The King of the Airwaves

He was not American, but that hardly mattered. He had been in the game longer than most politicians, wielding his influence like a bludgeon, shaping the narrative of entire nations with a single broadcast. He had built an empire on rage and fear, inheriting a network that thrived on paranoia and refining it into something more potent, something absolute. He was not just a broadcaster; he was an architect of reality, a master illusionist who convinced millions that the world was burning and only he could tell them the truth.

His network had perfected the art of repetition. The same phrases, the same talking points, the same carefully chosen words echoed across the country, drilled into the minds of his viewers day after day. They did not inform; they conditioned. There was no room for doubt, no space for critical thought. He did not ask his viewers to think—he told them what to believe, and they did, without hesitation. His anchors delivered their scripts with unwavering conviction, knowing that their words were not just news but law.

It did not matter how many times the network was sued. It did not matter how many court cases they lost, how many times they were forced to admit in a legal setting that no reasonable person should mistake their content for actual news. Their viewers did not care. The people who tuned in every night, who rearranged their lives around his broadcasts, did not consider themselves reasonable. They considered themselves enlightened.

The network had trained them well.

Whenever a story threatened the Circle, the network reacted like an immune system detecting a virus. Any thought, any news, any truth that challenged their carefully curated world was attacked with precision and fury. The response was instant and coordinated. If a major religious leader spoke about kindness and mercy for the poor, if he dared to preach the actual mission of Christianity, the network went on the offensive. They did not argue against his message directly—they poisoned it. They called him a heretic, a satanist, a puppet of the global elite. They turned charity into weakness, compassion into betrayal, and empathy into an act of treason.

When one of their own celebrated the Nazis, when a prominent Circle member was caught on tape praising the Third Reich, the network did not apologize or condemn. They reframed. They twisted. They found ancient Roman salutes and claimed this was all a misunderstanding. They unearthed blurry photos of protesters using similar gestures and presented them as evidence that this was all normal, that the outrage was manufactured, that the real villains were the ones calling it out.

And their audience followed, because their truth was the only truth.

The network was not just a media empire. It was the propaganda arm of the Circle. It did not report the news—it created it. It did not react to reality—it dictated it. It was both sword and shield, meant to attack the Circle’s enemies and defend its power at all costs.

They told their audience to do their own research, as if the people watching were remotely qualified to research anything, let alone something as complex as immigration or economics. But it was never about research. It was about obedience, about funneling them into the right conclusions.

And it worked.

The followers of the Chairman believed in the network as they believed in him. Their world was an echo chamber of fear, a constant stream of outrage and paranoia, a battle cry against imaginary enemies. They did not see contradictions. They did not see hypocrisy.

They saw truth.

Because it was the only truth they had left.

Cora and Alex had tried. They had pointed out the lawsuits, the court rulings where the network itself had admitted its content wasn’t real news, where they had stood in front of a judge and argued that no reasonable person would take them seriously. Cora had sent her parents the clips, the transcripts, the undeniable proof that the entire thing was a fabrication, nothing more than a performance meant to inflame and enrage.

It hadn’t mattered.

Her mother had scoffed, called it fake news, said that the “deep state” was trying to silence them because they were the only ones telling the truth. Her father had been more measured, as he always was, nodding along with her arguments but never truly hearing them. He had said things like well, maybe some of it’s exaggerated, but you can’t deny they have a point and they wouldn’t have to lie if the media weren’t so corrupt.

Alex had been less patient. He had called it out for what it was—clickbait, manipulation, propaganda. He had tried to explain the cycle, how rage and fear were addictive, how the network didn’t care about truth, only about engagement. How their entire business model depended on keeping their audience angry, desperate, and convinced that only they understood what was really happening.

But it had been too late.

The network had already done its job. Their parents had been watching for years, long enough for it to reshape the way they saw the world, to replace reality with a carefully constructed narrative of enemies and betrayals, of traitors within and invaders at the gates.

And once you started believing in that world, once you truly accepted that they were out to get you, that everything outside of the Circle was a lie, there was no coming back.

Cora had watched her mother’s face harden over the years, her casual comments about “those people” turning into full-throated rants about moochers and criminals, about how the country was being stolen out from under them. She had seen the way her father had slowly stopped questioning things, how he had learned to just nod and agree.

When they spoke now, it was as if they lived in two completely different realities.