Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr speaks during the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on February 24, 2024. | Source: Anadolu / Getty
Well, well, well — in a completely unsurprising non-turn of events, the president-elect who made a big show of distancing himself from Project 2025 has, once again, selected a Project 2025 author as a member of his administration in a position that is directly related to the part of Project 2025 that he contributed to.
One might almost fall under the impression that Donald Trump was lying to get elected and now that he’s elected, he’s going to do what non-MAGA folks were afraid he was going to do despite pro-MAGA folks insisting we were being hyperbolic.
Meet Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Trump-stumper who wrote the chapter on the FCC in the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for giving whiny, perpetually aggrieved white people the America they have always had but also the America that they think they have lost.
“We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans,” Carr tweeted after his cabinet position was announced, according to CNN.
Now, we all know that when white conservatives say “everyday Americans,” they really just mean themselves, because, despite the fact that people of all demographics and ideologies have complained about being locked out of their social media accounts over the controversial things they’ve posted, for whatever reason, conservatives with MAGA-sized persecution complexes wholly believe it’s only happening to them.
From CNN:
Claims of conservative censorship erupted several years ago as a result of content moderation decisions by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Officials at the platforms said they were acting in good faith to reduce some of the toxicity – like election lies and Covid pandemic conspiracy theories – that turned off many users. Conservatives charged that the platforms were unfairly silencing their views – factoring into Musk’s decision to buy Twitter and turn it into X.
Carr advanced this belief in a recent letter to the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple. He predicted that the Trump administration and Congress “will take broad ranging actions to restore” Americans’ First Amendment rights, “and those actions can include both a review of your companies’ activities as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights.”
The letter singled out NewsGuard, a startup that rates the reliability of news websites. NewsGuard said Carr was ill-informed: “Every statement in the letter about NewsGuard is false, citing unreliable sources.”
In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr wrote that the top priority for Trump’s administration should be “reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance,” because nothing says “small government” like a government agency forcing privately-owned tech companies to do its bidding and its job. However, if those tech companies are, say, “censoring” dangerous medical misinformation during a global health crisis — well, that’s just an affront to the Constitution conservatives hold so dear (but don’t read correctly).
Carr is at least the second Project 2025 contributor to land a spot in Trump’s cabinet. Last week, Trump announced ex-ICE director Thomas Homan, another contributor, as his new “border czar.”
Besides Homan and Carr, Trump has nominated Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host with zero experience in national defense, for — *checks notes* — Secretary of Defense. He also nominated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was literally banned by nine different Native American tribes in her home state, to lead the Department of Homeland Security. The president-elect also selected right-wing extremist Stephen Miller to serve as deputy chief of staff, which means it will be his duty to advise the DHS on how to deal with domestic terrorists, most of whom are right-wing extremists. And, of course, Trump, and accused sexual abuser, recently nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz, another accused sexual abuser, to serve as U.S. attorney general.
Trump’s cabinet picks seem to either be woefully underqualified for the positions they’ve been appointed to or nominated for, or they are overqualified to aid Trump in pushing his diet fascist ultra-conservative agenda to make white nationalism great again.
It’s going to be a long four years, y’all.
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NAACP President Derrick Johnson Delivers Powerful Breakdown Of Project 2025’s Impact On Black People
