Tucker Carlson Praises Biden Appointee and His Segment Gets a Retweet from – Ilhan Omar?

By Caleb HoweJun 21st, 2021, 10:49 pm
 

Lina Khan, for TIME’s ‘Next Generation Leaders’

Lina M. Khan is a Democrat who served as counsel House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law before taking on her new role as Commissioner of the FTC, after being appointed to the post by President Joe Biden.

On Friday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson did a segment on Big Tech and praised Khan for her work in the area. Her work is expert, and shares Carlson’s view on tech monopolies. Her award-winning 2017 Yale Law Journal article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” has been widely praised and is frequently referenced in discussions of tech industry antitrust issues.

Khan, who was Associate Professor of Law at Columbia Law School up until taking over at the FTC, has been big news in Silicon Valley. Scary news. As The New Yorker wrote Monday, Khan’s appointment “raises the prospect of a long-overdue drive to reinvigorate the enforcement of antitrust laws and inject more competition into a vital part of the economy that is dominated by a handful of gargantuan incumbents.”

In his segment on Friday, Carlson notes that this interest in big tech trust-busting is bipartisan. He also singled out House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who Carlson points out has made appeals to anti-big tech sentiment on the Trump right, but who he says “weirdly” isn’t on board with bipartisan support for new legislation aimed at the issue. Carlson lays into McCarthy heavily in the clip.

That clip was shared on a pro-Trump Twitter account with the handle @ColumbiaBugle, which shares a lot of Fox News clips.

Their tweeted video was then shared in a tweet from Yelp senior vice president of public policy Luther Lowe, whom Politico once referred to as “Google’s chief antagonist in the U.S. and Europe,” and is a frequent speaker and writer on the topic of tech monopolies.

Lowe, like Lina Khan, was a featured speaker at Columbia University’s “A New Future for Antitrust?” Conference (Lowe on the ‘Antitrust and High Tech. Platform Companies’ panel, Khan on ‘The New Brandeis School in Antitrust’.)

In his tweet, Lowe points out that Carlson’s segment followed just minutes behind the news of a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi from “pro-Big Tech Dems” asking her to slow down on the legislation that McCarthy likewise isn’t very keen on.

Considering that it was a Fox News segment from Tucker Carlson praising Democrat Lina Khan and bashing Republican Kevin McCarthy that aired within minutes of a faction of House Democrats asking Pelosi to back off the same thing McCarthy wants to back off from, Lowe reasonably remarked “Antitrust politics are fascinating right now.”

He didn’t even know how right he was.

Enter independent journalist, sometime foe of every political faction, and fan of political self-determination Glenn Greenwald, who highlighted exactly HOW interesting things had gotten. Because that complicated outline of party crossovers above was crossed over even further when progressive caucus star and Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar retweeted Lowe’s sharing of Columbia Bugle’s video of Tucker Carlson’s praise of Joe Biden-appointed Lina Khan, apparent scourge of House Dems and Kevin McCarthy alike.

In an impressive understatement, Greenwald referred to the situation as “interesting” in his own tweet. “When you view politics as an instrument to foster positive change rather than a self-branding game, you look for ways to create coalitions, not shun allies,” he wrote.

Interesting, yes. Fascinating, yes. Convoluted? Sure, a bit.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, earthquakes and volcanoes, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria?

Ehhh, not quite. But it’s understandable to be nonplussed by the mixed up cast of characters.

The keyword for those worried about Big Tech’s power — and that is a very large and diverse group that includes the likes of Josh Hawley as well as the ACLU — it is, as Greenwald said, encouraging.

If you’re a politician in the tech pocket, less so. But fascinating all the same.

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Caleb Howe - Contributing Editor

Caleb Howe is an editor and writer focusing on politics and media. Former managing editor at RedState. Published at USA Today, Blaze, National Review, Daily Wire, American Spectator, AOL News, Asylum, fortune cookies, manifestos, napkins, fridge drawings...