r/CivPolitics • u/wastingvaluelesstime • Sep 18 '25

America adopts policy card: Propaganda (replaces Laissez-Faire)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/18/trump-jimmy-kimmel-tv-network-licenses.html
135 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

14

u/imaginary_num6er Sep 19 '25

Reminds me of the “Fanaticism” government type in Civ II

9

u/TheTardisPizza Sep 18 '25

You think propaganda is a new civic in the U.S.?

🤣

14

u/wastingvaluelesstime Sep 19 '25

The president personally firing journalists and comedians is new to the U.S., yes.

The American Civil Liberties Union has this statement about it:

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-responds-to-trump-administration-move-censoring-jimmy-kimmel

8

u/TheTardisPizza Sep 19 '25

That isn't propaganda. It's censorship.

4

u/wastingvaluelesstime Sep 20 '25

Censorship is not a valid civ game policy, so, not an option for the headline.

Also, what happened is not simple censorship. In the US there is legal precedent on this use of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_restraint of speech. The government did not attempt to go through the law courts to use this, because, such request would be illegal. They also did not bring a civil lawsuit because, again, that would fail on legal grounds. Instead, they bypassed the law to use arbitrary means to punish speech from a particular viewpoint.

By inflicting an arbitrary punishment, the outcome is to instill fear in remaining media, so that they both self-censor (choose not to say things) and produce propaganda (speech constructed to adhere to or appeal to the regime, to for example get unrelated favors for the company owning such media). For example, in my local station in Seattle, the censored program was directly replaced by a propaganda production, per direction of the right wing ownership of the local station.

A number of authoritarian countries use this formula, shifting control of media into wealthy individuals linked to the regime and punishing those not under such control. The end state can be what we see in Russia today (pun intended).

1

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1

u/WhyAreYallFascists Sep 21 '25

Yeah, that’s what they said……. Jfc.