This is the Cater Daily podcast for Thursday, December 5th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What might a weaponized FCC look like?

We don't have to look that far either into the past or to other countries for what an agency

nominally tasked with regulating certain communications might be technically

able to do. Cato's Paul Matzko and Walter Olson offered their thoughts.

Paul, there are a lot of concerns that the incoming Trump administration, if you take the

former and now future president at his word with respect to what federal

agencies ought to be doing to the businesses or broadcast outlets that have annoyed,

offended, or in at least one case, just presented search results that were not to

Donald Trump's liking. Now that he is going to take up again the office in the White House,

give me the worst case scenario for using government against those who have

been offended.

Yeah, no, there's a very real threat of a kind of death by a thousand cuts using the regulatory

state that go after Trump's critics.

Some of this was, there was some insulation against this during the first Trump term because

the head of the FCC, I imagine, pie was pretty committed to rule of law and to free speech

principles.

So he didn't, when Trump variously said, hey, NBC criticized my nuclear

weapons policy, they should have their licenses for their local stations revoked. Adrapai said,

no, we're not going to do that. Right. So there was some insulation in that the conservative

members of the deep state were a little bit reluctant to just be pure partisan

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