Trump’s trade commission is using fear to silence dissent

Is there something “radically left” about being anti-Nazi? That was the question a judge put to the lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, which has no good answer.

This week, the FTC abruptly settled its case with Media Matters for America, a media watchdog the FTC had been investigating over its reports about pro-Nazi content running alongside ads on X. Those reports drove advertisers off the platform and prompted X owner Elon Musk to threaten a “thermonuclear lawsuit”.

Four months after Andrew Ferguson took the FTC helm, having explicitly vowed before his appointment to stand up to “the radical left”, his agency sought communications records from Media Matters.

Ferguson described his agency’s logic at an antitrust conference in April 2025, noting that his investigative tools are “expensive when applied to you even if we don’t win at the end of the day, so knuckle under”. This is not a description of law enforcement but rather a textbook definition of lawfare at its finest.

The FTC does not have a mandate to investigate first amendment disputes like this one. Nor do state attorneys general. Yet Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri also launched fraud investigations into Media Matters after pressure from Stephen Miller, now deputy White House chief of staff.

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

Why? Because the point was never necessarily to win in court. The point was to chill speech, drain resources and make opposition painfully expensive.

This is how democracies decay in the modern age: not always with soldiers in the streets, but through the capture of institutions that shape public discourse. Governments and oligarchs work together to make dissent ruinously expensive. Critics are dragged into investigations and lawsuits designed less to win in court than to send a message to everyone else watching. Speak up, and you may survive legally, but you may not survive financially.

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

Media Matters says the investigations cost it donors, derailed journalistic projects, and resulted in layoffs. NewsGuard, another target of FTC scrutiny under a dubious antitrust theory, said it had spent a significant portion of its revenue covering legal expenses. At the urging of the rightwing news outlet Newsmax, the FTC even made abandoning the services of NewsGuard – or any comparable service assessing news credibility – 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 its threats, filing antitrust lawsuits against both Media Matters and the advertisers that fled the platform. One of Musk’s principal targets was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or Garm, a coalition created after the livestreamed massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, to help advertisers avoid placing ads next to extremist content such as the pro-Nazi material documented on X.

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

What is happening here is bigger than any single lawsuit 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 pattern emerged in the approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year.

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

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, described the process as involving “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment – actions that violate both the First Amendment and the law”.

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

Even administration insiders are alarmed. The former senior 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 pushed back on these tactics multiple times. But court victories are retrospective. The threat alone is often enough.

Garm is gone. Watchdog budgets have been gutted. Newsrooms are making editorial calculations with one eye fixed on potential retaliation from regulators or politically connected billionaires. Companies understand that even if they ultimately prevail in court, surviving years of investigations and lawsuits can still mean financial devastation. They price ideological compliance into their business strategies before regulators ever formally demand it.

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

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

Authoritarian movements have always understood that controlling media does not necessarily require outright censorship. It is often enough to create a climate of fear where independent institutions begin censoring 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 investigations and ruinous litigation.

This is how democracy dies in the modern era. Not necessarily with newspapers shuttered overnight or reporters hauled off to prison (although we have come dangerously close to both scenarios), but through the gradual fusion of state power and oligarchic power into a system where dissent becomes economically unsustainable. Once enough institutions internalize that lesson, formal censorship is not necessary at all.

• Courtney C Radsch is the director of the center for journalism and liberty at 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