Stuff Fascists Like

Monday, March 16, 2026

Fascist Move of the Day

FCC chair threatens to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage he deems "fake news." A sitting US senator responds: "We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT."

Source: The Guardian, March 15 2026

Historical Parallel

On March 13, 1933 — six weeks after Hitler became Chancellor — Joseph Goebbels was appointed head of the newly created Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda: the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. One of its first acts was to assert control over German broadcasting. Radio stations were placed under direct state authority. Editors who published or broadcast content that deviated from the party narrative faced having their licenses revoked and their careers ended. The threat alone was sufficient. Within months, German media had achieved near-total self-censorship — not because every journalist agreed with the regime, but because every journalist understood what would happen if they didn't.

Goebbels did not need to revoke many licenses. He needed to revoke enough of them that the rest understood the signal. The distinction between state censorship and state-induced self-censorship is one that authoritarian regimes have always understood better than democracies: you don't have to silence every voice. You just have to make the cost of speaking high enough that most voices silence themselves.

Sources: USHMM — Nazi Propaganda · Wikipedia: Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

The Full Dispatch

On Saturday, FCC Chair Brendan Carr — a Trump appointee — posted publicly that broadcasters airing what the agency deems "fake news" about the Iran war could lose their broadcast licenses. He was not vague about it. He wrote: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up." On Sunday, he went on CBS News and doubled down: "People have gotten used to the idea that licenses are some sort of property right. I try to help reorient people that, no, there is a public interest, and broadcast is different." He did not specify what constituted a "hoax." He did not need to. The message was the specificity.

The response was bipartisan — and extraordinary. Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said on Fox News: "I'm in big support of the first amendment. I do not like the heavy hand of government, no matter who's wielding it." Senator Elizabeth Warren called it "straight out of the authoritarian playbook." Senator Chris Murphy wrote what may be the most unambiguous statement a sitting senator has made about the current political moment: "We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it." California Governor Gavin Newsom called it "flagrantly unconstitutional." The sole remaining Democratic FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, said the agency "can issue threats all day long, but it is powerless to carry them out."

Goebbels understood something that Carr is demonstrating in real time: the threat is the mechanism. You don't actually have to revoke broadcast licenses to control broadcast media. You have to make clear that you can, and that you will, and that the standard for what triggers revocation is subjective enough that no editor can be sure they're safe. "News distortion" is not a legal standard with clear boundaries. It is a rubber stamp that can be applied to anything the administration dislikes. That is the point. When the standard is vague and the enforcer is political, the rational response from every newsroom in America is: what can we say that won't put our license at risk? That question, once internalized, is censorship — even if no license is ever actually revoked.

The Nazis didn't invent broadcast censorship. They perfected the insight that broadcast licensing is a tool of state control — that any government with the power to grant and revoke the right to transmit information to millions of people holds a lever that no amount of constitutional language can fully neutralize, because the threat of revocation disciplines behavior before any court can intervene. Carr has now pulled that lever publicly, during a war, over coverage of that war. Commissioner Gomez may be right that the FCC lacks the legal power to carry out the threat. But Goebbels would have recognized the strategy instantly: you don't need to shut them down. You need them to shut themselves up.