A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan - then a law student - published #AmazonsAntitrustParadox in the *#YaleLawJournal*. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the #Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as "efficient") had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

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The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the #NeoBrandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as "#HipsterAntitrust"). This movement is a rebuke to #Reaganomics, with its celebration of #monopolies, #TrickleDown, #offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door #RegulatoryCapture, and companies that are simultaneously #TooBigToFail and #TooBigToJail.

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This movement has many proponents, of course - not just Khan - but Khan's careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the #FederalTradeCommission.

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It wasn't just that she had such a radical vision - it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

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Even more surprising was that Khan was made FTC *chair*, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against "woke" #BigTech. For these senators, the problem wasn't that tech had got too big and powerful - it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

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The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who'll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

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But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the "Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold" narrative).

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This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP's crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is "woke." Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

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Biden's ceding of antitrust policy to the left of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy's enemy, led to Khan's historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including #JonathanKanter at the DOJ Antitrust Division, #TimWu at the #WhiteHouse, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like #AlvaroBedoya (FTC), #RebeccaSlaughter (FTC), #RohitChopra (#CFPB), and many others.

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Crucially, these new appointees weren't just principled, they were *good at their jobs*. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act - with no further Congressional authorization - to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs' abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

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Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden admin have been *fuckin' ninjas*, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working - for the first time since Reagan - to protect us from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems' champions in the administration. People like #PeteButtigieg are heralded as competent
technocrats, "realists" who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can't cash.

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All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg's far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

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The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They're trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

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And by declaring noncompete "agreements" that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has *really* pissed off all the right people: America's billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

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Take the *#WSJ*: since Khan took office, they have published *67 vicious editorials* attacking her. Khan is living rent-free in #RupertMurdoch's head. Not only that, she's got the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn't be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest.

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Holy *moly* is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself *because she is an expert* is what the physicists call *not even wrong.*

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they're coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable.

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These people who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC's revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it's a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in *#TheAmericanProspect*, @ddayen runs the numbers:

> Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

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Take #ChristineWilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the *WSJ* published, presaging their concierge service for #SamuelAlito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

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For Wilson to question Khan's ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson's GOP FTC predecessor #JoshWright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he's practically got a Habsburg jaw.

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Wright went from Google to the US government and back again *four times*. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright's employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working "personally and substantially" while serving at the FTC.

George Mason's Scalia center practically *owns* the revolving door, counting *fourteen* FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

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Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials - both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems - "worked directly for a company that has business before the agency":

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The *majority* of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014-21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they'd regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

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Take #DeborahFeinstein, formerly the head of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, now a partner at #ArnoldAndPorter, where she's represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest's worth of #pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. #MichaelMoiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at #WeilGotshalAndManges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

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There's a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for #AndrewSmith, Trump's FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented *120 clients* that had business before the Commission, including "nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders":

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

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Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a "conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades."

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan's "conflict" is that she has a *point of view*. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

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This makes grifters like #JimJordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official's advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by *#Bloomberg*:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, #LoriellePankey, did *not*, in fact, make this recommendation. It's simply untrue.

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