Like Viktor Orban, Hungary’s leader, and Trump’s model-strongman, Trump is censoring media. In his sweeping attempts to remake the federal government, Donald Trump is using a playbook first perfected in Hungary by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose autocratic takeover started in 2010 and extends to today.

While Trump’s first term as president was autocracy on training wheels, his second term is making Orbán’s dictatorship look like slow motion. In just ten months Trump’s takeover seems to be on steroids, indicating a coordinated attack on our freedoms and on democracy, something seemingly long-planned and intentionally brutal.

Media has been hit hard. Trump has shut out real journalism, banning reporters from press briefings and giving sycophants and propagandists the fast track. He is seeking to stifle independent reporting, including individual criticism from all quarters, including newspapers, television, magazines and social media. And corporate oligarchs are making censorship much easier from the very start of the Trump regime.

Trump and his sycophants are easily outsourcing the dirty work to corporate owners. Media company owners chose protecting their profits rather than standing up for the facts. To do the former, they have paid bribes. Paramount forked over $16 million to settle a claim against 60 Minutes, favoring Trump for a merger approval. ABC stopped fighting back a Trump suit after the election by paying $15 million to Trumps presidential library to settle. Bezos’ Washington Post and Soon-Shiong’s LA Times both became Trump friends by withdrawing a Harris endorsement soft-selling Trump in print. Many oligarchs were guests at Trump’s inauguration.

There has been a kind of quiet self-censorship of all media except The Nation and Mother Jones, just to name a few. Musk’s X overwhelmed the information space before the election with pro-Trump lies and propaganda and about six months afterward until Trump and Musk’s bromance ended.

Now Mark Zuckerberg seems to be providing bed and board for Trump surreptitiously by claiming “protection of the community from spam, and limiting posts in a given time frame.” That time frame seems to be forever if you are Trump-critical. Your “feedback” is encouraged but never read. Stage one results in no group posts and stage two is open-face control, followed by a Meta-sentence.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook (Meta) with a kind of doublespeak elects truth-spam for the community. It’s full-face exposure using invasive techniques, mainly, your own phone camera or computer cameras to surveil your face (left, right, up & down), most likely to update/consult Trump’s facial recognition database, for his critics. Such a weapon was used against me today when I signed into Facebook. Such a recognition database is already used to ambush immigrants — critics or not.

The next logical step will be citizens identified as activists against Trump’s tyranny, which is growing. Such can be targeted for retaliation in Trump’s remaining years as president, assuming he continues after the Epstein file release.

Does big-brother control become obese-brother control in size and frame. President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies. It raises questions over whether the Trump Regime is compiling a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance and even disappearance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

Alex Karp, the Palantir CEO carps about the ascendency of Palantir, “The Palantir degree is definitely more important than any kind of Ivy League degree.” And seems to further demean the intellectual: “Most people doing intellectual endeavors are actually trying to sell us a pagan religion.”