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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.

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.

I'm not sure if the implication is that this contingent approves of Somali muslims ripping off US/MN welfare programs, a good fraction of that cash ending up being sent as remittances which end up in the hands of groups not exactly known for their love of Israel.

If this is your conspiracy, sure. But quite frankly it doesn't make a ton of sense.

Jews want to live in a multicultural state. Flooding Minnesota with minorities is in line with what they want.

A few Somalis are far less of a threat to jewery than a homogenous society is.

That doesn't make sense. Western countries post-WW2 were much less hostile to Jews than Western countries now. Multiculturalism means a) more Muslims and b) more other foreigners who don't feel post-war guilt about the Holocaust. Aliyah from countries like France is going up as they become more multicultural, as French Jews flee their new Muslim neighbours.

After the establishment of Israel, Middle Eastern Jews fled (or were expelled from) ethnically and religiously diverse countries in order to move to Israel. Diversity means more ethnic conflict overall, which means more ethnic scapegoating of rich groups (i.e. Ashkenazim). Whereas a tiny Jewish population in a homogenous country are much less of a threat.

It's a mistake to overinterpret what happened in Germany. Hitler's rise was driven by Germany's humiliation in WW1, the Treaty of Versailles, and the growing threat of Communism. Other fascist regimes like Italy or Spain were fine with the Jews. Antisemitism was just an idiosyncrasy of Hitler, not a law of history.

Antisemitism was just an idiosyncrasy of Hitler, not a law of history.

Can anyone point to a historical (right- or left-) populist movement in a culturally Christian country that didn't eventually turn anti-semitic? I suppose there is a colourable argument that Disraeli's OG One Nation Conservatism counts as right-populist, but it isn't a central example.

Jews really are over-represented (by somewhere around 10x, as you would expect given high-end estimates of Ashkenazi IQ if we do live in an IQ-meritocracy) in the allegedly-meritocratic elite, so if you think that the allegedly-meritocratic elite is a conspiracy, then it is a Jewish conspiracy.

There is a long history of homogeneous societies turning on Jews because domestic politics required a scapegoat. Admittedly it hasn't happened in an English-speaking Christian society since the late 18th century, and not in a murderous way since 1290.

There is a history of homogenous societies turning on Jews but there was also plenty of antisemitism in corners of diverse empires like the Russian and Ottoman Empires (not so much in the capitals, at least most of the time, but certainly in many of the provinces). In 1980 America was far more diverse than Western Europe and yet had little antisemitism.

In general the “Jews want diversity because Jews do better in diverse countries” point is extremely contrived, it’s gained currency only because it’s promoted both by Jewish progressives who want to defend multiculturalism in a weekly Reform temple sermon and by far-right antisemites who want to ‘explain’ the motive for why Jews supposedly want to destroy formerly-homogenous white countries with mass immigration. There isn’t much evidence for it or against it. Some Jews supported mass immigration, but so did plenty of powerful indigenous Europeans both in Europe and in North America. Jews were more progressive than many other groups on immigration in the mid-20th century of course, but they were also more progressive on economic and other issues (eg being very overrepresented in economic leftist movements), which suggests it wasn’t an immigration-specific thing.