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American Economic Liberties Project Director of Research Matt Stoller speaks on the phone at the organization's headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2023. | Francis Chung/POLITICO | Even before the infamous fist (or the even more infamous run), Republican Sen. Josh Hawley had few fans to the left of Reagan. But there was one Democratic writer who came to his defense. “It’s fascinating how Josh Hawley keeps rolling out pro-worker platforms, like payroll support, as well as anti-monopoly policy ideas,” progressive analyst and antitrust organizer Matt Stoller tweeted in May 2020. “And yet liberals and leftists use calling Hawley a fraud or a fascist as an in-group social signal to each other.” Why would an avowed progressive come to the defense of a hardline conservative? Well, for many of Stoller’s colleagues, it wasn’t all that surprising. Stoller, a firebrand in the anti-monopoly movement, advocates a dogmatic focus on challenging corporate power: Busting monopolies is the number-one goal — even, it seems, if it means praising figures that liberals consider villains. After all, just a few years earlier, Hawley had become the first state attorney general to sue Google on antitrust grounds. To critics, Stoller has tunnel vision; his focus on antitrust policy at any cost is a recipe for political ruin. But Stoller doesn’t seem to buy any hyper-partisan strategy. As one Biden official puts it, “He speaks Republican fluently.” Stoller puts it another way: “Republicans believe different things than we do. That’s just the reality,” he says. “And you can try to do politics and work on where you overlap, or you can choose to say, ‘I’m going to not try to get cancer patients the drugs they need for a reasonable price.’” As a renewed interest in breaking up big business sweeps Washington, with staunch conservatives recalibrating their party’s long de facto support of corporate power — part of what figures like GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) are calling “The Realignment” — Nancy Scola profiles Stoller, whose “gladiatorial presence” on Twitter and sway over the Biden administration (he maintains a “direct line to the White House,” says Columbia law professor and Biden’s former point person on competition in the White House, Tim Wu) have helped make him arguably the most important person breathing “new life into the idea that government should be breaking up monopolies wherever they lurk.” “As Stoller sees it, the ideal political setup is to have political opponents try to out-anti-monopoly each other — it’s the only way the antitrust vision can be realized,” Scola writes. “And if burning nominal allies is what it takes to bring about that future, then — to Stoller, at least — making everyone mad is worth it.” Read the story. | | | |  | “That’s not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi [Jinping] ... or sitting across from [President Vladimir] Putin and trying to resolve what’s happening in Ukraine, if you can’t see around a corner [Disney CEO] Bob Iger created for you.” Can you guess who said this about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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The MAGA fever has yet to break for some voters. | Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images |
Yes, Society Really Could Break Down … Knock on wood, but so far, the “death and destruction” that former President Donald Trump predicted over his indictment have not materialized. That doesn’t mean we’re in the clear, though — especially if conservatives face a choice between swallowing another Democratic presidential win or pushing for a Republican victory by Trumpian, even Jan. 6-style, means. “Full-scale civil war is not the only danger,” writes Steven Simon (from MIT’s Center for International Studies) and Jonathan Stevenson (from the International Institute for Strategic Studies). “As the 2024 election approaches, the threat of political violence and civil breakdown is only going to increase. And despite all that U.S. national security and law enforcement officials have learned since Jan. 6, the country is still not prepared for a far-right revolt.”
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| The media trial of the century barely got underway on Tuesday before it abruptly ended in a landmark $787.5 million settlement between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News. Here are some tips on how to sound like you were actually following along. (From Ankush Khardori) — Make sure to mention Tuesday’s most hilariously appropriate development — when Caley Cronin, a spokesperson for Fox News, was thrown out of the courtroom after violating a court order that prohibited taking photographs. According to the judge, Cronin then rudely “turned around and ratted” on others in the audience as she fumbled away. There is too much symbolism in this one moment to unpack in this space. Use your imagination and enjoy. — There is no doubt that the timing of the settlement — just as opening arguments were slated to get underway — was unusual, but the possibility that Fox would eventually throw in the towel had been clear for a while, the usual bluster notwithstanding. The network had suffered major setbacks during pretrial litigation that had gutted much of its prepared defense. — The media has already moved on to predicting that Smartmatic, which is also suing the network over similar alleged lies, may succeed where Dominion failed in taking down the network. Don’t count on it. Fox’s lawyers likely priced out the cost of a comparable settlement with Smartmatic when it decided to resolve Dominion’s case. — The network had been claiming for months that a loss could have negative ripple effects throughout the industry, but if anything, the case has reinforced support for the existing framework of defamation law. There is a high bar for plaintiffs suing media outlets, but not an insurmountable one, at least when the falsehoods are indisputable and repeated over time. This was well-substantiated and egregious media malpractice, and Fox deserved to pay handsomely for it.
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Elon Musk gestures as he is interviewed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson on April 13, 2023. | Fox News via AP | Why A.I. Scares Elon Musk … After driving NPR off Twitter, spewing a continuous stream of culture war shitposts and blowing up his working relationship with “Twitter Files” writer Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk has finally reached the stage of his strange political evolution where he emerges from a cocoon filled with epic memes to spread his (right-) wings on Tucker Carlson’s show. But the worldview he presented to the Fox host in a two-part interview earlier this week was not merely liberal vs. conservative. The tech mogul opened the interview with his fears about AI’s threat to humanity, arguing for the creation of a new regulatory agency to tackle the risk. But he’s not anti-AI, exactly; rather, he believes an AI free of speech restrictions — a “based” AI, if you will — would have a fuller picture of humanity, in all its complexities, which might … make humans too interesting to eliminate? “Like all questions about artificial general intelligence, or unicorns, or little green men, it’s impossible to answer whether an AI’s data set including every bit of racist invective @Groyper69420 has ever hurled at unsuspecting Twitter users will endear or depreciate humanity in its digital mind,” writes studied Musk-interpreter Derek Robertson. “But Musk’s belief that uncensored AI speech platforms will ultimately benefit humanity more than their currently-existing counterparts … is aligned with his overall view of progress as a sort of survival of the fittest.”
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| |  Doubleday | | Move Over, Moby Dick … In a starred review, Kirkus calls The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, the new book out this week from longtime New Yorker writer David Grann, “a rousing story of a maritime scandal.” The plot, in broad strokes: After the Wager, an English vessel, crashed on a desolate island in 1741, its crew — including the young John Byron, future grandfather of the poet — split into factions. When some of them finally did manage to find their way back to England, they shared sharply different accounts of what had happened, accusing one another of mutiny — a crime worthy of hanging. This work of mind-blowing historical research reads as if Grann was really there; you can practically feel the sea mist salting your face. Grann plunges the reader into the crushing depths of desperation, where pretense washes away and only the truth of human character, emaciated and half mad with scurvy, endures. That’s the book’s real subject: The truth, and how to find it. What could be more relevant in our political age of division and disinformation, when — much like the crew of the ill-fated Wager — we can’t agree on what’s real, much less who’s responsible? (From Dylon Jones)
| | | **Who Dissed answer: It was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, criticizing DeSantis’ high-profile fight with Disney, which has placed the apparent 2024 contender at odds with the GOP’s longstanding friendliness to big business. “I don’t think Ron DeSantis is a conservative, based on his actions towards Disney,” Christie added. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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