Dr. Oz: Vaccine Mandates Are Bad. I’ll Just Beg People To Get Vaccinated Instead.

from the this-isn't-working dept

I want to say a little something upfront in this post, so that there is no misunderstanding. While I’ve spent a great deal of time outlining why I think RFK Jr. and his cadre of buffoons at HHS and its child agencies are horrible for America and her people’s health, I do understand some of the perspective from people who pushback on vaccinations some of the time. One of those areas are vaccine mandates. Bodily autonomy is and ought to be a very real thing. A government installing mandates for what can and can’t be done with one’s own body is something that needs to be treated with a ton of sensitivity and I can understand why vaccine mandates in general might run afoul of the autonomy concept. Of course, it’s also why the government shouldn’t be in the business of telling women what to do with their bodies, or blanket outlawing things like euthanasia, but the point is I get it.

But there are times when we, as a society, do make some legal demands of the citizenry when it comes to their own physical beings for the betterment of the whole. Not all drugs are federally legal because there are some drugs that, if they were to proliferate, would cause enormous harm to the public that surrounds those individuals. The government does regulate to some extent what appears in our food and medicine, never bothering to ask the public their opinion on the matter. And there are some diseases so horrible that we’ve built some level of a mandate around vaccination, traditionally, especially in exchange for participation in publicly funded schools and the like.

Dr. Oz, television personality turned Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has vocally opposed vaccine mandates in general terms. When Florida dropped the requirement for vaccines for public school children, Oz cheered them on.

In an interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” the Fox News host asked Oz whether he agrees with officials who want to make Florida the first state in the nation to end childhood vaccine requirements and whether Oz would “recommend the same thing to your patients.”

“I would definitely not have mandates for vaccinations,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator told MacCallum. “This is a decision that a physician and a patient should be making together,” he continued. “The parents love their kids more than anybody else could love that kid, so why not let the parents play an active role in this?”

The MMR vaccine was one of those required for Florida schools. So, Oz is remarkably clear in the quote above. The government should not be mandating vaccines. Further, the government shouldn’t really have direct input into whether people are getting vaccines or not. That decision should be made strictly by the patient and the doctor who has that patient directly in front of them, or their parents.

Those comments from Oz were made in September of 2025. Fast forward to the present, with a measles outbreak that is completely off the rails in America, and the good doctor is singing a much different tune.

So, Oz is now reduced to begging people to get vaccinated for something that, for decades, everyone routinely got vaccinated for.

“Take the vaccine, please. We have a solution for our problem,” he said. “Not all illnesses are equally dangerous and not all people are equally susceptible to those illnesses,” he hedged. “But measles is one you should get your vaccine.”

To be clear, he’s still not advocating for any sort of mandate. Which is unfortunate, at least when it comes to targeted mandates for public schools and that sort of thing. But in lieu of any actual public policy to combat measles in America, he’s reduced to a combination of begging the public to get vaccinated and telling the general public that a measles shot is definitely one they should be getting.

And on that he’s right. But he’s also talking out of both sides of his mouth. Oz isn’t these people’s doctor. These school children aren’t all sitting directly in front of him. So the same person who advocated for a personalized approach to vaccines is now begging the public to take the measles vaccine from Washington D. C.

That inconsistency is among the many reasons it’s difficult to know just how seriously to take Oz. And consistency is pretty damned key when it comes to government messaging on public health policy. That, in addition to trust, is everything here. And when Oz jumps onto a CNN broadcast to claim that this government, including RFK Jr., have been at the forefront of advocating for the measles vaccine, any trust that is there is torpedoed pretty quickly.

CNN anchor Dana Bash was left in disbelief as one of the president’s top health goons claimed the MAGA administration was a top advocate for vaccines. Addressing the record outbreak of measles in the U.S., particularly in South Carolina, Bash asked Dr. Mehmet Oz on State of the Union Sunday: “Is this a consequence of the administration undermining support for advocacy for measles and other vaccines?” “I don’t believe so,” the Trump-appointed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator responded. He then said, “We’ve advocated for measles vaccines all along. Secretary Kennedy has been at the very front of this.”

Absolute nonsense. Yes, Kennedy has said to get the measles vaccine. He’s also said maybe everyone should just get measles instead. One of his deputies has hand-waved the outbreak away as being no big deal. Kennedy has advocated for alternative treatments, rather than vaccination.

The government is all over the place on this, in other words. As is Oz himself, in some respects. To sit here in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in decades, beg people to do the one thing that will make this all go away, and then claim that this government has been on the forefront of vaccine advocacy is simply silly.

Filed Under: cmms, hhs, measles, mehmet oz, rfk jr., vaccines

The Policy Risk Of Closing Off New Paths To Value Too Early

from the historical-analogies dept

Artificial intelligence promises to change not just how Americans work, but how societies decide which kinds of work are worthwhile in the first place. When technological change outpaces social judgment, a major capacity of a sophisticated society comes under pressure: the ability to sustain forms of work whose value is not obvious in advance and cannot be justified by necessity alone.

As AI systems diffuse rapidly across the economy, questions about how societies legitimate such work, and how these activities can serve as a supplement to market-based job creation, have taken on a policy relevance that deserves serious attention.

From Prayer to Platforms

That capacity for legitimating work has historically depended in part on how societies deploy economic surplus: the share of resources that can be devoted to activities not strictly required for material survival. In late medieval England, for example, many in the orbit of the church made at least part of their living performing spiritual labor such as saying prayers for the dead and requesting intercessions for patrons. In a society where salvation was a widely shared concern, such activities were broadly accepted as legitimate ways to make a living.

William Langland was one such prayer-sayer. He is known to history only because, unlike nearly all others who did similar work, he left behind a long allegorical religious poem, Piers Plowman, which he composed and repeatedly revised alongside the devotional labor that sustained him. It emerged from the same moral and institutional world in which paid prayer could legitimately absorb time, effort, and resources.

In 21st-century America, Jenny Nicholson earns a sizeable income sitting alone in front of a camera, producing long-form video essays on theme parks, films, and internet subcultures. Yet her audience supports it willingly and few doubt that it creates value of a kind. Where Langland’s livelihood depended on shared theological and moral authority emanating from a Church that was the dominant institution of its day, Nicholson’s depends on a different but equally real form of judgment expressed by individual market participants. And she is just one example of a broader class of creators—streamers, influencers, and professional gamers—whose work would have been unintelligible as a profession until recently.

What links Langland and Nicholson is not the substance of their work or any claim of moral equivalence, but the shared social judgment that certain activities are legitimate uses of economic surplus. Such judgments do more than reflect cultural taste. Historically, they have also shaped how societies adjust to technological change, by determining which forms of work can plausibly claim support when productivity rises faster than what is considered a “necessity” by society.

How Change Gets Absorbed

Technological change has long been understood to generate economic adjustment through familiar mechanisms: by creating new tasks within firms, expanding demand for improved goods and services, and recombining labor in complementary ways. Often, these mechanisms alone can explain how economies create new jobs when technology renders others obsolete. Their operation is well documented, and policies that reduce frictions in these processes—encouraging retraining or easing the entry of innovative firms—remain important in any period of change.

That said, there is no general law guaranteeing that new technologies will create more jobs than they destroy through these mechanisms alone. Alongside labor-market adjustment, societies have also adapted by legitimating new forms of value—activities like those undertaken by Langland and Nicholson—that came to be supported as worthwhile uses of the surplus generated by rising productivity.

This process has typically been examined not as a mechanism of economic adjustment, but through a critical or moralizing lens. From Thorstein Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption, which treats surplus-supported activity primarily as a vehicle for status competition, to Max Weber’s analysis of how moral and religious worldviews legitimate economic behavior, scholars have often emphasized the symbolic and ideological dimensions of non-essential work. Herbert Marcuse pushed this line of thinking further, arguing that capitalist societies manufacture “false needs” to absorb surplus and assure the continuation of power imbalances. These perspectives offer real insight: uses of surplus are not morally neutral, and new forms of value can be entangled with power, hierarchy, and exclusion.

What they often exclude, however, is the way legitimation of new forms of value can also function to allow societies to absorb technological change without requiring increases in productivity to be translated immediately into conventional employment or consumption. New and expanded ways of using surplus are, in this sense, a critical economic safety valve during periods of rapid change.

Skilled Labor Has Been Here Before

Fears that artificial intelligence is uniquely threatening simply because it reaches into professional or cognitive domains rest on a mistaken historical premise. Episodes of large-scale technological displacement have rarely spared skilled or high-paid forms of labor; often, such work has been among the first affected. The mechanization of craft production in the nineteenth century displaced skilled cobblers, coopers, and blacksmiths, replacing independent artisans with factory systems that required fewer skills, paid lower wages, and offered less autonomy even as new skilled jobs arose elsewhere. These changes were disruptive but they were absorbed largely through falling prices, rising consumption, and new patterns of employment. They did not require societies to reconsider what kinds of activity were worthy uses of surplus: the same things were still produced, just at scale.

Other episodes are more revealing for present purposes. Sometimes, social change has unsettled not just particular occupations but entire regimes through which uses of surplus become legitimate. In medieval Europe, the Church was the one of the largest economic institutions just about everywhere, clerical and quasi-clerical roles like Langland’s offered recognized paths to education, security, status, and even wealth. When those shared beliefs fractured, the Church’s economic role contracted sharply—not because productivity gains ceased but because its claim on so large a share of surplus lost legitimacy.

To date, artificial intelligence has not produced large-scale job displacement, and the limited disruptions that have occurred have largely been absorbed through familiar adjustment mechanisms. But if AI systems begin to substitute for work whose value is justified less by necessity than by judgment or cultural recognition, the more relevant historical analogue may be less the mechanization of craft than the narrowing or collapse of earlier surplus regimes. The central question such technologies raise is not whether skilled labor can be displaced or whether large-scale displacement is possible—both have occurred repeatedly in the historical record—but how quickly societies can renegotiate which activities they are prepared to treat as legitimate uses of surplus when change arrives at unusual speed.

Time Compression and its Stakes

In this respect, artificial intelligence does appear unusual. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have diffused through society at a pace far faster than most earlier general-purpose technologies. ChatGPT was widely reported to have reached roughly 100 million users within two months of its public release and similar tools have shown comparably rapid uptake.

That compression matters. Much surplus has historically flowed through familiar institutions—universities, churches, museums, and other cultural bodies—that legitimate activities whose value lies in learning, spiritual rewards or meaning rather than immediate output. Yet such institutions are not fixed. Periods of rapid technological change often place them under strain–something evident today for many–exposing disagreements about purpose and authority. Under these conditions, experimentation with new forms of surplus becomes more important, not less. Most proposed new forms of value fail, and attempts to predict which will succeed have a poor historical record—from the South Sea Bubble to more recent efforts to anoint digital assets like NFTs as durable sources of wealth. Experimentation is not a guarantee of success; it is a hedge. Not all claims on surplus are benign, and waste is not harmless. But when technological change moves faster than institutional consensus, the greater danger often lies not in tolerating too many experiments, but in foreclosing them too quickly.

Artificial intelligence does not require discarding all existing theories of change. What sets modern times apart is the speed with which new capabilities become widespread, shortening the interval in which those judgments are formed. In this context, surplus that once supported meaningful, if unconventional, work may instead be captured by grifters, legally barred from legitimacy (by say, outlawing a new art form) or funneled into bubbles. The risk is not waste alone, but the erosion of the cultural and institutional buffers that make adaptation possible.

The challenge for policymakers is not to pre-ordain which new forms of value deserve support but to protect the space in which judgment can evolve. They need to realize that they simply cannot make the world entirely safe, legible and predictable: whether they fear technology overall or simply seek to shape it in the “right” way, they will not be able to predict the future. That means tolerating ambiguity and accepting that many experiments will fail with negative consequences. In this context, broader social barriers that prevent innovation in any field–professional licensing, limits on free expression, overly zealous IP laws, regulatory bars on the entry to small firms–deserve a great deal of scrutiny. Even if the particular barriers in question have nothing to do with AI itself, they may retard the development of surplus sinks necessary to economic adjustment. In a period of compressed adjustment, the capacity to let surplus breathe and value be contested may well determine whether economies bend or break.

Eli Lehrer is the President of the R Street Institute.

Filed Under: ai, business models, jobs, labor

The System Of Checks And Balances Doesn’t Work When One Branch Refuses To Play By The Rules

from the fuck-em-for-existing-I-guess dept

Technically — TECHNICALLY! — we still have a system that relies on three co-equal branches to ensure that any single branch can’t steamroll the rest of the system (along with the nation it’s supposed to serve) to seize an unequal amount of power.

Technically.

What we’re seeing now is something else entirely. The judicial branch is headed by people who are willing to give the executive branch what it wants, so long as the executive branch is headed by the Republican party. The legislative branch — fully compromised by MAGA bootlickers — has decided to simply not do its job, allowing the executive branch to seize even more power. The executive branch is now just a throne for a king — a man who feels he shouldn’t have to answer to anyone — not even his voting bloc — so long as he remains in power.

The courts can act as a check against executive overreach. But as we’ve seen time and time again, this position means nothing if you’re powerless to enforce it. And that has led to multiple executive officials telling the courts to go fuck themselves when they hand down rulings the administration doesn’t like. A current sitting appellate judge no less made a name for himself in the Trump administration by demonstrating his contempt for the judicial system he’s now an integral part of.

Only good things can come from this! MAGA indeed!

And while this is only one person’s retelling their experience of being caught in the gears of Trump’s anti-brown people activities, it’s illustrative of what little it matters that there are three co-equal branches when one branch makes it clear on a daily basis that it considers itself to be more equal than the rest of them. (via Kathleen Clark on Bluesky)

This is from a sworn statement [PDF] in ongoing litigation against the federal government, as told by “O.,” a Guatemalan resident of Minnesota who has both a pending asylum application as well as a Juvenile Status proceeding still undergoing in the US. None of that mattered to ICE officers, who arrested him in January 2026 and — within 24 hours — shipped him off to a detention center more than a thousand miles from his home.

O. was denied meals, access to phones, access to legal representation, stuffed into overcrowded cells, and generally mistreated by the government that once might have honestly considered the merits of his asylum application.

But the real dirt is this part of the sworn statement, which again exposes this administration’s complete disinterest in adhering to orders from US courts, much less even paying the merest of lip service to rights long considered to be derived from none other than the “Creator” himself.

ICE did not tell me that my attorney had been trying to call me and contact me while I was in Texas. They didn’t tell me my attorney Kim, had retained another attorney, Kira Kelley, to file a habeas petition on my behalf, or that a court had granted it and ordered my release. They just kept holding me there and occasionally trying to get me to self-deport.

[…]

I was put in a cold cell where I had to sleep on the bare cement floor. Around 10 in the morning my cellmate asked to speak to an ICE officer. Three officers came into the cell so I had a chance to speak to them too. One officer told me that I “had no chance of returning to Minnesota” and that “the best thing for [me] is self-deportation.” She told me that if I fought my case, I would spend two to three more months here in El Paso. She offered me $2600 to self-deport. I refused. I wanted to talk to my attorney. They didn’t tell me the judge had already ordered my release and return to Minnesota. If I hadn’t managed to talk to my attorney who told me a while back that I was ordered released, I might have given up at this point and signed the self deportation forms because the conditions were so unbearable.

So… you see the problem. A court can order a release. But the court relies on the government to carry out this instruction. If it doesn’t, the court likely won’t know for days or weeks or months. At that point, a new set of rights abuses will have been inflicted on people who should have been freed. When the government is finally asked to answer for this, it will again engage in a bunch of bluster and obfuscation, forcing the court system to treat the administration like a member of the system of checks and balances even when it’s immediately clear the executive branch has no desire to be checked and/or balanced.

While more judges are now treating the executive branch as a hostile force unwilling to behave honestly or recognize restraints on its power, the imbalance continues to shift in the administration’s favor, largely because it can engage in abusive acts at scale, while the court is restrained to the cases presented to it.

But if you’re outside of the system, you can clearly see what’s happening and see what the future holds if one-third of the government refuses to do its job (the GOP-led Congress) and the other third can’t handle the tidal wave of abuses being presented to it daily. The executive branch will become a kingdom that fears nothing and answers to no one. But the bigger problem is this: most Americans will see this and understand that this will ultimately destroy democracy. Unfortunately, there’s a significant number of voters who actually welcome these developments, figuring it’s better to lick the boots of someone who prefers to rule in hell, rather than serve the United States.

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, mass deportation, trump administration

Daily Deal: The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows License + Windows 11 Pro Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is exactly that. This operating system is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows + Windows 11 Pro Bundle is on sale for $44.97 for a limited time.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

An 18-Million-Subscriber YouTuber Just Explained Section 230 Better Than Every Politician In Washington

from the the-kids-are-alright dept

Over the years, we’ve written approximately one million words explaining why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to how the internet functions. We’ve corrected politicians who lie about it. We’ve debunked myths spread by mainstream media outlets that should know better. We’ve explained, re-explained, and then explained again why gutting this law would be catastrophic for online speech.

And now I find myself in the somewhat surreal position of saying: you know who nailed this explanation better than most policy experts, pundits, and certainly better than any sitting member of Congress? A YouTuber named Cr1TiKaL.

If you’re not familiar with Charles “Cr1TiKaL” White Jr., he runs the penguinz0 YouTube channel with nearly 18 million subscribers and over 12 billion total views. He’s known for deadpan commentary on internet culture and video games. He’s not a policy wonk. He’s not a lawyer. He’s just a guy who apparently bothered to actually understand what Section 230 says and does—something that puts him leagues ahead of the United States Congress.

In this 13-minute video responding to actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s call to “sunset” Section 230, Cr1TiKaL laid out the case for why 230 matters with a clarity that most mainstream coverage hasn’t managed in a decade:

Dismantling section 230 would fundamentally change the internet as you know it. And that’s not an exaggeration to say it. Put it even more simply, section 230 allows goobers like me to post whatever they want, saying whatever they want, and the platform itself is not liable for whatever I’ve made or said. 

That is on me personally. 

The platform isn’t going to be, you know, fucking dragged through the streets with legs spread like a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey for it and getting blasted by lawsuits or whatever. Now, of course, there are limitations in place when it comes to illegal content, things that actually break the law. That is, of course, a very different set of circumstances. That’s a different can of worms, and that’s handled differently. But it should be obvious why section 230 is so important because if these platforms were held liable for every single thing people post on their platforms, they would get into a lot of hot water and they would just not allow people to post things. Full stop. because it would be too dangerous to do so. They would need to micromanage and control every single thing that hits the platform in order to protect themselves. No matter how you spin it, this would ruin the internet. It’s a pile of dogshit. No matter how much perfume gets sprayed on it or how they want to repackage it, it still stinks. 

Yes, the metaphors are colorful. But the underlying point is exactly correct. Section 230 places liability where it belongs: on the person who actually created the content. Not on the platform that hosts it. This is how the entire internet works. Every comment section, every social media post, every forum—all of it depends on this basic principle.

Also, he actually reads the 26 words in the video! This is something that so many other critics of 230 skip over, because then they can pretend it says things it doesn’t say.

And unlike the politicians who keep pretending this is some kind of special gift to “Big Tech,” Cr1TiKaL correctly notes that 230 protects everyone:

This would affect literally every platform that has anything user submitted in any capacity at all. 

Every. Single. One. Your local newspaper’s comment section. The neighborhood Facebook group. The subreddit for your favorite hobby. The Discord server where you talk about video games. The email you forward. All of it.

He’s also refreshingly clear-eyed about why politicians from both parties keep attacking 230:

Since the advent of the internet, section 230 has been a target for people that want to control your speech and infringe on your First Amendment rights.

This observation tracks with what we’ve pointed out repeatedly: the bipartisan hatred of Section 230 is one of the most remarkable examples of political unity in modern American governance—and it’s driven largely by politicians who want platforms to moderate content in ways that favor their particular political preferences.

Democrats have attacked 230 claiming it enables “misinformation” and hate speech. Republicans have attacked it claiming it enables “censorship” of conservative voices. Both cannot simultaneously be true, and yet both parties have introduced legislation to gut the law. Cr1TiKaL captures this perfectly:

When Democrats were in charge, it caught a lot of scrutiny, claiming that it was enabling the spread of racism and harming children. With Republicans in power, they’re claiming that it’s spreading misinformation and anti-semitism. This is a bipartisan punching bag that they desperately want to just beat down.

The critics always trot out the same tired arguments about algorithms and echo chambers and extremism. As if removing 230 would somehow make speech better rather than making it disappear entirely or become heavily controlled by whoever has the most money and lawyers. Cr1TiKaL cuts right through this:

There are people that are paying a lot of money to try and plant this idea in your brain that section 230 is a bad thing. It only leads to things like extremism and conspiracy theories and demonization and that kind of thing. That’s not true. 

Anyone who stops and thinks about this for even just a moment, firing on a few neurons, should be able to recognize how outrageous this proposal is. How would shutting down conversation and shutting down the ability to express thoughts and opinions somehow help combat the rise of extremism and conspiracies? that would only exacerbate the problem. Censorship doesn’t solve these issues. It makes them worse. 

He even anticipates the point we’ve made countless times about what the internet would look like without 230:

Platforms would not allow just completely unfiltered usage of normal people expressing their thoughts because those thoughts might go against the official narrative from the curated source and then the curated source might go after the platform saying this is defamatory. These people have just said something hosted on your platform and we’re coming after you with lawsuits. So they just wouldn’t allow it. 

This is a point we keep repeating and you never hear in the actual policy debates, because supporters of a 230 repeal have no answer for it beyond “nuh-uh.”

The people who most want to control online speech are exactly the people you’d expect: governments and powerful interests who don’t like being criticized. Section 230 is one of the things standing in their way.

And when critics inevitably dust off the “think of the children” argument, Cr1TiKaL delivers the response that shouldn’t be controversial but apparently is:

Be a parent. It is not the internet’s job to cater to your lack of parenting by just letting your kid online. Fucking lazy trash ass parents just sit a kid in front of a computer or an iPad and then are stunned when apparently they find bad shit. Be a parent. Be involved in your kids’ life. Raise your children. Don’t make it the internet’s job to do that for you. 

Is this delivered with the diplomatic nuance of a congressional hearing? No. Is it correct? Absolutely. The “protect the children” argument for dismantling 230 has always been a dodge—a way to make critics of the bill seem heartless while ignoring that Section 230 doesn’t protect illegal content and maybe, just maybe, the primary responsibility for what media children consume should rest with the adults responsible for those children.

We’ve been writing about Section 230 for years, trying to explain to policymakers and the general public why it matters. And most of the time, it feels like shouting into the void. Politicians keep lying about it. Journalists keep getting it wrong. The mythology around 230 persists no matter how many times it gets corrected.

And we’ve heard from plenty of younger people who now believe that 230 is bad. I recently guest taught a college class where students were split into two groups—one to argue in favor of 230 and one against—and I was genuinely dismayed when the group told to argue in favor of 230 argue that 230 “once made sense” but doesn’t any more.

So there’s something genuinely hopeful about seeing a young creator with an audience of nearly 18 million people—an audience that skews young and is probably not spending a lot of time reading policy papers—get it right. Not just right in a general sense, but right in the specifics. He read the law. He understood what it does. He correctly identified why it matters and who benefits from dismantling it.

Maybe the generation that grew up on the internet actually understands what’s at stake when politicians threaten to fundamentally reshape how it works. Maybe they’re not buying the moral panic narratives that have been trotted out to justify every bad piece of tech legislation for the past decade.

Or maybe I’m being optimistic. Either way, Cr1TiKaL’s video is worth watching. It’s profane, it’s casual, and it’s more correct about Section 230 than anything you’ll hear from the halls of Congress.

Filed Under: cr1tikal, section 230

Trump DOJ Launches Bunk Investigation Of Netflix Merger As a Favor To Larry Ellison

from the "antitrust-enforcers"-in-name-only dept

We told you this was coming months ago.

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) says it has initiated a broad investigation of Netflix’s business practices and it’s planned $82.7 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The Trump DOJ’s pretense is that they’re just suddenly really concerned about media consolidation and monopoly power (you’re to ignore the U.S. right wing’s generational and indisputable quest to coddle and protect monopoly power across telecom, energy, air travel, banking, and countless other industries):

“Questioning how Netflix competes with rivals suggests the department is looking at whether its planned Warner deal could entrench its market power, or lead to a monopoly in the future. U.S. law gives enforcers broad power to oppose mergers that could lead to a monopoly.”

In reality, the Trump administration has made it extremely clear they’re hoping to scuttle the Netflix deal to help Larry Ellison acquire Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. If they can’t kill the deal, they aspire to at least leverage the merger approval process to force Netflix executives to further debase themselves before the Trump administration, which I suspect they’ll all be happy to do.

It’s part of a longstanding trend by Trumpism to pretend that they’re engaged in populist antitrust reform, claims historically propped up by a long list of useful idiots across the partisan spectrum, and parroted by a growing coalition of right wing propaganda outlets. This bogus populism helps obfuscate what’s really just some of the worst corruption America has ever seen (which is really saying something).

The original (paywalled) Wall Street Journal report (and this aggregated Reuters recap) dutifully help sell the claim that the DOJ is also “investigating” Ellison’s Paramount/Skydance, whose Warner Brothers acquisition bid was repeatedly rejected by the Warner board over worries about dodgy financing and Saudi money involvement:

“The WSJ reported that the DOJ is also reviewing Paramount’s proposed acquisition bid, which Warner Bros’ board unanimously rejected by labeling it “inadequate” and “not in the best interests” of shareholders.”

The outlets fail to remind you that there is generous reporting discussing how Larry Ellison and Trump have had extensive meetings discussing who Larry Ellison would fire on Trump’s behalf should he take control of CNN. They also fail to remind you that the right wing “press,” with Trump’s help, has been engaged in a broad effort to undermine the Netflix merger chances using false claims.

After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry, MAGA, and the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity: