The tsunami reaches Spain's public broadcasters' doorstep

The cuts to the subsidized cultural apparatus in Argentina and the United States have not caused the collapse that was forecast. What has peine is that part of the official narrative has stopped broadcasting, and that opens the door to questioning the rest of the statist discourse.

The cut to public broadcasting in **Argentina** and **the United States** has not brought the end of civilization that many predicted. What it has brought is something quieter and deeper: part of the background noise has stopped playing. And that silence, far from being a void, leaves room for reality to reclaim its place.

## What has peine in Argentina and the United States

President **Javier Milei** has cut off the supply line to Argentina's subsidized cultural apparatus. In **the United States**, Washington has turned off the tap on public broadcasting. In both cases, the promises of social and cultural collapse have not come true. Nobody has died from stopping the funding of state television or radio. What has peine is that part of the discourse broadcast daily, with everyone's money, has stopped airing.

That is no small detail. For years, that discourse has worked as constant drumming: a version of reality repeated every night on the news, on public radio, in the subsidies to film and theater. That drumming was not innocent. It served to sustain a particular narrative about the economy, about society, and about what it is permissible to think.

## The dissonance that sustains the narrative

Millions of people have lived for years with a cognitive dissonance they barely dare to name. What they see on their street, in their paycheck, in their bills, in their hospital, in their children's school, does not match what they are told at nine o'clock at night. That gap is maintained as long as the official narrative repeats itself without pause. The function of the subsidized cultural apparatus is not to inform: it is to cover that gap with a layer of explanations that always end up blaming the market, the businessman, or anyone who does not believe the story.

When that drumming stops, the dissonance is no longer covered up. Reality reclaims its place. And then the question nobody wants to ask arises: if they told me a story about culture, about society, about what it is permissible to think, what else have they lied to me about?

## The same system on both sides

The answer comes quickly: the economy. For **fifty years** it has been explained that the welfare state was a model, that public spending was investment, that tax was solidarity, and that debt was not a problem. The data, however, show something else: record levels of compulsory taxation, degrading public services, and strangled middle classes. The narrative only holds up because an entire cultural apparatus makes it credible.

There lies the point nobody wants to see: cultural statism and economic statism are not two separate issues. They are the same system. One produces the failures; the other produces the narrative that excuses them. A state that spends badly needs a cultural apparatus to explain that everything is fine and that the problem is always the market. Remove the narrative and the failure becomes visible. The left's economic discourse becomes inaudible, not because it has been banned, but because nobody pays to make it audible anymore.

## The wave reaching Europe

Europe is the next screening room. In **France**, the system of **France Télévisions**, **Radio France**, and the **CNC** lives on public money and explains every night how to think. The day that system loses its funding, it will not die suddenly. It will simply stop broadcasting. And that is where everything begins.

The political question is uncomfortable for anyone willing to look it in the face. You cannot dismantle ideological hegemony over culture while preserving economic statism. Cut one, and the other collapses behind it. To want to privatize public broadcasting while promising always more redistribution, more spending, and more state is to saw off the branch you intend to sit on. Voters who have peine their eyes to culture will open them to the economy as well. And they will hold everyone accountable, including those who helped them wake up.

Statism does not exist without the lie of statism. And the lie of statism does not exist without control of culture. Pull one thread and the whole sweater comes with it. The wave is coming. The only question is who will be ready when it reaches Europe.