Fourth & Democracy | Billionaires Buy Up Media & a Turning Point in the Temperature of Our Country

Plus, the NBA Commissioner defends skyrocketing costs to watch games at home: 'Let Them Have Highlights'

Welcome to another edition of Fourth & Democracy, where the playbook meets the public square.

Last week may go down as one of the darkest of the last decade in American politics. A right-wing figurehead was assassinated. A school shooting barely registered. And the Epstein files vanished without a trace.

Meanwhile, we got no updates on the genocide unfolding in Gaza. NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave us his “let them eat cake” moment on the price to watch at home. And Gen Z MAGA world turned inward, with Groypers and TPUSA tearing each other apart.

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s not waste any time.

1st & 10: Too Expensive To Watch At Home?

If you’ve been asking yourself questions like: Why are Atlanta and Minnesota playing on Sunday Night Football? Why is there only one NBA game on tonight? What happened to the all-day spectacle before and after games that used to keep us locked in? — you’re not crazy. You’re just watching late-stage capitalism seep into your favorite sports leagues.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver tried to explain it away at last week’s preseason Board of Governors meeting. Asked about the league’s new broadcast schedule and rising costs for fans, Silver said:

“There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consumer for free. I mean this is very much a highlights-based sport. So Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it.”

Oh, Adam.

Maybe that was true in the ‘90s, when ESPN highlights were the crown jewel of a four-channel world. But in 2025? Fans can barely afford a single ticket, let alone multiple games. They want to watch their team from home — and they can’t, thanks to local blackouts. And when they turn to streaming, they find out it’s not one subscription, it’s three: Peacock, Amazon Prime, and soon Netflix. Games that used to air on ESPN or ABC are now scattered behind paywalls.

So no, it’s not a “highlights-based” sport. It’s a profits-based league. And the NBA is just following the NFL’s lead, which recently enraged fans by sneaking commercial breaks into the. NFL Red Zone package.

Rising costs and endless subscriptions are pricing people out of one of the last escapes from daily chaos. And in a society that no longer values third spaces, what happens when working-class Americans can’t even afford to watch the game from their couch?

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NBA

Basic Out-of-Market NBA Fan: League pass standard ($109.99), Peacock ($10.99 x 8 mo), cable service to get ESPN/ABC/NBC/TNT games = $350-$450

More Complete Coverage: League Pass Premium + all necessary network/streaming bundles + national broadcast, extra = $600+

NFL

Basic NFL Fan: Cable for local network games, NFL+ Premium, One or Two streaming services for TNF, SNF = $300-$650

Full Coverage: NFL Sunday Ticket, NFL+ Premium, Amazon Prime, Peacock, access to ESPN/ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC/Local network access = $1200-$1600/year

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2nd & Long: Charlie Sheen Doc

Back in 2011, Charlie Sheen was the highest-paid actor on television, a societal force in America — the face of Two and a Half Men, and the walking embodiment of excess. Sheen was on top of the world and was adored by millions, even if we were a bit eccentric. Then came the meltdown: Public fights with Chuck Lorre, cocaine binges, “tiger blood,” “Adonis DNA,” and the infamous “Violent Torpedo of Truth” tour. Overnight, Sheen turned into a 24-hour news cycle — ranting about how he was “WINNING” while his career, his family, and his health spiraled into free fall.

It was almost the cultural precursor to having a celebrity as the president.

Netflix’s new two-part documentary aka Charlie Sheen takes us back inside that spectacle of pornstars and 7-gram rocks — but this time, it isn’t just the memes and T-shirts. The film weaves archival footage with raw, present-day interviews, including ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, co-star Jon Cryer, and even his longtime drug dealer. Sheen himself owns up to a lot of it, but cracks dark jokes and obfuscates any real damage he caused while admitting the mess was bigger than anyone knew.

Some of the revelations land heavy. His HIV diagnosis — and the years of secrecy and blackmail that followed — are laid out in full. There are confessions about sexual experimentation during drug binges that Sheen now describes as “fun” and liberating. There are stories of desperate interventions including one disguised as a birthday party, and a phone call from Clint Eastwood urging him to get his shit together.

The documentary isn’t a neat redemption arc though. Sheen is sober now, more measured, grateful to still be alive. Yet there’s a hollowness in how the film treats the damage done to his partners, his family, and to the people caught in the blast radius of his chaos. The remorse is uneven, the accountability thin. His father, Martin Sheen, and his brother, Emilio Estevez, don’t appear, and without their voices, the family story feels unfinished.

What’s left is a portrait of celebrity collapse in the age of meme culture — the way our system can feed on the spectacle, burn people alive for clicks, and then shrug off the bodies left by the wayside. Sheen’s “winning” was never about victory; it was a mask for survival in a world that treated his breakdown and personal demons like entertainment for the masses.

3rd & Short: Billionaires Are Buying (More) of the Media

Follow the money.

David Ellison recently dropped $8 billion to take over Paramount, which means CBS News is now effectively a Skydance property. Backing the nepo baby billionaire is his father, Larry Ellison — the Oracle co-founder, current richest man in the world, and Trump-world check writer who’s spent years underwriting Republican causes. The FCC rubber-stamped the deal after forcing through “reforms” tied directly to newsroom practices, a political thumbprint that even had commissioners calling it an intrusion on editorial independence.

Inside CBS, the alarms are blaring. Reports say Ellison is getting ready to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press and install her in a top editorial role at CBS News. Nothing is signed yet, but the smoke is thick with rumors of $300 million deals that would essentially lead to free publicity for the state of Israel. Think about what that means: a billionaire heir with family ties to Trump parachuting a right-wing, pro-Israel culture warrior into one of the most powerful newsrooms in America. That’s not media diversity — that’s a coup.

And Ellsion isn’t done. Skydance is already circling Warner Bros. Discovery, which would put CNN and CBS under the same roof. Wrap your head around that: the richest man in the world and his son controlling two of the biggest legacy brands in the country, with a direct line back to Trump. In a world where the president is weaponizing the executive against universities and late-night hosts, that isn’t some abstract merger. This is the seizing of narrative power — and it’s exactly how authoritarian movements consolidate control.

We’ve seen this playbook before. Musk with X. Murdoch with Fox. Thiel-aligned platforms popping up to launder the next round of disinformation. The method is always the same: buy the channels, seed loyalists, scream about bias until you get viewpoint diversity that just means Trump propaganda. You don’t need government censorship when billionaires quietly set the incentives and editors are conformed to the West Wing out of fear.

This is how democracies corrode. Not tanks in the street in 2025, but billionaires buying up your media, building databases like Palantir, and turning watchdogs into lapdogs. Unless we call it what it is — a pressure campaign to bend the press toward Trump’s dictatorship — we are going to wake up one morning and realize the stories that matter never made it to air.

4th & Democracy: Turning Point — The Temperature of the Country

Charlie Kirk is dead, but the outrage economy he helped build is still humming — and now it’s turning inward?

The Groypers — Nick Fuentes’ far-right loyalists — have wasted no time sharpening knives. To them, Kirk was always a gatekeeper: Too cozy with Republican elites, too interested in “culture war optics” instead of ideological purity. That animosity goes back to the so-called Groyper Wars of 2019, when Fuentes’ crew hijacked TPUSA campus events and branded Kirk a fraud. His assassination has reopened those wounds, with Groyper influencers blasting TPUSA for selling out conservatism and accusing Kirk of being little more than a celebrity mascot for the establishment.

TPUSA, for its part, is leaning into martyrdom. The organization launched a fundraising blitz within days of Kirk’s death — email appeals, video tributes, “carry on the mission” rhetoric plastered across every platform. Donation tiers run from $25 to $100,000. GiveSendGo campaigns for Kirk’s family alone have pulled in nearly $3 million, and TPUSA claims tens of thousands of new chapter requests on high school and college campuses. In other words: Grief is being weaponized into cash and infrastructure.

This isn’t just a fight over legacy — it’s a battle for the soul of young conservatism. On one side, the Groypers pushing radical purity tests. On the other, TPUSA is trying to lock down legitimacy by turning Kirk into a martyr and doubling down on brand growth. And in the middle? A country where political violence has become just another line item on a fundraising spreadsheet.

The temperature is rising, and the right is feeding on its own. But don’t mistake the infighting for weakness — it’s fuel. Kirk’s death has become a pressure point to radicalize, recruit, and raise money, and the result is a movement more dangerous, not less.

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What to Watch

Chief Of War — Apple TV+

Jason Momoa stars as a Hawaiian war leader who finds himself caught in the midst of a tribal war over control of the islands during colonial expansion. A bit of Game of Thrones mixed with Shogun.

The Dangerous Rise of Nick Fuentes — Hasan Piker (Youtube)

The Death of Debate — Rick Wilson (Substack)

The Death of Debate

A Conversation with Gov. J.B. Pritzker | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

What to Read

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

Amid rising tensions in our own country, There Will Be Fire is a great read. The story of how the IRA came very close to killing Thatcher in one of the most infamous attacks linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles.

The Final Word

Society feels like it’s teetering. Political assassinations and school shootings dominate the headlines. Social media is drowning in vitriol. Out in public, people look over their shoulders constantly. There’s an undercurrent of anger and violence running through this country, and it feels like it could snap at any moment.

We all need to take a fucking breath.

We’re stressed. We’re broke. We’re exhausted. But none of that gives us license to weaponize our insecurities against each other. Everyone you pass is carrying their own quiet wreckage. And while all of this is going on, some people — you know who they are — act like empathy is optional, when it’s actually the only thing standing between us and total collapse.

That’s why discipline matters. Not just discipline in how we vote or how we fight — but discipline in how we see each other, how we care for each other, how we decide to act when the world is waiting for us to become cruel.

Dangerous times demand more from us, not less. So let’s be disciplined in our empathy, disciplined in our compassion, and disciplined in our refusal to surrender to hate. Because the future — any chance at a decent one — depends on whether we can still fight for good, together.

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the News from Underground Substack.