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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Netflix ditches deal for Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount’s offer is deemed superior

In a development that was predicted by many, Paramount Skydance owned by the Ellison family has derailed the Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros and will acquire the company.

The Ellison family are close, long-time personal friends and business partners with Netanyahu. For example, in 2020 Haaretz reported that Ellison intervened to secure a lawyer to represent Netanyahu in his corruption case. In 2021 Larry Ellison offered Netanyahu a paid role on Oracle’s board. Larry Ellison has widely been described as the largest private donor to the IDF.

With Paramount Skydance now poised to acquire Warner Bros, here is an incomplete list of the properties that now have or will shortly come under ownership of the Ellison Family.

August 2025- Hostile takeover of Paramount:

  • Paramount Pictures
  • Paramount Television
  • CBS
  • CBS News
  • CBS Sports
  • Nickelodeon
  • MTV
  • BET
  • Comedy Central
  • Showtime
  • Paramount+

We saw the immediate fallout from the Ellison family acquisition of CBS News with the installation of Bari Weiss to lead the editorial direction of the company.

Only last month in January 2036 the TikTok algorithm came under the ownership and control of Ellison-owned Oracle, so for practical purposes TikTok should be added to this list:

  • TikTok

Now with the impending takeover by Paramount of Warner Bros, these properties will come under the control of the Ellison family:

  • Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group
  • CNN / CNN International
  • HBO / HBO Max
  • Discovery+
  • Discovery Channel
  • DC/DC Studios
  • TLC
  • TNT
  • TBS
  • Turner Classic Movies (TCM)
  • Animal Planet
  • Science Channel
  • Travel Channel
  • American Heroes Channel (formerly the Military Channel)
  • Cartoon Network / AdultSwim

This is the consolidation of American Media under the Ellison family in just sixth months.

Netanyahu has described International Media as the "eighth front" of Israel's wars, it is wildly intolerable to me that the Trump Administration would permit the consolidation of this breadth of news media into a family with foreign loyalties and foreign ties. The reforms at CBS News and elevation of Bari Weiss also prove a political motive and intent to fight this Eighth Front defined by Netanyahu, which is a front Israel is fighting against the minds of the American People.

At what point do "conspiracies" stop becoming conspiracies and start just becoming recognized as plain reality? All the "conspiracy theorists" predicted from the beginning the TikTok algorithm would be handed to an apparatus loyal to Israel, and that Paramount Skydance would not allow Netflix to win Warner Bros, because they are fighting a geopolitical war and not optimizing dollars and cents.

All of this while the United States mobilizes to fight another war for Israel... but deporting Somalis from Minnesota is just impossible we are told.

Seems like a failson wannabe Hollywood mogul centibillionaire heir wasting a huge amount of his father’s money (and some dumb money from outside investors of a similar caliber) on an industry that’s about to be completely upended by AI.

Smart move for Netflix to walk away, say what you will, these assets won’t be worth $100bn in 5 years.

As to your last point, the person doing more than anyone else to deport Somalis from Minnesota (including almost all gentile GOP politicians) is Jewish.

It actually doesn't seem like that at all, it literally seems like Israeli agents acquiring property to make sure American Media is pro-Israel and pro-Jewish. You can't say "oh they just want to waste their money on clout" to explain Bari Weiss being installed at CBS New, or the political sequence of events that led TikTok algorithm into falling in the lap of Ellison (hundreds of Jewish lobbies lobby for the TikTok ban because TikTok is antisemitic, then the ban happens and Ellison gets the algorithm, that's not "bored billionaires")- which Netanyahu directly identified as the most important development in Israel's eighth-front war. That's not "bored billionaires trying to buy everything" it's something else.

ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt was heard on leaked call demanding something must be done about TikTok due to declining support for Israel among young people, hundreds of Jewish organizations throw their weight behind a Tik Tok ban, a week ago Time publishes in article by Anthony Goldbloom titled Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism...

TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.

For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."

They want control over the moderation and algo, as ADL has control over the moderation of Reddit and nearly every platform except X only since Musk's takeover.