'Not My Department says Wernher von Braun'
How an old Tom Lehrer song got me thinking about the complicity of workers in media and tech in the rise of global autocracy
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Looking back at all the crossroads, the things we didn’t do. Take media for example, we could have enabled micropayments thirty years ago — instead, democracy dies behind paywalls. Or we give journalism away for free, as I decided to do on these pages, and hope that enough people care and are willing to subscribe anyway.
Some news sites chose the way of the spammy ads — nothing like planting a closeup of some “avert the eyes” medical horror to make the reading go down less pleasantly.
Looking at the media landscape, now rife with billionaires, corporations, and ownership linked to hedge funds, it does seem rather dystopian. Parasitizing is everywhere — the old Soviet technique of embedding the disinformation bomb in what appears on the surface to be a perfectly reasonable report.
The payload — a forgery, a lie, whataboutism, or an emotional distraction — pushes the reader or viewer toward accepting a mangled reality.
Or there’s the Vichy element — a news organization which may continue occasionally to do good work, but also collaborates with and normalizes the fascists.
Is there really any point in 2026 to offer a stage to Elon Musk or Donald Trump so they can seed the world with lies and continue their mangling of reality? At what point is the media outlet complicit? Likely, the very first time a lie slipped by unchallenged.
And even then, during the instances when the designated collaborator/normalizer challenges the lie, what then? The damage is still done. The alternate reality seeds take root among those who enjoy being lied to, those who have no inoculation against the lies, and those for whom the lie presents opportunities to further distort reality to their benefit.
And the enabler from the media is complicit in giving the liars power over us — for the lies act as a form of dominance.
As Keir Giles writes in American Overthrow about the US administration’s response to the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis:
The murders thus marked a further milestone in the administration’s abandonment of truth and even plausibility, with the normalisation of federal officials not just concealing the truth, but lying even when everybody knows they are lying. Multiple news outlets published frame-by-frame video analyses showing the official accounts of the murders were false; and yet, the administration continued to assert the same false claims anyway.
In a Russian context, this display of disregard for plausibility and not even bothering to pretend to tell the truth reflects that the speaker is already operating in a society where the truth no longer matters, and furthermore that they can use falsehood as an exercise of power and a display of dominance—the listeners know they are being lied to, but can do nothing about it.
As veteran reporter Bonnie Fuller queried in her July report for The Media and Democracy Project’s newsletter: “Why participate in your own execution?”
Fuller questioned every member of the White House press corps and their editors for their willingness to participate in the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner on July 24.
She notes of the original April event:
Donald Trump, who has viciously disparaged the press and has worked assiduously to destroy the credibility of fact-based American journalism ever since his presidential campaign in 2015, was the guest of honor at the black tie event.
He is openly at war with every concept embedded in the First Amendment - especially freedom of the press. Why he was being honored in the first place was questionable beyond belief.
Trump, who was also honored at the what she calls July’s rescheduled “masochistic dinner,” recently subpoenaed “reporters at the New York Times and…the phone records of their relatives” — what Fuller calls “a major escalation in Trump’s war on freedom of the press” and “straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” In addition to calling women reporters “piggy,” “stupid,” and “ugly,” he supported Pete Hegseth’s removal of “all fact-based media from the Pentagon” and labeled journalists as “enemies of the people” — a Stalin quote, she reminds us.
Fuller adds:
All in attendance should forever be stained with a red-scarlet letter “T” for their compliance and inactions in defense of the Constitution… After all, they will be honoring an aspiring king and their would-be executioner.
It is absolutely refreshing to read another reporter’s words, who sees the betrayal so clearly.
We are being constantly pulled toward the alternate reality the autocrats are creating versus the truth we can see with our own eyes.
And one truth I see clearly is the desire to continue to prop up bad actors — we’ve already proven that Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Trump and his loyalists are part of the democratic demolition team. We’ve already proven their links to authoritarian regimes and the many ways they work in unison to harm all remaining democracies.
I often wonder what people in corporate media and people who work in tech are telling themselves these days? Are they walling themselves off from reality? Are the nice things they own so important to them that they have decided to be Good Germans? To just go about their day as if darkness was not descending?
The biggest story today in American news - the biggest since the Civil War - is Trump’s plan to destroy democracy and replace it with his own brand of authoritarianism.
The media who are members of the White House Correspondents’ Association have done an excellent job of not covering that story.—Bonnie Fuller, The Media and Democracy Project
I’m sure even now, there’s an editor putting the final touches on a Sam Altman profile, working with the art department to give him just the right air of mystery.
“That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.”
I have learned to do more listening than talking when engaged in the casual conversation.
Yesterday, I learned that the roots of fear are deepening in those targeted with narrative operations about marauding immigrants taking over their countries and coming for their women. Literally, old Nazi shite.
As I noted in my May report about Steve Bannon’s attempts to infiltrate Ireland and push anti-immigrant narratives:
In recent weeks, Bannon’s been dedicating coverage of Ireland on his podcast, pushing anti-immigrant narratives.
Chair of the board of advisers at the Clinton Institute of American Studies at University College Dublin, Ted Smyth, told reporter Edward Luce in the Financial Times:
“Ireland cannot be complacent about Bannon’s threat, given that the billionaire owners of tech platforms ruthlessly use their algorithms to disseminate disinformation about immigration and crime in Ireland, spreading false claims about civil unrest.”
I also learned that multiple acquaintances working in the tech sector have shut themselves off from news, and don’t want to hear anything negative about how their platforms are complicit in radicalizing people away from any semblance of their previous selves. But they are happy to talk about their shiny possessions.
And somewhere in my mind, I hear a lyric from Tom Lehrer, a wicked smart New York musician and mathematician, who gave us some acid-tongued gems.
Among them was the musical number on Wernher von Braun, a Nazi Party member who led the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany, and later, in the US.
Lehrer, whose myriad contributions to culture include the invention of the jello shot, sings of von Braun:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical.
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun
In a few pithy rhymes, Lehrer sums up how I’m feeling today about those who are doing less than nothing to defend against global autocratic capture, and in fact, are contributing to the threats by enabling them.
In 2003, the satirical songwriter and academic who once taught a class called “Math for Tenors” and was Stephen Sondheim’s camp counselor at Camp Androscoggin in Maine, explained why he stopped writing songs back in 1965.
“I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write,” he said. “That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them."
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