President Trump has made an appointment that has Big Tech panicked
2025-02-06
Category: political

President Donald Trump made one of the best and most consequential decisions of his second term: tapping technology lawyer Gail Slater to lead the Antitrust Division of his Justice Department. Chances are, you have never heard of Slater. But the lawyers, lobbyists, and woke billionaires of America’s largest tech firms all have. Rest assured that within minutes of Slater’s nomination, Silicon Valley flew into panicked Slack chats, Zoom calls, and emergency meetings. Big Tech’s big hope for 2025 — that for all Trump’s populist rhetoric, a Republican president would never really challenge Big Business — was dashed. After years of consumer abuse, market manipulation, and political treachery, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and the nation’s other tech giants will finally face their reckoning. BONDI SWORN IN AS ATTORNEY GENERAL WITH MISSION TO END ‘WEAPONIZATION’ OF JUSTICE DEPARTMENT Gail Slater is that reckoning. For Slater is not just an expert in competition and antitrust law, thoroughly qualified to lead the Division. Nor is she just an accomplished lawyer with experience in private practice and two branches of government. No, what makes Slater’s resumé stand out — and what gut-punches the Big Tech execs — is that she worked for years behind the Silicon Curtain. She has held senior positions at major technology and telecom firms, and even the internet industry’s trade association. Slater emerged from these experiences — behind enemy lines, as it were — as the most knowledgeable, principled conservative antitrust hawk in Washington.  She is one of the few in right-wing antitrust circles who understands what the antitrust statutes are for: not irritating roadblocks for business to weave and dodge around, but integral components of upholding a fair and robust free market, one where both large and small entrants can compete on their merits and thrive. While some industry-funded policy groups in Washington are being paid by Silicon Valley to conflate her with the populist left, Slater’s ideology is distinct. Her approach to antitrust law is not values based, nor is it too laden in favor of speculative economic jargon. Rather, Slater continues the tradition of John Sherman, the pro-Lincoln, anti-slavery Republican from Ohio who lent his name to the nation’s founding antitrust statute: a skepticism toward centralized power, both in the government and outside of it, and a goal of keeping the market open to all comers, not just those who can buy their way through the government’s labyrinth of rules, regulations, and regulators. What Slater understands — and what too many elite, Republican legal ideologues still refuse to see — is that distortive, tyrannized capitalism is not the same thing as free enterprise. Private firms, when large enough, are just as capable of warping the market as the government. Antitrust law is about freedom, not esoteric technicalities and pricing models. Its core function (like the Constitution’s itself) is to protect the American people from the dangers of centralized, unaccountable power. And centralized, unaccountable power is precisely what Big Tech lords over our society today. The famous, consumer-friendly innovations that made these firms successful in decades past are relics of a bygone age. Big Tech’s post-innovation business model today — screen and porn addiction, woke propaganda, partisan censorship, industrial-scale privacy violations, and predatory acquisitions of startup competitors — is a threat not only to our market economy, but our entire way of life.  Donald Trump gets this. He often couches his criticisms of Big Tech as defenses of "Little Tech." He knows how anti-competitive Big Business executives behave when they think they can get away with it. And he knows that regulatory micromanagement often only leads to regulatory capture. Antitrust enforcement — forcibly decentralizing abusive concentrations of economic power — is the only real, permanent way to protect the American people from corporate oligarchs. Trump’s appointment of Gail Slater is the surest sign yet that he plans to continue DOJ’s lawsuits, investigations, and antitrust enforcement against Big Tech… and intensify its scrutiny on America’s other "Big" predators: Big Ag, Big Banks, Big Pharma, and the rest. The corporate media is framing Slater’s nomination as an escalation of a battle begun during the Biden years. In truth, it represents America’s long-overdue return to a battle it began more than two centuries ago — the battle of humble, working families against corrupt elites bent on subjugating them. Antitrust enforcement is not a "crackdown" - it’s self-defense. We are already living in the world Big Tech imposed on us. We have the toxic political culture, the youth mental health crisis, the censorship regime, and the throttled innovation economy to prove it. The American people don’t trust Big Tech. And they don’t trust the federal government in part because it hasn’t protected us from Big Tech. "Trust Busting" today might be better described as "Distrust Busting" — Washington finally stepping up to defend our economy and our people from trillion-dollar political, economic, and cultural predators. President Trump understands the future of American freedom depends on finally slaying this dragon. Gail Slater is just the knight for the job.