a letter to the CEOs of Alphabet and Google, calling out the refusal of YouTube TV to carry a network, Great American Family, as a potential case of discrimination against faith-based programming.”
It is, of course, up to a cable or streaming company as to what channels it delivers to its audience. This is generally dictated, fairly coldly and mathematically, by which channels attract viewership eyeballs, and protected by the First Amendment. It’s not generally based on the random-ass zealotry of the head of the Federal Communications Commission.
Carr, again, could be doing any number of things to actually help markets function or improve consumer welfare. Instead he’s harassing a streaming TV provider he has no authority over for not carrying a religious channel not all that many people watched in the first place. This again aligns pretty well with the MAGA mantra that they believe in “free speech,” but only if they agree with what’s being said.
Like most companies, Google signed up for Trumpism because they wanted some mindless deregulation, a heightened war on labor, and some tax breaks. But as is always the case with authoritarianism (or say, Bespin’s gas mining trade deal with the Empire), most of these companies are quickly figuring out they may have bitten off more than they can chew.
They thought they might be getting another Ajit Pai — a corporatist lackey who simply rubber stamped the interests of corporate power. But authoritarianism is something much worse, as everybody — including many of the companies that signed up for it — are going to continue to learn in painful detail.
The highlighted paragraph sums it up nicely. maga rules in its own interests, driven by its core wealth and power imperatives. The bigotry and aggressiveness of CN elites is frightening. These people are dead serious. They lie, slander and do whatever they think will advance corrupt, fundamentalist Christian theocracy, while displacing secularism, pluralism, the law and inconvenient facts and truth.
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I keep seeing occasional reports indicating something was seriously wrong with the 2024 elections. The reporting appears to be reliable. For example, Snopes reported that djt's statement, "They rigged the election, and I became president", during a March 2025 news conference was real. Of course, it's unclear whether Trump was referring to the 2020 or 2024 presidential election. I assume he was talking about the 2024 election and the rigging was done by maga elites and operatives to put djt back in power.
An article by The American Prospect reports on an aspect of 2024 election-rigging that has not been discussed much:
Right-Wing Donors and Foundations Spent $1 Billion to
Keep People From Voting Last Year
There are many reasons Democrats had a poor showing on Election Day. One reason that isn’t getting enough attention is that conservative foundations and wealthy donors spent heavily on funding nonprofits that suppress voter participation, kick people off the voter rolls, and throw out legitimately cast ballots.
In the 2024 election, more people didn’t vote than voted for any one candidate: 36.33 percent of eligible voters nationwide stayed home (or had their vote thrown out); 31.78 percent voted for Trump; 30.84 percent voted for Harris; and 1.06 percent voted for a third-party candidate.There are, of course, many reasons why so many eligible voters didn’t vote. Right-wing funding of election deniers and anti–voting rights organizations are definitely part of the answer. Millions of people wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so. Others did vote, but their vote was wrongly rejected and was never counted.
That didn’t happen by accident; it was planned for and funded. In just three years—2020, 2021, and 2022—more than $1 billion flowed from more than 3,500 foundations and high-net-worth donors to about 150 nonprofits that advocate purging people from the voting rolls, restricting vote-by-mail or early voting, removing drop boxes, and other ways of making it harder for people to vote.
The problem is that reporting like this has not generated any significant effort by anyone in power to either deny or confirm suspicions of an election rigged to favor djt in 2024. Elite Democrats dismiss this out of hand as crackpot conspiracy theory. Maybe that is all it is. But maybe not. I asked Perplexity to do a deep research dive into the likelihood of a rigged election.
Q: How important a factor in the 2024 elections were voter suppression efforts described in this article https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-12-right-wing-donors-foundations-spent-billion-keep-people-from-voting/ ?A: .... long analysis, 31 references ....
Media Neglect and Public Perception
Despite overwhelming evidence, mainstream outlets underreported suppression’s scale. Only 12% of post-election coverage in The New York Times and CNN mentioned purges or ballot rejections, focusing instead on Trump’s baseless fraud claims 1 12. This imbalance allowed 54% of Republicans to falsely believe noncitizen voting swayed the election, per Issue One polling 2 7. Palast argues this media failure stemmed from a reluctance to “undermine public confidence” in elections—a narrative that inadvertently legitimized suppression 1 3.
Conclusion: A Democracy in CrisisThe 2024 election exposed systemic vulnerabilities in U.S. democracy. Voter suppression did not merely influence the outcome; it determined it, disenfranchising millions through meticulously engineered laws and vigilante campaigns. The tactics—rooted in historical racism and enabled by dark money—reveal a concerted effort to subvert the principle of one person, one vote.
As long as no serious effort is made to confirm or deny, suspicions of a rigged election will remain nothing more than speculation.
