Missouri's latest senator is part of a wave of (extremely selective) Republican enthusiasm for trustbusting

When Josh Hawley was Attorney General of Missouri, he was an (extremely selective) firebreathing trustbuster who used his office to chase Google up and down the state, investigating the company's anticompetitive action and the pontential for public harm represented by its market dominance and size.

Hawley is part of a wave of GOP enthusiasm for antitrust enforcement -- when it comes to Big Tech, at least. Despite having sainted Ronald Reagan (who kicked off 40 years of antitrust malpractice, and despite being rotten from within by corporate thinktankies paid to espouse the "public harm" standard of antitrust (which holds that monopolies are "efficient" and thus desirable), a bunch of "free market" Republicans have started sounding off like Roosevelt trustbusters about Silicon Valley companies, galled by their Democrat-leading leadership and by a wave of no-platforming directed at the likes of Alex Jones.

And now Hawley is the latest senator from Missouri, and he's doubled down on his trustbusting rhetoric, for Big Tech, at least (Hawley doesn't say much about breaking up big banks, oil companies, or Koch Industries and Walmart). He's joined by noted asshole Tucker Carlson, who uses his Daily Caller to rail against Big Tech's monopoly power, and the trustbusting chorus includes periodic, confused tweets from noted asshole Donald Trump and highbrow intellectual cover in the National Review.

I think this is a mixed bag. The far-right echo-chamber is built on the idea of deference to authority, which means that right-wingers who gain dominance in their little Lord of the Flies LARP rarely get checked from within (publicly, at least -- privately, they're all about the long knives in the back). Read the rest