Break 'Em Up
America First antitrust, the war on citizenship, and will AI take over the world?
Hi there! A few new items to drop into your inbox.
First, with the confirmations of Gail Slater as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at DOJ, Andrew Ferguson as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Mark Meador as an FTC Commissioner, America First antitrust has firmly taken a seat at the table.
What does this mean, and what can we expect? I discuss how we got here and where antitrust policy in the Trump administration is going — including a look at what DOJ is proposing in the remedies phase of the Google search trial — in an essay for Commonplace Magazine.
I discussed the essay, and Trump’s first 100 days, in a podcast with American Compass’s Oren Cass.
Changing topics a bit: the country continues to wrestle with the fallout of Joe Biden throwing open US borders to 10+ million illegal immigrants. What’s been lost in the discussion, particularly on the left, is the meaning of citizenship — what it requires, and what is lost to us as a nation as it is constantly devalued. I have an essay on that in the Washington Examiner, which you can read here.
And finally, I joined Chris Bedford at The Blaze to discuss the Senate’s shamefully slow pace in confirming President Trump’s nominations. While the Cabinet was confirmed quickly, the Senate has regressed to the mean when it comes to confirming the subcabinet and beyond — the people tasked with implementing the president’s agenda. When we recorded this, there were roughly 50 nominations languishing in the Senate. Today, that number is over 60.
I was also recently on Fox News contemplating the big questions around Artificial Intelligence — will it take over the world? A heady topic for 5:45am! You can watch that interview here.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
Rachel
Break ‘Em Up
Life has moved fast for the Big Tech companies.
Five years ago, Google and Meta were untouchable. The millions they spent annually on direct lobbying and on their non-profit advocacy networks had purchased the good will of both party establishments. To Democrats, these firms were ideological allies in the culture wars; to Republicans, they were heroes of free enterprise, competition, and innovation. Even in Washington, the tech giants basked in what Nobel Prize-winning economist John Hicks called the greatest of all monopoly profits: “a quiet life.”
Cut to today, and both firms’ lives are anything but. Twice in the last year, federal courts have sided with the Department of Justice against Google, finding the company to be an illegal monopolist in two markets: online search and digital advertising. Meta is in court now defending itself against a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging antitrust violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
So what’s changed? As a former British prime minister was rumored to have said, “Events, dear boy.” Specifically, the political right has largely woken up to the threat of concentrated economic power, acting at scale, because that power has been systemically wielded against them.
Big Tech’s Big Bias
Powerful tech companies have suppressed conservative political views, prohibited circulation of news stories critical of the Democratic Party, shieldedprogressive figures from criticism while deplatforming those on the right, brazenly kneecapped conservative market rivals, and memory-holed a president of the United States.
Individually, these actions were threats to free speech. But when activist progressive dogma is paired with unprecedented economic dominance, the result is an ideologically driven market and speech cartel: a handful of powerful tech firms able to alter the flow of information, commerce, communication, and expression, ultimately changing the nature of independent thought and public discourse in a free society. In other words, distorting the marketplace of ideas is only possible if companies first control the marketplace itself.
For years, both the Left and the Right have debated legislative fixes to the maladies Big Tech products have inflicted on our culture, communications, and commerce. None of them truly address the issue, however, because so many of the complaints against Big Tech are downstream of the concentrated economic power these firms possess. Antitrust law—the legal framework for ensuring a robust and competitive marketplace—is designed to deal with this concentration. And for the first time in half a century, the Right is re-embracing its conservative tradition of antitrust enforcement.
America’s antitrust laws arose out of Republicans’ skepticism toward centralized power (indeed, the Sherman Act, the country’s foundational antitrust law, was given its name from the pro-Lincoln, anti-slavery Republican senator, John Sherman of Ohio, who championed its passage. It was a Republican President, Benjamin Harrison, who signed it.). Just like democracies can be threatened by the tyranny of an unchecked majority, generations of conservative, classical liberal, and even libertarian thinkers have understood that centralized and scaled private economic power can tyrannize capitalism.
After years of neglect, the Right is once again relying on antitrust enforcement within its proper context—law enforcement for the marketplace—a “trust, but verify” approach to corporate power that ensures all market participants are competing fairly and legally. Fundamentally, the antitrust statutes—the Sherman Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, enacted in 1914 to bolster the former—are designed to ensure that consumers are receiving the benefits of a marketplace that functions as freely as possible.
Read the rest of the essay here.
A devalued citizenry
The worst argument in America’s immigration debate is what is called the existential imperative, which says America’s future, our very national survival, depends on importing tens of millions of foreigners.
Progressive Democrats usually frame the existential imperative in moral terms — restricting immigration betrays America’s legacy as an open, tolerant, melting pot of diversity and opportunity. Corporate-friendly Republicans tend to pitch the argument as hardheaded economists: “Immigrants do jobs Americans can’t or won’t do.”
However, in truth, the existential imperative never really comes from the Left or the Right, but from the top down. Behind the moralizing and faux economic sophistication, it’s just an elitist cudgel wielded to blackmail American citizens out of their rights, sovereignty, and national identity. Indeed, the closer you look at the existential imperative, the more insidious it gets.
Pecksniffian hypocrisy
In the first place, it’s nonsense. The United States is a 250-year-old republic of 340 million people — the third largest nation in the world by population and fourth by landmass. It is home to the most productive, innovative, and generous people in the world. The idea that its economy and society will crumble without the mass in-migration of people who do not share our culture, language, and values is absurd. No one believes that China or India’s future depends on the number of Norwegian nannies or Australian farmworkers they admit.
And let’s be clear: None of the elites espousing the existential imperative argument believe it, either. Corporations love open borders out of greed, not patriotism. Low-skilled foreign workers suppress wages, especially when they are undocumented. And our high-skilled visa programs are, by design, little more than white-collar indentured servitude. Woke colleges and universities love foreign students because they pay full tuition, unlike American undergraduates. Democrat elites only support mass immigration to expand their voter base (it’s not a coincidence that the only foreigners liberal elites ever turned away are historically right-of-center Cubans).
Remember this the next time you hear a CEO fretting about unpicked lettuce or a politician quoting Emma Lazarus. Behind every assertion of the existential imperative is an institution that materially profits from open borders, usually at the expense of working-class American citizens.
And that’s the real problem with the existential imperative — not its Pecksniffian hypocrisy but its role in the global elitist project to devalue national citizens and the privileges of citizenship.
Ordo amoris
However much elites feign to clutch their pearls about it, there is nothing controversial in asserting that nations exist exclusively for their people. Ireland exists for the Irish, Kenya for Kenyans, and Brazil for Brazilians.
The U.S. is no different. Yes, it was founded upon a creed. But it was and is our creed, our nation. The American republic was a nationalist undertaking from the beginning. It says so in the founding charters. The Declaration of Independence asserts universal principles but only on behalf of “the good people of these colonies.” The Constitution was written for us, “We the people,” to secure the blessings of liberty, not to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but “to ourselves and our posterity.”
Countries are supposed to prioritize their citizens. That doesn’t mean they dislike other people; it simply means they expect their government to prioritize citizens over others.
That’s what Vice President JD Vance was getting at when he spoke earlier this year about the ordo amoris — the “order of loves.” Human affection and obligations begin with those closest to us and ripple out: from family to community to nation and so on.
That’s what patriotism is. This is why President Donald Trump’s “America First”branding resonates with Americans. It’s also why similar leaders of similar movements are on the rise across the West. Citizens are sick of self-appointed “citizens of the world” usurping their power and are reasserting their natural rights.