Brendan Carr, the FCC, and the Banality of Evil

If you were going to single out the most dangerous functionary in President Trump’s little circle of Hell, you’d have plenty of candidates from which to choose. But don’t sleep on Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. His legacy of awfulness may prove more durable. His rhetoric is all about ensuring a “diversity of viewpoints.” He holds himself out as an honest broker in search of a more balanced media. Which would be fine, except that Chairman Carr isn’t really interested in anything resembling balance or a free market for news; he’s interested in smashing the whole thing to pieces and letting a more docile and expedient group of executives pick through the shards. The only core freedom that energizes Chairman Carr is the freedom to please his boss. And in this way, Chairman Carr also embodies something common to authoritarian regimes everywhere: It’s never the grand theorists or soaring orators who make government repression a daily reality. It’s the mild bureaucrats who execute the agenda, whose unexamined loyalty and neediness blind them to consequence, who make statism seem pedestrian. When all the independent thinkers have made their dash for the exits, it’s the Brendan Carrs of the world, cosplayers in the costume of extremism, who stay at their posts and file their reports, eyeing the next promotion.