FTC Chair Lina Khan's Co-Author: Use Antitrust to Address 'Structural Racism'

The new Chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency with the power to threaten corporations with costly antitrust fines among other regulatory burdens, once co-authored a paper with a progressive scholar who advocates the use of antitrust law to solve “structural racism.”

President Biden pulled what the Wall Street Journal called a “bait-and-switch” on Republican senators earlier this week when he named 32-year old progressive Lina Khan to be chairwoman of the FTC, on the same day that the Senate voted to confirm her as a Commissioner.

Biden made no indication before or during the confirmation proceedings that he planned to immediately promote Khan from Commissioner to Chairwoman, resulting in less Senate scrutiny than she might otherwise have faced.

In 2016, Khan co-authored an academic paper with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the progressive Open Markets Institute, about the use of antitrust to tackle economic inequality.

In a later article, Vaheesan described the FTC — which Khan now chairs — as a “progressive secret weapon.” In the piece, Vaheesan salivates over the amount of power contained within the agency.

“The agency’s expansive mandate, combined with well-established legal doctrine that instructs courts to defer to federal agencies that administer open-ended statutes, gives the agency effective legislative power to regulate and structure nearly every kind of market,” wrote the progressive scholar.

In another article, published this September in the wake of a summer of unprecedented race riots across the United States, Vaheesan urged the use of antitrust law to tackle “structural racism.”

Using the language of Critical Race Theory, Vaheesan argues that the FTC should be used to redistribute wealth and power along racial lines, with antitrust as the weapon of choice.

“Such an antitrust enforcement system, backed by a popular movement, would redistribute power downward from a class of mostly white economic royalists to the multiracial majority in American society,” wrote Vaheesan.

In the same week that Khan was approved by the Senate and fast-tracked to FTC Chairwoman by Biden, the Democrat-controlled house introduced five new bills — with great fanfare — that would radically overhaul U.S. antitrust laws in relation to large technology companies, threatening them with massive financial penalties for non-compliance.

The enforcement mechanisms behind the bills? The antitrust division of the Department of Justice…and Lina Khan’s FTC.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.