#communications act

By Genevieve Gluck April 10, 2024

A trans-identified male spared a prison sentence after threatening to bludgeon a man with a claw hammer has again avoided jail after threatening to kill women’s rights campaigners. Layla Le Fey, 44, was handed a combined 20-week suspended sentence for violent threats he sent to Helen Joyce and Kellie Jay Keen, two well-known women critical of gender identity ideology, in which he fantasized about butchering and dismembering them.

Last year, Le Fey sent the violent messages via a now-suspended account on X (formerly Twitter) from March through June. Using the handle @laylalefey1, Le Fey stated he was “interested in setting fire” to Keen’s home while she was inside.

Le Fey had also communicated his desire to “kick the s**t out of” her, rip her eyes out, and break her spine in a bizarre bid to “prove [her] point” that “some trans people are extremely violent.” That same day, Le Fey stated that he would enjoy either seeing Keen brutally killed by a “misogynist psychopath” or acting out the murder himself.

Paul Matzko at The UnPopulist:

After the Sept. 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump’s supporters blamed their candidate’s lackluster performance on the moderators and host ABC News. It was, variously, a “public show trial,” “organized crime,” or simply the “worst moderated presidential debate” of all time. Trump declared it was a “rigged” debate for which the network should have its license revoked. “To be honest,” Trump reflected the morning after on Fox News, “they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

This is not an atypical reaction for the former president. Trump has a lengthy history of calling for broadcasters to have their licenses revoked after they criticize his conduct or policies. For example, in 2017 he wanted NBC to have its broadcast licenses revoked by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) because of that network’s coverage of his call to exponentially increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Many legal scholars have pointed out that broadcast licenses do not work that way—they’re tied to individual stations, not networks—and Trump does not have the authority to order the FCC to target his critics. Nonetheless, these episodes reveal Trump’s censorial intent even if they simultaneously expose how poorly he understands the mechanisms of governance. Trump has repeatedly signaled his willingness to silence his critics via overt censorship, although, thus far, career civil servants (or, as Trump would call them, the “Deep State”) have prevented talk of censorship from turning into acts of censorship.

Trump: Following JFK’s Blueprint for Abuse

But it is worth considering how a future administration that combines Trump’s lack of principle with a modicum of administrative ability could deploy the federal government’s broadcast regulatory apparatus to extract partisan benefit. It has, after all, been done before, as I have detailed at some length in my book on the John F. Kennedy administration’s abuse of FCC regulations for a censorship campaign targeting right-wing broadcasters in the 1960s. There is a discernible pattern that resurfaces throughout the long history of regulatory weaponization by the FCC that begins with stacking the deck.

The FCC’s five commissioners are presidential appointees split along the red-blue partisan line with the chairman as tiebreaker. Nominal independence notwithstanding, the smart, aspiring commissioner will pay attention to what their presidential benefactor desires. As President Kennedy told E. William Henry when appointing him as FCC Chairman in 1963, “It is important that [broadcast] stations be kept fair,” by which he meant kept fair to me. Henry followed through by singling out right-wing broadcasters that were critical of the administration for regulatory scrutiny while leaving pro-administration broadcasters untouched.

It is not hard to imagine Trump or another authoritarian tweeting or posting a similar sentiment, thus placing pressure on their appointees to direct policy accordingly. After all, Trump has had considerable success with his appointees in other arenas, including the judiciary. Those investments are already paying off in the form of questionable rulings and trial delays. And while steering the ship of the federal judiciary—composed of 870 judgeships—requires immense effort, a relatively small investment of political capital in the FCC could go much further. All it takes is three sympathetic commissioners to enact or enforce regulations, including some that can and have been abused for partisan purposes in the past.

Project 2025’s Radical Plans for the FCC

Trump enjoys a head start. One of the current Republican commissioners, Brendan Carr, is a Trump appointee, and would be a frontrunner for replacing the current Democrat-appointed chairwoman if Trump wins in 2024. Carr authored a chapter in the controversial Project 2025, a policy wish list crafted by over 100 right-wing organizations, and it provides some indication of the direction of a Carr-fronted FCC under a Trump White House 2.0. In this chapter, Carr signals his willingness to radically reform the FCC to make it a more effective instrument for the Trump administration’s broader goals.

For instance, Carr claims that the FCC—and not the courts—ought to have ultimate interpretive authority over Section 230 of the Communications Act, which is the law that holds online platforms such as Facebook and Substack immune from civil liability for user-posted content. Carr cites a solo, outlier opinion of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to advocate for peeling back Section 230 protections in order to “prohibit discrimination against core political viewpoints.” This echoes a frequent complaint of conservative activists, who are upset when platforms remove their posts while citing terms of service prohibiting racism, misogyny, or other hateful content. But conditioning Section 230 protection on carrying “core political viewpoints” would act as a functional backdoor to a common carrier rule without designating the platforms as common carriers. Platforms must carry this political speech regardless of whether they or their users want it.

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Here is the worst-case scenario if Trump is elected, given that he has not been coy about his plans to persecute his critics and political opponents: On day one in office, the new FCC chairperson, citing the news distortion standard, would begin rolling investigations into any broadcast outlet that aired critical coverage of the administration. There is “fake news” or disinformation that must be rooted out! (The fact that disinformation is indeed a real problem provides even better rhetorical cover for what, in this scenario, is fundamentally an attempt to suppress dissent.) It would not really matter whether the investigations uncovered any actual impropriety; the financial and reputational cost of lawyering up and being dragged into FCC hearings would pressure news outlets to think twice before airing critical commentary about the administration. Furthermore, given the current willingness of Elon Musk to openly boost the Trump campaign on the platform formerly known as Twitter, it is not hard to imagine that some conservative news outlets and pro-administration platforms would provide sympathetic coverage of the FCC’s investigations into their mainstream media competitors.

News providers could find themselves squeezed from multiple angles: their broadcast news team under public scrutiny for news distortion, their CEOs subpoenaed for a series of FCC hearings, their local station affiliates facing license renewal challenges, and their websites exposed to civil lawsuits after having Section 230 protections revoked for their content moderation policies. Again, even if the news provider were ultimately cleared, this kind of regulatory full-court press could have a significant chilling effect. And it could all be done, legally, under existing statutes and designated authority. We know this because similar actions have been taken by the FCC in the past, like the aforementioned Kennedy administration’s censorship campaign, the targeting of the news distortion standard, and much more. It is reasonable to be concerned about the potential direction of the FCC under the leadership of Carr given what he wrote for Project 2025, and that he wrote it despite the risk that doing so represents a violation of federal law against electioneering by officials. But the danger is much greater than any one FCC commissioner.

FCC Is Not the Only Vehicle for Punishing Political Enemies

In fact, stacking the FCC with partisan activists might not even be necessary for an authoritarian president trying to manipulate the airwaves. As former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has noted, the Communications Act of 1934 includes a provision allowing the president to “cause the closing of any station” for radio or wire communications—which encompasses the full scope of broadcasting, wireless, and internet—in the interest of national security or in the case of a national emergency. Note, presidents have been declaring national emergencies on increasingly thin grounds to advance their policy agendas, as when Donald Trump did so to justify redirecting money to building a border wall with Mexico and when Joe Biden tried to forgive student loan debts during the covid pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the former and blocked the latter, but even in failure there is the opportunity for political advantage.

Imagine a future scenario where a president, who is angry about negative media coverage, declares a national emergency, citing a major weather event, foreign policy consideration, or whatever pretext they desire. Or they could simply claim a national security interest. They could then order the FCC to close any radio and television stations affiliated with the offending network. They might be able to justify locking down the internet exchange points that control web traffic. Now, even if that order were not sustained in court, the potential disruption to the targeted news outlet or social media network could still be immense and costly. A clever authoritarian knows how to snatch political victory from the jaws of judicial defeat. The mere possibility of future executive action could have a chilling effect on anti-administration speech.

Paul Matzko writes in The UnPopulist that Donald Trump will use the powers of the “Presidency” to weaponize the FCC to censor opponents of his fascistic regime if he is elected.

The settlement is the latest sign that the FCC is stepping up Verizon agreed to pay $1.35 million to settle Federal Communications Commission charges that it violated customers’ privacy when it used a hidden undeletable number to track cellphone users. In the settlement, Verizon also agreed to make its unkillable “zombie” cookie opt-in, meaning that…