Staff Reports
If you think the mainstream media will give Americans the full picture about the Israel-Hamas war, think again. Last week’s South Park episode cut through the sanctimony and forced a truth the journalists keep bending away from: the conflict is messy, the political lines are blurred, and our cultural arbiters are more interested in virtue signaling than rooting for facts or common sense. Comedy central may offend everyone, but sometimes satire reveals what cable news hides.
The TikTok story is the clearest example of Washington theatre masquerading as national security policy. What’s being sold to the public as a clean break from Chinese control is actually a corporate shell game that hands algorithmic oversight to a U.S. investor cabal while leaving ByteDance with real economic upside — a deal that keeps the platform running, protects ad revenue, and gives elites plausible deniability. Americans who value free speech should be skeptical when powerful interests tell us a takeover was about anything other than control and influence.
Make no mistake: politicians and foreign leaders understand the power of platforms better than the average voter does. Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t mince words when he called social media “a weapon,” and Israel’s public diplomacy machine has been actively courting influencers to shape narratives among U.S. audiences. This isn’t conspiracy theory; it’s raw, confessed strategy — social media is where hearts, minds, and votes are won or lost.
That means the freshly restructured TikTok will be a battleground, not a neutral town square. With Oracle, Silver Lake, and other U.S. investors lining up to run the algorithm and data security — while ByteDance clings to a minority stake — expect savvy campaigns to flood feeds with carefully calibrated messages that favor geopolitical allies. Conservatives should welcome sensible security guardrails, but we must resist any arrangement that hands the curation of political truth to corporate or foreign-influenced gatekeepers.
Meanwhile, American public opinion is shifting in ways the media pretends to be surprised by. Polling shows a stark generational divide: younger Americans are far more skeptical of Israel than older voters, and overall sympathy for Israel has sagged from the highs seen after October 7. If the left thinks it can coast on moral preening while ignoring how its narratives alienate whole swaths of the country, they’re going to be wrong — and we need to be honest about why those shifts are happening.
The political theater at the United Nations was further proof that global elites are as performative as our own media class. Delegates walked out en masse during Netanyahu’s U.N. address, a spectacle that the same outlets calling for “nuance” somehow never applied when reporting violent atrocities or the plight of civilians. If the world stage is where legitimacy is bestowed or withdrawn, then pay attention to who’s clapping and who’s leaving; it tells you where the real power and propaganda are being staged.
On a more somber note, the conservative movement is still reeling from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a reminder that political violence can touch anyone and that the costs of a toxic media ecosystem are real. The heroic tributes from allies in Israel and the U.S. don’t erase the questions conservatives must ask about safety, rhetoric, and who benefits from the chaos — but they do underscore that our side will not be silenced by intimidation. We owe it to his memory to keep pushing for truth, security, and the unapologetic defense of Western values.
Now is not the time for half-measures or moral relativism. If platforms will be weaponized, then conservatives must master every medium with principled, clear-eyed messaging that defends liberty, sovereignty, and our allies without surrendering to authoritarian gatekeepers. Americans who believe in self-government and free markets should rally behind transparency, oppose corporate capture of political speech, and demand that both the press and Big Tech stop deciding for us what patriotism looks like.
