MAGA's authoritarian-kleptocrat war on freedom of expression

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) discusses aggressive MAGA efforts to control all media sources and generally poison public discourse: 

The latest maneuver comes from the Federal Trade Commission. Last month, it announced that it would approve the merger of two of the biggest ad agencies in the world only if the parties agree to an unusual condition: The merged company cannot refuse to place ads on websites for political reasons.

The move was a sharp break from its traditional practice. The F.T.C. is usually focused on such concerns as consumer protection and monopoly power; now it’s trying to dictate where businesses advertise their products.

While the move would theoretically affect platforms of any political persuasion, there’s little doubt that it is a thinly veiled attempt to prop up X.

If advertisers adopt this approach, it could expand to mean more money for Mr. Trump’s own media platform, Truth Social, as well as his favorite conservative outlets, and less money for outlets that are adversarial to the administration.

The F.T.C. move is an attempt to tilt the media landscape in favor of the government in ways that are simply un-American. If we want a media that is willing to stand up to government, we need to fight for the right to boycott, not just for ourselves but also for advertisers.

This started with the FTC's June 2025 consent order for the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger. The merger had an unprecedented condition requiring the merged entity to avoid refusing ad placements "based on political or ideological viewpoints." The $13.5 billion merger created the world's largest advertising agency. But the merger came with restrictions that legal experts describe as "blatantly inconsistent with the First Amendment right of advertisers not to associate their brands with content or viewpoints that they know consumers find objectionable."

The consent order specifically prohibited the merged company from "entering into or maintaining any agreement or practice that would steer advertising dollars away from publishers based on their political or ideological viewpoints." This was a dramatic expansion of FTC MAGA power into editorial and commercial speech decisions. Previously, those decisions were protected forms of free speech expression.

These blatantly authoritarian MAGA actions are a direct attack no both media independence and democratic discourse. By weaponizing federal agencies to protect favored outlets from market forces, MAGA elites create what amounts to a state-subsidized conservative media ecosystem that is impervious to organized backlash by citizens and companies. MAGA elites want to force companies to advertise with crackpot and poison sources like Musk's X and djt's cynically named Truth Social (actually, lies antisocial).

MAGA's authoritarian transformation of antitrust enforcement from protecting competition to protecting specific political viewpoints is a deadly anti-democracy precedent. It fundamentally alters the relationship between government, media, and commercial speech in American democracy with a power shift from the public interest to the dictator-kleptocrat djt.