How to take over the world

Over at Slacktivist the eponym continues his heroic deconstruction of the Left Behind series, novels about the Rapture.

Nicolae Carpathia is explaining to Buck how he plans to purchase every major newspaper, newsmagazine, radio and TV station in the world. He can do this, he explains, because he is the sole heir of Jonathan Stonagal's fortune....

This is, again, how former John Birch Society lecturer Tim LaHaye views the world. He believes the United Nations is some kind of hierarchical federation that can overrule the sovereignty of all of its member nations. And he believes that the world's financial system is secretly run by a nefarious cabal of spectacularly wealthy international bankers, represented in this story first by Jonathan Stonagal and now by his heir, Nicolae.

To be unnecessarily fair to the authors, the scheme Carparthia sets out here is approximately the same one that underlies the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Carpathia is able to take over the world because it is already run by a cabal of international financiers; all he has to do is challenge the alpha male, Stonegal, to a fight and win, and he's in command of the world.
In Holmes, the villain (Lord Blackwater?) wants to conquer the world; to cover the necessary handwaving as to how this is to be done without a lot of action-sapping exposition it is pointed out that the world in 1892 or whatever is surreptitiously run by some group of masons and all that Blackwater has to do is drown the previous incumbent in his bath and be elected Grand Poohbah and the job is done. It would seem to me to raise more questions than it answers, but Guy Ritchie obviously begs to differ.
Still, as Slacky says,

I have no problem enjoying a work of fiction that has a character like Stonagal in it. It's like the movie trailers all say, "Imagine a world ..."

I can imagine such a world. But it's not this world. It doesn't look anything like this world.

Now, or in the nineteenth century.

Mmm. The state of construction of Tower Bridge in the film suggests 1892, too late for Watson's marriage in 1887. Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel.