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Feds Will Try Bogus Antitrust Action Against Musk

The Biden administration will try and kill the Musk Twitter takeover with an antitrust suit. But they conveniently look the other way at their own oligarchs like Jeff Bezos. Liz Peek explains the antitrust issue.

Peek: Elon Musk, Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year, is under attack. Why? Because he is bucking the liberal establishment and wants to make sure that you can too.

The FTC is reportedly reviewing Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, possibly setting up a lengthy investigation of potential anti-trust issues with the acquisition. A probe which could delay and possibly torch the deal if investors get nervous and withdraw their support.

We should have seen this coming. The Joe Biden White House – and their leftist allies in the media and the Democratic Party — will stop at nothing to prevent Musk’s takeover of the important social media site. Why? Because the billionaire entrepreneur advocates for free speech.

Their opposition tells us how extraordinarily threatened they are by dissenting opinion, and the vice-like grip they have over the flow of information in our country.

For most Americans, this is shocking and unacceptable. Freedom of speech is one of the constitutionally-protected rights that have defined our country through the ages and distinguished it from totalitarian regimes like China and Russia. That we now have a government attempting to squash that right is horrifying.

Lest you think we’re exaggerating, recall that Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism bulletin in February highlighting possible dangers stemming from “domestic threat actors” disseminating “mis- dis- and mal-information” about “widespread election fraud and COVID-19.”

“Disinformation” that might include, for instance, evidence that Covid vaccines do not prevent people from becoming sick with the virus, contrary to Joe Biden’s promises, or that some shots carry risks – the kind of information that has gotten people banned from Twitter.

Or, consider the Disinformation Governance Board set up by DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas, a Soviet-sounding secretive agency apparently tasked with ferreting out controversial – read: non-conforming – speech. That the U.S. government would even contemplate such an Orwellian operation is frightening.

Consider the absurdity. Musk is CEO of three companies: Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company. Tesla makes electric cars, SpaceX sends rockets into space and the Boring Company offers an ingenious approach to digging tunnels under the ground. All three are brilliant commercial ventures; not one has anything to do with social media. There is no overlap with Twitter for the FTC to investigate.

Not true, says The Open Markets Institute (OMI), a political non-profit group that rants against business combinations. OMI issued a statement saying it “believes the [Musk} deal poses a number of immediate and direct threats to American democracy and free speech.”

They follow up that laugher (the best defense being a strong offense) by claiming “the deal violates existing law, and that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have ample authority to block it.”

The organization spills considerable ink justifying these claims, oddly invoking, among other precedents, the Telegraph acts of 1860 and 1866, which probably don’t have much to do with social media. Their claim that the FCC should shut the deal down has been described as “frivolous” by FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who said “The FCC has no authority to block Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and to suggest otherwise is absurd.”

As to the FTC, OMI suggests that SpaceX’ Starlink, a satellite communications system, is “one of the most important internet platforms in the world”, and that Musk having ties to both that entity and Twitter would be anti-competitive…

Do not be fooled. None of the objections from OMI or any other left-leaning quarter is about anything but shutting down an organization that might dare to challenge liberal orthodoxy. And… shutting down Elon Musk who, in the nick of time, has emerged as a fearless defender of free speech and who has the money to back up his ambitions.

This piece was written by David Kamioner on May 10, 2022. It originally appeared in LifeZette [3] and is used by permission.