Rupert Murdoch built more than a media empire. He built a cathedral of grievance where facts die on the altar and paranoia pays the rent. For three decades, this structure stood as the template for manufacturing outrage, monetising fear, and turning democratic discourse into profitable spectacle.
But the monster he unleashed no longer answers to him.
The cathedral now swarms with new architects; fossil fuel billionaires, cryptocurrency charlatans, and surveillance barons who view democracy as a speed hump on their motorway to absolute power. Peter Thiel bankrolls politicians who openly question whether democracy and freedom are compatible. Charles Koch’s network has spent billions rewriting state laws. Leonard Leo transformed the judiciary into a corporate wish-fulfilment service. These men don’t want to govern. They want to own the operating system.
Murdoch was the original Frankenstein. But he no longer controls the laboratory.
Project 2025: Autocracy’s IKEA Manual in Reverse
Project 2025 is not a policy platform. It is a demolition manual.
Nine hundred pages of instructions for gutting environmental protections, purging civil servants who won’t pledge personal loyalty, and transforming federal agencies into partisan enforcement arms. The Heritage Foundation wrote it. Dark money networks funded it. Trump’s inner circle staffed it with authors.
The plan names names. It identifies specific federal employees to fire. It designates entire departments for elimination. It doesn’t hide its intentions; it advertises them. Schedule F would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants as at-will employees, who may be sacked without even giving cause. The EPA would become a permitting service for polluters. The Department of Justice would serve the president, not the law.
This is Uber for autocracy. Deregulate everything. Destabilise institutions. Hand the keys to the highest bidder.
Trump allegedly told oil executives he’d dismantle climate regulations for one billion dollars in campaign funding. That’s not corruption. That’s venture capital with a fascist stamp. The product isn’t governance. It’s immunity from consequence, sold to those who can afford the premium.
Peter Thiel’s fingerprints mark every surface. His company Palantir sells surveillance systems to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Is this why Trump recently summoned 800 generals and admirals? Scan the crowd. Identify foes. Thiel’s proteges populate Trump’s administration. His essays argue that democracy has become incompatible with freedom; by which he means his freedom to accumulate wealth without democratic interference.
These people don’t oppose government. They oppose government they can’t purchase.
The Persecution Engine: Outrage as Perpetual Motion
The cathedral runs on manufactured persecution. Watch how the machinery operates.
Fox News ran 1,098 segments about “critical race theory” in four months during 2021. Most viewers couldn’t define it. That was the point. The confusion generated the outrage. The outrage generated the engagement. The engagement generated the profit.
“Deep state.” “Woke mob.” “Globalist cabal.” These aren’t arguments. They’re incantations. Repeat them often enough and they become real. They don’t require evidence. They require only repetition.
You’ve seen this pattern. A new target gets selected every few weeks. Trans people using bathrooms. Immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Teachers “indoctrinating” children. Librarians stocking “pornographic” books. The specifics don’t matter. The machinery remains constant.
Target identified. Outrage manufactured. Mob assembled. Target destroyed.
Then the mob needs feeding again.
Conspiracy theories function as perpetual motion machines of resentment. They generate rage without requiring reason. QAnon claimed Democratic politicians ran child trafficking rings from pizza restaurant basements. The restaurant in question had no basement. Didn’t matter. A man showed up with a rifle to “investigate.” The conspiracy expanded to include every institution that questioned it; proof, they said, of how deep it goes.
This is the fiendish brilliance of the persecution complex. Every correction becomes evidence of conspiracy. Every fact-check proves the cover-up. The machinery is self-sustaining, powered by its own contradictions.
And in the digital economy, outrage is the most valuable commodity.
The Algorithm Sees All, Understands Nothing
Murdoch was a gatekeeper who decided which news you saw. Today’s technology oligarchs are different. They don’t curate content. They engineer emotions.
The algorithm doesn’t ask what’s true. It asks what keeps you scrolling. Baits your clicks.
Zuckerberg owns the platform where billions form their understanding of reality. Musk owns the town square where political discourse happens. Thiel owns the surveillance infrastructure tracking dissent. Shadow President, billionaire, Larry Ellison will control TikTok, engineering feeling, where a fifth of US subscribers get their news. They’re not publishers. They’re puppet masters but with much better data.
Facebook’s own research showed Instagram harms teenage girls’ mental health. The company knew. It didn’t matter. Engagement metrics mattered. Depression scrolls. Anxiety clicks. Rage shares.
Stop and think about your last hour online. How many times did you feel outraged? How many times did you click because you were angry? That’s not accident. That’s design.
You’re not the customer. You’re the product. And the product is your rage.
Studies confirm what we’ve all experienced: posts containing moral outrage spread faster and further than neutral content. Each outrage word in a tweet increases retweets by 20%. The algorithm learned this. Now it optimises for it. Your feed isn’t showing you reality. It’s showing you the version of reality most likely to make you angry enough to engage.
Truth is slow, expensive and click-resistant. Disinformation is fast, cheap and endlessly shareable.
Sky News Australia exports Fox’s model with a colonial accent. Billionaire-owned platforms worldwide peddle “anti-woke” content not as ideology but as inventory. The culture war isn’t politics anymore. It’s a business model. Outrage mining. Rage refining. Resentment as renewable resource.
The media mogul as gatekeeper is obsolete. Today’s oligarchs are algorithmic deities; engineers of feeling, owners of both the pipeline and the product flowing through it. They direct the flood while drowning in their own feeds, mistaking engagement metrics for reality, confusing virality with truth.
Even Gods Bleed
The throne wobbles.
Sam Bankman-Fried; crypto emperor, Democratic megadonor, effective altruist philosopher-king; is serving 25 years in federal prison. FTX’s collapse vaporised $8 billion in customer funds. The blockchain billionaire who promised to save the world through enlightened capitalism turned out to be running a garden-variety fraud.
Turns out theft is still theft, even when you explain it using game theory.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and immediately destroyed half its value. Advertisers fled. Users migrated. The “free speech absolutist” reinstated Nazis while banning journalists who criticised him. The world’s richest man spent $44 billion to prove that being wealthy doesn’t make you wise.
The surveillance capitalists thought they’d transcended consequence. They believed their own mythology; that they were building the future, that old rules didn’t apply, that disruption justified any damage. But gravity remains undefeated. Markets crash. Frauds collapse. Hubris extracts its fee.
The oligarchs bet on chaos because they thought they’d profit from disaster. Thiel has a backup citizenship and a compound in Queenstown, New Zealand for when civilisation collapses. Zuckerberg builds bunkers in Hawaii. They’re not trying to prevent apocalypse. They’re investing in it, certain their wealth will insulate them from the rubble.
But chaos doesn’t read contracts. It eats everyone.
Climate catastrophe destroys their beach houses too. Thiel’s plans are on hold. Social collapse threatens their security regardless of how many armed guards they hire. They’re building escape pods on a burning ship, when they could have helped put out the fire.
Overweening ambition is the autocrat’s fatal flaw. The tighter they grip the reins, the more reality slips between their fingers.
The Colosseum Demands Fresh Blood
Modern autocracy doesn’t merely require spectacle. It requires ritual sacrifice.
Watch the pattern. The algorithm identifies a target. A teacher dares mention racism in American history. A librarian stocks a book with LGBTQ characters. A public health official recommends masks.
The mob assembles on social media. Fox picks up the story. Local fascists show up at school board meetings howling about “grooming.” The target receives death threats. Loses their job. Disappears from public life.
The mob grows hungrier.
This isn’t random violence. It’s how the system feeds itself. Each sacrifice temporarily satisfies the audience while raising their appetite for the next one. The cruelty isn’t a bug. It’s the core feature. The suffering is the point; public, ritualistic, designed to terrify anyone who might resist.
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss counted votes in Georgia. Giuliani accused them of election fraud on national television. The lies were specific, detailed, and completely fabricated. They received death threats so severe they had to flee their homes. Trump mentioned them by name 18 times. They became human sacrifices on the altar of the Big Lie.
When they sued Giuliani for defamation, he admitted in court that he’d lied. Admitted it. Still refuses to pay the $148 million judgment. Because the lies served their purpose. The mob got its show. Two Black women had their lives destroyed as warning to others. The punishment is the message.
This is today’s arena; a digital colosseum where targets are paraded and consumed for public amusement, each degradation normalising the next, each ritual desensitising the audience to their own cruelty, until fascism feels like entertainment and democracy dies to applause.
The Mapmakers of Sanity
Resistance doesn’t come from institutions anymore. The institutions failed or capitulated or got purchased. Resistance comes from the edges.
Teachers hide banned books in their classrooms. Climate activists chain themselves to bulldozers. Public defenders file motions in kangaroo courts. Nurses treat patients despite politicians’ death panels. Election workers count ballots despite death threats.
Robert Reich explains oligarchy in three-minute videos that reach millions. Heather Cox Richardson provides historical context showing we’ve survived authoritarian attempts before. Anand Giridharadas names plutocrats and refuses their polite camouflage. Sarah Kendzior warned about Trump’s fascist trajectory years before mainstream media acknowledged the danger.
But the mapmakers extend beyond prominent voices. Librarians in small towns defending their collections against book-banning mobs. Teachers resisting mandates to whitewash history. Indigenous activists blockading pipelines. Abortion clinic escorts creating safe paths through screaming crowds. Tenant unions fighting evictions. Mutual aid networks feeding people their government abandoned.
These aren’t generals. They’re guerrillas. And guerrillas don’t win by fighting armies directly. They win by making occupation impossible. By refusing to disappear. By building networks that survive the purges. By keeping truth alive when lies have institutional backing.
The front lines run through school boards and library commissions. Through local journalism and neighbourhood organising. Through the unglamorous work of showing up, bearing witness, and refusing to be moved.
Poets, Fools, and Saboteurs
The cathedral demands reverence. Satire is sacrilege. Which is precisely why satire matters.
Autocracy runs on spectacle, but satire punctures spectacle. It takes the sacred seriously enough to mock it. The emperor insists he’s wearing magnificent robes. The satirist points out his arse is showing. This isn’t decoration. It’s demolition.
George Carlin dissected American mythology for five decades. His routines weren’t entertainment; they were autopsies. He showed the machinery beneath the rhetoric, the profit motives behind the platitudes, the cruelty papered over with patriotic bunting.
Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette did more to expose misogyny in art history than a thousand academic papers. By making people laugh and then stopping the laughter to explain exactly why the joke worked, she taught an audience how they’d been taught to normalise violence.
This is what poets and satirists do. They build funhouse mirrors that show power’s grotesquerie. They find the cracks in propaganda. They speak the unspeakable and make the unbearable visible. When institutions lie with polished press releases, artists tell truth through metaphor. When politicians speak in anaesthetic euphemisms, poets use the words that cut.
The cathedral wants you numb. Artists keep you awake.
A Living Lexicon
Language is battleground. The Right understands this. They’ve spent fifty years weaponising words. “Pro-life” sounds better than “forced birth.” “Religious freedom” means freedom to discriminate. “Parental rights” means censorship. They don’t argue positions – they brand them.
The resistance needs its own vocabulary. Not euphemisms but clarifications. Terms that expose rather than obscure.
Cathedral of grievance. Slot-machine judiciary. Autocracy’s IKEA manual. Outrage mining. Algorithmic deities. Ritual sacrifice by algorithm. Persecution engine. Surveillance capitalism. These aren’t slogans. They’re diagnostic tools. They name the machinery before it crushes you.
Sew them into conversation. Make them common currency. Build a shared language that identifies the mechanisms of oppression and the points of leverage for resistance.
The cathedral speaks in mystifications. Obfuscates. Respond with clarity.
What Happens When Cathedrals Burn
Murdoch built the cathedral. The oligarchs weaponised it. Trump lit it on fire.
But cathedrals burn.
The business model is collapsing under its own contradictions. Advertisers abandon platforms toxic with disinformation. Audiences fragment as lies become too obvious to sustain. The algorithm; optimised for engagement is killing the host; radicalising users until they commit violence, spreading disease misinformation until pandemic kills viewers, promoting financial fraud until markets crash.
The cathedral’s foundations were always rotten. It was built on lies, maintained through fear, funded by grift. You can’t construct stability from chaos. Eventually the structure collapses.
We’re watching the beginning of that collapse. Fox paid $787 million for lying about Dominion. Newsmax paid another $67 million. Alex Jones owes $1.5 billion for Sandy Hook lies. Giuliani can’t pay his judgments. Trump faces 91 criminal charges. The immunity they thought they’d purchased turns out to be temporary.
Truth is slow. But it’s also heavy. And eventually it crushes lies.
What Comes After
When the cathedral collapses; and it will; we’ll need more than poets documenting the rubble.
We’ll need the teachers who kept truth alive in hostile classrooms. The journalists who published despite the threats. The organisers who built networks when institutions failed. The lawyers who filed motions in captured courts. The election workers who counted ballots through the death threats. The librarians who refused to ban books. The nurses who treated patients despite the politicians.
They won’t be mapping ruins. They’ll be building what comes next.
This requires unglamorous work. Showing up to school board meetings. Running for local office. Supporting independent journalism. Joining tenant unions. Volunteering at abortion funds. Teaching media literacy. Building mutual aid networks. Protecting vulnerable people. Telling truth to neighbours.
The spectacle wants you exhausted, isolated, convinced resistance is futile. That’s how you know resistance matters.
The cathedral of grievance stands on foundations of lies. Truth is patient. Truth is specific. Truth doesn’t need to be exciting; it just needs to be repeated, documented, and acted upon.
Every teacher who refuses to lie about history. Every journalist who names oligarchs. Every organiser who builds community power. Every artist who exposes the machinery. Every ordinary person who refuses to accept manufactured reality; these are cracks in the foundation.
The cathedral is burning. Some will mourn it. But beneath the rubble, people are already building something different. Not another cathedral; cathedrals centralise power and demand submission. What comes next will be decentralised, democratic, and designed to serve human flourishing rather than oligarchic profit.
The spectacle is not supreme. The monster is mortal. The lies eventually exhaust themselves.
And when the cathedral falls, truth won’t need to shout. It’ll just need to stand there, solid and undeniable, while the rubble settles.
Start building. The future is watching.
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“Start building. The future is watching.”
Well said and a great article – thanks!
Much truth, a guide, a light, so, we sit in our canoes, paddling towards imagined horizons, waving weapons of individual assurance, and, we will GET THESE BASTARDS, just as soon as crippling superstition is ended…actually there is much to hate and fear, beyond the “limits.”
This is a wonderful essay,David, which offers hope for a better future.
Yes,David Tyler, yes, a thousand times yes.
I don’t know about others, but I have this quirk where I’ll sometimes read something and go ooooo that’s it, that’s the answer, or wow, there it is all wrapped up in a neat package, well right now I’m running around the room tearing down the curtains singing the chorus to Waltzing Matilda.
I don’t mean to elevate David’s article above anyone else’s, AIMT is a treasure trove. But the involvement of these oligarchs in the Israel-US-West genocide in Gaza through Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Palantir, News Corp and co.in trialling survelliance, oppression and AI murder on an entire population had me thinking maybe Luigi Mangione has the right idea. The only rationale I had keeping me from coming to that conclusion was sacrificing life made us no different to them.
Yes, we need to call them out, we need to name them and what they’re doing, we need to mock and ridicule them, we need to bring their model down, we need to unite against them.
We let our children down if we just go off bash a few bushes, scare a few birds, terrorize a few lizards and claim its all too hard I’ll just sit here and look at the view instead.
Labor and the Coalition are not going to bring their corporations to account. We need new leadership. We need to press for a government that is going to hold the corporations these oligarchs use to account, here in Australia, and if that means we’re going to have to replace them with our own platforms, etc. then all the better, we can benefit rather than some monstrous tax-dodging oligarch .
Yep, Project2025 was joint Koch Network’s Heritage and Tanton Network; the latter of deceased white nationalist and formerly fossil fuel astroturf ZPG Zero Pop Growth, John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton.
Tanton admired white Oz policy, visited and hosted by SusPopAus (according to King in Koch linked AIP’s Online Opinion) and via a Brit born friend, allegedly advised Fox News management till few years ago; local NewsCorp management then inferred editorial via Tucker Carlson……
Gertz in Media Matters explains, based on NYT investigation, in ’22 titled ‘If you are in business with Fox News, you are on the hook for its white nationalism’.
Great essay.
Murdoch & T-Rump will drop dead soon. As will the Koch bros, and their ilk.
The American dregs of 20th century European fascists are all due to expire.
Their contemporaries such as Theil & co are precious whimps by comparison, and won’t stand a snowflake’s chance in hell – they know it and are shitting themselves.
The bovver boys of Silicone Valley and the Techbros are now so bloated, there isn’t a drug they can use to save themselves.
Together their once scalding steam is now a remnant dribble of drivel, as they take to their sieges with nothing to do but eat each other alive.
Spot on Clakka, spot on.
Thiel and Co are the third generation from the Hayek and Co — the European fascists that emerged from the ruins of the Cold War.
The third generation cannot sustain the momentum because the promises of hyper-liberalism turned out to be lies.
The problem we have now is the degree to which the third generation are prepared to use the power their ill-gotten wealth gives them to enforce compliance.