Welcome to Paradoxically Speaking
A New Project with Timeless Conservative Principles
This Substack is a place for frank talk about the abandonment of timeless conservative principles by the so-called “new right” – and what we can do to restore the heart and soul of a conservative movement that once yearned to make America the shining city on a hill.
First, though, we should acknowledge good news that is worthy of celebration. We are grateful that:
The open border that allowed 14 million anonymous people from around the planet to stream into our country has been sealed shut. Order has been restored, fundamental to our survival as a nation.
America’s energy leadership is now treated as a matter of national pride and economic health instead of a moral failing to be discouraged and ultimately destroyed.
The strange fetishes of oppressive “woke” ideology and corporate and university speech codes are getting long-needed and well-deserved pushback.
The secret censorship programs of the last administration have been exposed and ended.
That is all to the good. But with every step forward, the new right then takes us two steps backward – the paradox of so-called conservatives advancing progressive policies and cementing long-sought ambitions of the socialist left.
Uncle Sam Takes a Seat on the Board of Directors: The second Trump Administration, like the first one, is stripping back regulations and freeing Americans to work, save, invest, and profit.
At the same time, this administration is mixing public monies with private investment, extracting shared profits, and crafting bespoke regulations to guide the business strategies of corporations. Washington is essentially acting as a corporate director, laying the foundations for state capitalism.
Winners and Losers Chosen by Politics: Industrial policy in some critical sectors – such as rare earth minerals and advanced semiconductors – can be justified as a response to China’s predatory mercantilism and geopolitical hostility.
But the politics of industrial policy are spreading, encouraging cronyism and special pleading. For example, the difference between industries that must pay tariffs and those that do not are often due to which ones have lobbyists best positioned for the politics of the moment.
Antitrust Policy that Forgets the Consumer: For almost half-a-century, antitrust policy has been guided by the Consumer Welfare Standard, which takes the politics out of regulatory enforcement by judging mergers and acquisitions by their impacts on price, choice, and innovation for consumers.
Inexplicably, President Trump’s antitrust regulators failed to restore the Consumer Welfare Standard by adopting and extending the guidelines of the ultra-progressive antitrust regime of President Biden and his Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. The result is a hybrid “America First” antitrust policy that sounds conservative but embraces the progressive actions of the Biden-Khan era.
Free Speech for Me But Not For Thee: The Trump Administration ended the State Department program that funded efforts to scare advertisers away from conservative news outlets, and an FBI “jawboning” program that pressured social media companies to secretly deplatform conservative speech.
Yet this same administration uses executive orders to target firms and individuals for criminal investigation for political speech. The Federal Communications Commission abuses its regulatory authority and revives long-dormant doctrines from the broadcast era to punish news organizations for their editorial decisions and to strongarm networks into firing talk-show hosts.
We could go on – and in the months ahead, we will. But for now we hope this short survey of the current landscape shows just how far we’ve come from the limited government and neutral regulation of the conservative past. Instead, what we have is a system that treats laws and norms as much of the rest of the world does – as the means to bend people, businesses, and industries toward political fealty.
Centuries of conservative tradition teaches us that this can only end in tears.
Turnabout Is Not Fair Play: It Is Ideological Suicide
Some in the new right buy into the idea of turnabout is fair play. They understandably want payback. Liberals often twisted the law – from censorship to IRS audits – to cow conservative speech. Now the new right wants to use even stronger means, this time wielded without embarrassment in very public ways, against our former persecutors.
This is not only unprincipled. It is ideological suicide.
The new right suffers from the same delusion that the Biden progressives did – that they can hold onto power permanently. When the next progressive president takes office – and it will happen sooner or later (recent events suggest sooner) – the new right will have created the means for its own destruction and the reversal of every conservative achievement since Reagan.
That is why we warn against the threat of “conservative socialism.”
About Us
Our site is not dedicated to cultivating detestation for President Trump or to hype the outrage of the day. We refuse, like some former conservatives who are critics of Donald Trump, to let this moment propel us leftward, as have some at The Bulwark. We choose to take a stand for a return to first principles, and we welcome fellow conservatives and others who want to discuss and debate these propositions in this space.
The New Paradox and Antitrust
We’re kicking off our effort with a book, The New Paradox: Antitrust and the Threat of Conservative Socialism, by Robert H. Bork Jr. and Mark W. Davis, to explore how one of the major ways the new right is undermining the laws and norms that make capitalism possible. Available now on Amazon.
We are currently collecting commentary from leading voices on the right – economists, legal experts in regulation and the Constitution, popular influencers and editorialists, and movement conservatives.
Sample a free chapter from our book below:
Why Do Khanservatives Enable Their Enemies?
“I would hope that whoever is the next FTC chair would continue many of the cases that Chair Khan has brought against predatory businesses.”
—Former Rep. and Khanservative Matt Gaetz
A passionate hatred for the Big Tech social media companies is driving the re-emergence of progressive antitrust and Khanservatism alike. Today, liberals and conservatives alike see a pattern similar to the big-trust era, only with new names – Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates. While progressive antitrust aims at virtually all U.S. businesses, the emotional force behind it is animus against billionaires. For separate reasons, the right and the left both hate Big Tech.
The left is driven mad by aerial drone photos that show Big Tech’s founders’ latest acquisitions and building projects. A palatial Hawaiian estate. A well-appointed bunker to survive the apocalypse. A luxury yacht in the Mediterranean. A private spaceship. Is the comparison to the so-called “robber barons” of the past appropriate? Are these unusually large companies the Standard Oils and Central Pacifics of our day?
There is no denying that Big Tech is unusually prominent. The top eight U.S. tech companies combined have a market cap of about $20 trillion, almost 70 percent of the United States’ annual gross domestic product. Like the tycoons who inspired Sen. John Sherman to draft and pass his eponymous law, this concentration of wealth is inspiring a new generation of Republicans, independents, and Democrats to buy into a renewed wave of strong antitrust enforcement. But the size of these companies is not due to rigging markets, but to the tech phenomenon known as “network effects.” To put it simply, everyone uses Google because everyone uses Google. The participation of billions of people who make 8.5 billion searches a day sharpens Google’s ability to deliver. If you break up Google, something of a similar size would take its place. No one wants to be forced to use five different search engines.
Amazon, Apple, or Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are also hard fits as the 21st-century versions of Standard Oil. The trusts of old used predatory techniques to capture markets and often raise prices for – as Sen. Sherman put it – the necessaries of life. The social media platforms of today are offered to consumers for free, monetizing their data to sell to advertisers who want to show ads for island vacations, coffee makers, and organic dog food in their social media feeds. Consumers are thus free to access as many endless funny cat videos as they want. This bears no comparison to trusts that exercised restrictive control over commodities such as oil, sugar, or rail service. They are also not as eternal as you might think. AOL, Yahoo, and Myspace once seemed impregnable, if not immortal; today, so do Nvidia, OpenAI, and Palantir.
The animus on the right is driven by something entirely else. Most conservatives believe, with good reason, that Big Tech’s social media platforms de-posted and sometimes de-platformed conservative voices and ideas. While conservative content flourishes on Facebook feeds and in Amazon book sales, there have been high-profile instances of conservatives being exiled by major social media companies, for example, a temporary effort by Facebook to block the conservative online platform PragerU. Those who advanced the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, or that school closures were harmful, were deposed. This censorship continued for some time after the FBI’s later determination that a lab leak was the likeliest source of Covid, and a wide body of research indicates that the school lockdowns were unnecessary in length and harmful to children. Thoughtful people like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who criticized the readiness of the medical establishment to respond to a child’s gender confusion with life-altering treatments, were shut out. Her ideas have been validated to the extent that they are now similar to the policies of Britain’s Labor government. Yet Silicon Valley demonized Rowling’s views as too evil or misinformed to be allowed access to the nation’s digital town squares, setting them apart from the permissible posts of Iran’s mullahs and the digital publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Add to these conservative complaints of Silicon Valley’s promotion of inflexible DEI ideology that became a fetish of “woke” C-suites in corporations ranging from BlackRock to Disney, and you have all the elements of a building rage against big business from the right. As many conservatives reasoned, what better way to put these woke tycoons in their place than by using antitrust to break their dominance? There are even deeper cultural and social reasons behind the enthusiasm many on the right have for supporting progressive antitrust. This is best seen in the life and thought of another plain-spoken man elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio, who carries Sherman’s concern about economic concentration into the 21st century – Vice President J.D. Vance.
Vance earned a law degree from Yale and a fortune as a venture capitalist in San Francisco. But those biographical details are deceiving. Vance’s character was formed in his early life as a child raised in a broken home in Middletown, Ohio, in a family of former Kentuckians plagued by substance abuse. He and his sister were raised by their grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” After graduating from high school, Vance served with distinction in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq.
Vance became famous for recounting his early life in Hillbilly Elegy, a haunting memoir that became a national bestseller. It became, over time, a blue stater’s guide to MAGA America, chronicling the stoicism, chivalric ideals, and patriotism of people from Appalachia, side by side with their despair and petty vices. The strongest theme in his book is the bewilderment of hard-working men and women who watched as their jobs vanished and their incomes diminished, pushing them from the lower middle class into poverty and dependency. If they were able to find jobs, they saw their real wages and benefits shrink. As Vance grew up, the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations lowered tariffs and signed free trade agreements around the world. These agreements coincided with the decline of low-value manufacturing, though much of the job loss appears to have been due to automation, not to foreign competition. This is unlikely to be true of trade with China. In 2000, Congress in 2000 passed a bill granting Permanent Normal Trade Relations to the People’s Republic of China. This gave U.S. businesses the confidence to go all-in on exporting jobs and importing cheap goods from China.
Cheap Chinese goods certainly helped consumers but undeniably harmed many U.S. workers. Two economists – Justin R. Pierce, serving the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and Peter K. Schott of the Yale School of Management – found that granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relation status caused Chinese exports to the United States to balloon by one-third. Studies showed the obvious result: rising joblessness, reduced income, and greater reliance on social welfare programs in U.S. regions most heavily impacted by Chinese imports, particularly in parts of the United States where Americans were still making things. Pierce and Schott took this analysis one step further. They examined CDC data to map counties with high rates of “deaths of despair,” early deaths due to suicide, drug overdose, and diseases of the liver. When a map of these counties is overlaid on a map of the counties hardest hit by Chinese substitution of U.S. manufacturing, the match is almost perfect.
Such revelations are not lost on J.D. Vance and other new skeptics of 21st-century corporations and their agendas. Vance describes how, after the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, he met with billionaires in Sun Valley, Idaho. A self-made venture capital millionaire and bestselling author, Vance seemed to fit right in with that crowd. “Everybody loved me back then,” he said in an interview with The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. “But I was seated next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in the world at dinner. He was almost a caricature of a business executive, complaining about how he was forced to pay his workers higher wages.” The CEO complained about then-President Trump’s border closure and the higher wages it created. He pivoted to Vance: “Well, you understand this as well as anybody. These people just need to get off their asses, come to work, and do their job. And now, because we can’t hire immigrants, or as many immigrants, we’ve got to hire these people at higher wages.”
Vance told Douthat: “I literally grew up in a family where my grandmother was negotiating with the Meals on Wheels person to give her more food so that both of us could have something to eat.” No wonder he found himself in a state of unreality to find himself at this “Sun Valley billionaires boot camp.” Sen. Vance said: “The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train, or I’m going to wake up in ten years and really hate everything that I’ve become. And so I decided to get off that train, and I felt like the only way that I could do that was, in some ways, alienating and offending people who liked my book.”
For everyone Vance offended, he made more new friends and admirers. As a result, Vance climbed into the U.S. Senate by riding a populist, anti-corporate wave sweeping both parties. Vance says his journey has made him more open to the politics of the “Bernie Bros.” But it put him out of sync with Republican “center-right conservatives” and “center-left” liberals, who are doing very well, but “have an incredible blind spot about how much of their success is built on a system that is not serving people who they should be serving.”
Vice President Vance is among the most thoughtful of Republican leaders – former Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, now Secretary of State, is another – who are examining how capitalism works and doesn’t work for Americans today. They are also coming to embrace the re-emergence of activist antitrust as an antidote to what they see as business practices that are crushing their constituents. Some Republicans are less thoughtful. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has gone to the left of Lina Khan. Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, recently retired, formed a strange bedfellows alliance with ultra-progressive Democrat David Cicilline, who had chaired the House antitrust subcommittee. Together, they advanced bills through the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that would have forcibly changed the core business operations of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta in online markets, effectively turning their operations over to political control from Washington. That is not a surprising position for a progressive like Cicilline, but it was a strange quest for Buck, a self-described conservative from Colorado.
Even Vance, as a senator, edged toward Khan. He said that far from being “engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing,” as some Republicans portray her, Chair Khan is one of the few Biden Administration appointees who is doing a pretty good job.”
Lina Khan’s cultivation of Khanservatives is the very essence of cognitive dissonance. When Lina Khan testified before the House Judiciary Committee, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida made sure photographers captured their grip and grin. He later interviewed Lina Khan on Newsmax. When Jonathan Kanter, the progressive antitrust chief of the Justice Department, testified on the Hill, Gaetz said, “I think you’re doing a good job, and that is a painful admission for me to have to make about anyone who works at the Department of Justice.”
To be a man or woman of the right once meant a belief in free markets, with regulation and government control reduced to a minimum. Republicans followed President Reagan in welcoming trade agreements with other countries, provided they were based on the president’s standard of “fair trade.” This is not true for today’s new right. Jonah Goldberg, in a recent take on the self-styled New Right Man, wrote that he is someone who “presupposes that everyone who likes capitalism and limited government is somehow to his left – which makes it fine to call them cowards and eunuchs … The irony here is that less than a generation ago, the idea that you could adopt liberal (i.e., statist) means for conservative ends was precisely the sort of idea that aroused so much condemnation of ‘big government’ and ‘compassionate’ conservatism from the right.”
The what’s-new-is-old-is-new again progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt is seeping back into the Republican mainstream. The exemplar of this is, once again, Sen. Josh Hawley, who conspicuously drapes himself in the mantle of TR. Not to be bound by old conventions like limited government, Hawley proposes massive increases in funding and the expansion of the FTC’s powers, while outlawing all large mergers and acquisitions, something that even Khan herself never publicly contemplated.
No less a conservative than Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has joined with Sen. Elizabeth Warren to create a federal commission to regulate social media. Graham would institute a new agency and regulator that would purportedly give Americans control over their personal data.[iii] While giving Mark Zuckerberg a heavy-handed regulator would give some conservatives emotional satisfaction, it comes at the cost of supercharging the government’s control of the market, the internet, and speech itself.
Lindsay Graham has long been one of the most grounded, if contrarian, voices for limited government on the Hill. It is a mark, perhaps, of how Silicon Valley’s social media censorship and other nettles and beestings deranged Republicans like Graham, driving a limited government, anti-woke leader in the Senate to support a bill that would make the imposition of woke content by big government an inevitability. Somehow, we as conservatives have forgotten the timeless principles of the free market, limited government, not to mention the wisdom of the Bill of Rights. As Jonah Goldberg notes, these old Republican principles “were, axiomatically, timelessly correct and therefore timelessly worth fighting for.” For the New Right, though, “it’s cowardly to keep fighting for them when the new priority is to fight for power as its own reward. Crushing your enemies – not persuading them – is another booby prize.”
Thus, a regressing, intellectual spiral has twisted principled conservatives from mounting an intelligent and constructive critique of how to ensure that changes in trade and technology support American workers and families, into becoming witless tools of progressivism. It gives us ridiculous spectacles like Sen. Hawley imitating Teddy Roosevelt and his “warrior republicanism,” fist-bumping his way up the San Juan Hill of antitrust while hawking his book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. It is a strange feature of our times that the same New Right Men who purport to be paragons of masculinity are so often the handmaidens of the Left.
There is no need for conservatives to reinvent themselves. The movement is better off returning to first principles – to defend the free market as the best way to promote competition and rising levels of prosperity. We must remind ourselves of the lessons of the previous century, especially the 1970s, that purported market failures, from oil shocks to inflation, were almost always the result of bad government policy. And we must stand firm against any official efforts to regulate speech in the name of curbing “disinformation.”
A free market in ideas is the lifeblood of a free market and a free society. As we will explore in more detail later, there are better, targeted ways to address internet content curation and censorship. Concerning the latter, the Trump Administration showed the way by rooting out and defunding parts of the federal government, such as the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. This center funded an international NGO that secretly advised advertisers to avoid supporting disinformation from outlets such as Reason magazine. The administration also closed the secret “jawboning” in which 80 agents of the FBI instructed Facebook and other social media platforms to remove unorthodox posts and deplatform conservative speakers. Another might be attaching a “user’s bill of rights” to Section 230, the law that grants social media companies liability protection for the contents of third-party posts.
But the Khanservative approach, of getting even with Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s censorship by enacting sweeping antitrust, is like detonating the policy equivalent of an atom bomb next to the CEO’s house. Sure, conservatives angry about censorship would have the emotional satisfaction of punishing their Silicon Valley bête noir. But much else would be destroyed in the process. In fact, everything else.
In the pages ahead, this book makes the case that otherwise thoughtful people are letting their anger at irritations, excesses, and hypocrisies in business – whether about social media censorship, or about billionaires and their yachts, or about hospitality CEOs who want unchecked immigration to bring down wages – to lead them to endorse an antitrust agenda that is designed to transform the U.S. economy into a socialist regime and the American constitutional order into something that would be unrecognizable to the Founders.
And by doing so, many conservatives are letting themselves be lured into welcoming socialism – even though its most prominent advocates proudly ride atop, not within, the Trojan Horse of progressive antitrust.
