When American newspapers framed President Donald Trump’s September visit to Great Britain as the latest symbolic exchange between a dominant empire and a faded one, they followed the approach generally desired by these exchanges’ operators and missed the bigger empire-building project at play. This new imperial project is hiding in plain sight. It encompasses America’s and Britain’s military, corporate, media, and education complexes—currently collaborating in a major “reinvention” of the Middle East via force, displacement, commerce, and propaganda. Its most influential player locates his loyalties firmly with these complexes’ major client and the hinge of their Middle East operation: Israel.
The latter-day Cecil Rhodes in question is Larry Ellison. Founder and Chairman of Oracle and a close friend and supporter of Donald Trump, Ellison previously made the news for making the largest single one-time donation to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), $16.6 million in 2017 on top of $10 million three years before that. He is also known to use Oracle to provide cyber services for Israel. But Ellison’s military presence is a pale image of what is becoming his role as the public relations hinge for an empire run from America with outposts in Britain and facilitated by Zionists.
Understanding how means understanding Ellison’s role among not just American Jewish Zionist billionaires but American billionaires generally, which is rare even in this rarified circle. Bill Ackman, as I reported in a past piece for the Libertarian Institute, may be the unasked-for Patrick Henry of the reactionary military corporate class, always available and eager to vocalize (and reveal) his class’s latest stealth project of social control. But Ackman is playing only with a $9.4 billion dollar fortune. Larry Ellison, whose fortune, like most entrepreneurs, has been turbocharged thanks to government investment in Silicon Valley beginning in the 1990s, is worth $383.6 billion more than that. This means that Ellison doesn’t have to cast himself as an orator in order to secure standing space inside the proverbial “room where it happens”; he can actually sit at the table and initiate plays. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2024, he has done this in a fashion to take one’s breath away without leaving anyone breathless by provoking too much careful notice.
Around the same stretch of weeks that Donald Trump made his state visit to Britain, reports broke of Ellison’s Oracle acquiring Paramount, the parent company of CBS and owner of a collection of media and entertainment companies with wide public reach, and so forming Skydance; of Ellison acquiring a stake in the social media company TikTok; and of Ellison “bankrolling a massive for-profit research campus costing upward of $1.3 billion” at Oxford University in Britain, “the planned home of his Ellison Institute of Technology by 2027.” The media acquisitions were covered by the business sections of major newspapers and business websites. They were also covered in a New York Times profile of Shari Redstone, the owner of Paramount who sold it to the Ellison family, and a Times’ profile of Ellison’s stake in TikTok and his friendship with Trump. The depth and breadth of Ellison’s Oxford venture has only been reported in recent investigations in The New York Times (in August) and The Wall Street Journal (in September.) None of the coverage of these acquisitions and ventures goes much beneath the surface. But the details behind them, and of the players who along with Ellison made them possible, reveal the real game at play: controlling information to support Zionism and Empire and priming a population to accept these controls.
Hellbound and Down 