The neoliberal Democrat Party could have won if they had put someone like Lina Kahn in charge of the FTC

Matt Stoller has reached levels of self-parody beyond the reach of any telescope currently available to the world’s leading astronomers:

The Trump-Vance administration is firing Lina Khan!!! Her team is packing their bags….

I don’t understand the impulse to relentlessly purity-test Democrats while simultaneously acting hyper-credulous about every gesture of moderation from a Republican. https://t.co/qzTjEZ6UPe— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 9, 2024

Hey Matt, do you support the state having access to women’s private medical records? https://t.co/Ur5uB0TmWY pic.twitter.com/rJCfvDZjQP— Dhaaruni ✨✨✨ (@dhaaruni) November 9, 2024

Is there any degenerate far-right Republican misogynist that Stoller wouldn’t praise as the new FDR while relentlessly attacking the most left-populist Democratic administration in decades? All signs point to “no.”

I once again observe that for some reason Wall Street and Silicon Valley think that “who is in charge of the FTC” is of more material importance than “something JD Vance once sad on a podcast to appeal to morons who will vote for Ryanomics if you make a few vague and empty rhetorical gestures toward economic populism”:

“Investors are celebrating,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Capital in Chicago. He was among those buying shares of smaller companies, on the bet that Trump’s policies will rev up the economy.

The enthusiasm is especially heated in a few areas, investors and bankers said. Banks and other financial companies climbed, with the KBW Bank Index rising 11%. Investors expect regulatory scrutiny will ease in a Trump administration.

Some also expect more dealmaking, potentially among smaller and midsize banks. The expected departure of Lina Khan, who leads the Federal Trade Commission and has been a thorn in the side of executives hoping to work out tech acquisitions, was cheered by investors and bankers.

“A lot of these mergers have been thwarted by the current administration,” the activist investor Carl Icahn said in an interview late Tuesday. Given a Trump victory, he said, “That’s going to change.” 

It will be funny to see Stoller cite Patrick Deneen blog posts to demonstrate that Republicans are the working man’s party now while the Trump administration quickly approves every single merger to come down the pike (with the exception of those involving media organizations that refuse to kowtow to Trump.)

Anyway, the key move for bullshit artists like this is the use of the word “surrogate.” You see, by using this word you can attribute anything ever said by anyone vaguely associated with a public official to them. This is the same strategy that Bari Weiss is currently using to claim that Kamala Harris’s campaign was based around police abolitionism and making it a capital offense not to use the term “Latinx.” Somebody must have said it sometime!