Trump’s trade commission is using fear to silence dissent | Courtney Radsch

Is there anything “radically left” about being anti-Nazi? That’s the question a judge asked the Federal Trade Commission’s lawyer, to which there is no good answer.

This week, the FTC abruptly settled its case with Media Matters for America, a media watchdog that the FTC had investigated over its reports of pro-Nazi content running alongside ads on X. Those reports caused advertisers to leave the platform and prompted X owner Elon Musk to threaten a “thermonuclear trial.”

Four months after Andrew Ferguson took over as head of the FTC, having explicitly promised before his appointment to stand up to “the radical left,” his agency requested communications records from Media Matters.

Ferguson described his agency’s logic at an antitrust conference in April 2025, noting that its investigative tools are “expensive when applied to you, even if we don’t win in the end, so go for it.” This is not a description of the application of law, but rather a classic definition of law in its most refined form.

The FTC is not mandated to investigate First Amendment disputes like this one. Neither do state attorneys general. Yet Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri also launched fraud investigations into Media Matters under pressure from Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff.

The courts ultimately forced the FTC and the attorneys general to stand down. But the investigations were still successful.

For what? Because it was never necessarily about winning in court. The goal was to paralyze discourse, drain resources, and make opposition extremely costly.

This is how democracies decay in the modern era: not always with soldiers on the streets, but through the takeover of the institutions that shape public discourse. Governments and oligarchs work together to make dissent extremely costly. Critics are drawn into investigations and lawsuits intended less to win in court than to send a message to all onlookers. Talk about it and you may survive legally, but you may not survive financially.

This is precisely what is happening in the United States today.

Media Matters says the investigations have cost donors, derailed journalism projects and led to layoffs. NewsGuard, another target of FTC scrutiny under dubious antitrust theory, said it spent a significant portion of its revenue to cover legal costs. At the request of right-wing news outlet Newsmax, the FTC even made abandoning NewsGuard’s services – or any comparable service that assesses the credibility of information – a condition for approving the Omnicom-IPG advertising merger: the companies would not be allowed to use such platforms.

Meanwhile, Musk’s X followed through on his threats by filing antitrust lawsuits against Media Matters and advertisers who fled the platform. One of Musk’s main targets was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or Garm, a coalition created after the live-streamed massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, to help advertisers avoid placing ads next to extremist content such as the pro-Nazi content documented on X.

A federal judge in Texas threw out Musk’s lawsuit earlier this year, ruling that the advertisers had simply exercised their independent business judgment in deciding not to advertise on X. But by then, the damage was already done. The dissolution of Garm was announced in August 2024, a few days after the lawsuit was filed, under the weight of the legal assault. The victory in court came too late to prevent the deterrent effect.

What’s happening here is bigger than any single trial or merger review. It is the emergence of a system in which oligarchs and the state work together to discipline critics, reward loyalists, and reshape the media environment to serve those in power.

A similar trend emerged when the Paramount-Skydance merger was approved last year.

The deal, controlled by the Ellison family and vetted by a deeply politicized FCC, was approved only after a remarkable series of concessions. Paramount reportedly paid Trump $16 million to settle a dispute over a 60 Minutes interview, canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert publicly described the settlement as a “bribe” and demonstrated that the combined company would impose tighter editorial controls on CBS News while dismantling diversity initiatives. The Late Show airs its final episode this month.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s only Democratic commissioner, described the process as involving “unprecedented forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment — actions that violate both the First Amendment and the law.”

As I testified before Congress, merger review has become a political concession machine under the Trump administration. Larry Ellison, father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, reportedly called Trump personally after Netflix expressed interest in Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the competing deal would hurt competition. Of course, Paramount now holds the winning bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

Even administration insiders are alarmed. Former top Justice Department antitrust official Roger Alford, who was fired last year, later described the antitrust division’s conduct as pay-to-play regulation.

Courts have now repeatedly rejected these tactics. But legal victories are retrospective. The threat alone is often enough.

Garm is gone. The budgets of monitoring bodies have been gutted. Newsrooms make their editorial calculations with an eye fixed on possible retaliation from regulators or politically connected billionaires. Companies understand that even if they ultimately win in court, surviving years of investigations and lawsuits can still result in financial devastation. They integrate ideological conformity into their business strategies before regulators formally require it.

The organizations targeted by the administration and Musk all shared a common trait: They made X less profitable or less politically useful. The deal with Paramount revealed the other side of the equation. Companies that host the administration are rewarded. Companies that resist are punished.

That’s the real story here. The FTC and FCC are no longer being used as intended: to govern fairness in our markets. They are increasingly used to shape the information environment itself, determining which institutions survive, which voices are amplified, and which critiques are buried under crushing legal and financial pressure.

Authoritarian movements have always understood that media control does not necessarily require outright censorship. It is often enough to create a climate of fear in which independent institutions begin to censor themselves. Where journalists hesitate before publishing. Where advertisers retreat from controversy. Where media executives learn that favorable coverage and political loyalty can secure regulatory approval, while criticism can trigger ruinous investigations and litigation.

This is how democracy dies in the modern era. Not necessarily with newspapers shut down overnight or journalists sent to prison (although we have come dangerously close to both scenarios), but through the gradual merging of state and oligarchic power into a system where dissent becomes economically unsustainable. Once enough institutions have internalized this lesson, formal censorship is no longer necessary at all.

• Courtney C Radsch is director of the Center for Journalism and Freedom at the Open Markets Institute and the author of Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change. She is a board member of theguardian.org