In 1985, a struggling oilman named Warren Buffett quietly bought 3 million shares of Capital Cities Communications. The company was about to pull off the media heist of the century—swallowing ABC, one of America's three sacred broadcast networks, for $3.5 billion. Buffett's name wasn't on the deal. It didn't need to be. That's the first rule of the alphabet game: the people who own the letters rarely sign their names.
We teach our kids that ABC is just the alphabet. Innocent. Neutral. But follow the money and a different story crawls out of the woodwork. The Walt Disney Company owns ABC today—swallowed it whole in 1996 for $19 billion. And Disney? Disney is a web of institutional ownership: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street. The same three firms sit atop Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer, and virtually every major newsroom in America. Coincidence? That depends on what you think "coincidence" means.
Here's where the dots get uncomfortable. ABC News fed us the JFK assassination coverage, the 9/11 narrative, the COVID briefings. Every major cultural script of the last sixty years was delivered through that three-letter branding. The network that taught us our alphabet also taught us what to fear, what to trust, and who to vote for. And the ownership never stopped consolidating.
In 2024, Disney handed ABC over to a new entity—Hearst Communications, a hundred-year-old private media dynasty most Americans can't name. No vote. No public debate. Just a quiet restructuring buried in earnings reports while everyone was watching the election. The alphabet changed hands again, and nobody noticed.
This is the part that should keep you up at night: the network called ABC literally shares its name with the foundation of all language. Children sing it before they can read. Adults never question it. That's not branding—that's programming. The most powerful media property in America chose the name of the alphabet itself, then spent seventy years filling in the meaning of every letter.
Ask yourself why no competitor ever seriously challenged the name. Why no court ever asked whether a single corporation should own the building blocks of literacy. Why the FCC—the agency created to guard the public airwaves—approved every merger, every sale, every quiet transfer of power. The answer isn't hidden. It's just spelled out in letters we were trained not to read as a word.
The alphabet isn't neutral. It never was. ABC is a brand, a broadcast, and a behavioral code, all wearing the same three letters. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And that's exactly why they count on you never looking.
**Opinion:** The real conspiracy isn't that powerful people own media—it's that they named it after the alphabet itself, so the indoctrination starts before we can even spell "resistance." Stay woke, because the first thing they taught you was the tool they'd use to control you. Question every letter.