{"id":1109,"date":"2026-07-28T14:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=1109"},"modified":"2026-07-28T14:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:08:08","slug":"trumps-antitrust-pick-adam-candeub-fought-big-tech-censorship-before-it-was-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=1109","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Antitrust Pick Adam Candeub Fought Big Tech Censorship Before It Was Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

President Donald Trump nominated Adam Candeub last week to serve as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department\u2019s Antitrust Division. This is welcome news. Candeub has a rare combination of sterling credentials plus MAGA bona fides that stretch back to 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The Antitrust Division has been without a Senate-confirmed chief for months. It is about to get one who actually knows what the last decade did to American speech.<\/p>\n

Candeub is eminently qualified. A graduate of Yale and Penn, he\u2019s written dozens of scholarly\u00a0articles that have been twice cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. As even his liberal critics note, his work has reshaped conservative views on tech. He\u2019s the current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, former acting head of the National Telecommunications and Information Authority, and a Jones Day alum. Normally, these are the kinds of credentials that would ensure a speedy, uncontroversial nomination. That won\u2019t happen this time, because Candeub is a 2016 MAGA OG \u2014 and that makes people on the hill nervous.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In October 2016, when endorsing Donald Trump was a career-ending move in legal academia, Candeub was one of the handful of law professors in the country willing to publicly back the future president. He also took on tech censorship before it was a popular fundraising line, fighting some of the earliest censorship cases against tech platforms including Taylor v. Twitter <\/em>in 2018 and Murphy v. Twitter <\/em>the following year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a law professor and a telecommunications expert, it would have been far easier to take advantage of the hundreds of millions of federal dollars that had, at that time, begun flowing to the burgeoning field of \u201cdisinformation studies.\u201d Candeub did the opposite.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At NTIA under the first Trump administration, he , pressing the argument that Section 230\u2019s liability shield was never meant to immunize the platforms\u2019 editorial suppression of American citizens. He represented then-Sen. JD Vance in Ohio\u2019s lawsuit arguing that Google should be treated as a common carrier. And he represented the America First Policy Institute in the NetChoice litigation, defending state laws written to stop the platforms from throwing citizens out of the modern public square.<\/p>\n

Libertarian critics say this track record makes Candeub an enemy of tech, along the lines of Biden\u2019s Lina Khan. This is entirely inaccurate; Candeub is an enemy of online political censorship. That\u2019s different from flailing around an antitrust hammer just for the sake of it, as Khan was wont to do. Candeub has been explicit that his criticism of Big Tech has been tightly aimed at their past censorship practices, not about the size of firms as such.<\/p>\n

When Congress was pushing sweeping populist antitrust bills, Candeub , warning that they would load costs onto American businesses without doing anything to address the censorship problem that motivated conservatives in the first place. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he stands \u201con the side of economic freedom and business enterprise,\u201d and that his concern is with \u201cthe effects of Big Tech on fundamental American institutions such as free speech and the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He has been just as candid about the platforms themselves, that they have been \u201cincredibly innovative\u201d and that there is \u201clittle to no evidence\u201d they have caused \u201ctraditional consumer harm in the form of higher prices [or] reduced output.\u201d He has pointed to Europe as the cautionary tale, noting in 2023 that a continent with a far more aggressive regulatory posture could not claim a single one of the world\u2019s 10 largest tech companies while the United States claimed eight. A nominee who says that in writing is not coming to Washington to break American firms for sport.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Candeub authored the Federal Trade Commission chapter of , which the left will treat as a scandal and which is in fact the most useful document for understanding how he thinks. The FTC shares antitrust authority with Justice, so it is worth quoting what he actually proposed rather than what the press release will say he proposed.<\/p>\n

He called for investigating \u201cESG practices as a cover for anticompetitive activity.\u201d (ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, a series of principles often used to evaluate corporations by left-leaning metrics.) His reasoning is not culture-war boilerplate, it is corporate law. Managers of publicly traded companies who use shareholder assets to earn praise from left-leaning groups, in his words, \u201cappropriate corporate wealth for their own benefit.\u201d Shareholders pay for the executive\u2019s social standing. That is a legal question, not a vibe.<\/p>\n

Under the heading \u201cCancel Culture, Collusion, and Commerce,\u201d he argued that \u201cconcentration of industries, particularly in pharmaceuticals, health care, and the internet, encourages government collusion that undermines democratic institutions.\u201d As he noted, that collusion can be explicit or implicit, ranging from government involvement in Big Tech censorship to the creation of massive regulatory burdens that keep smaller competitors from ever entering the market. Anyone who read Missouri and Louisiana\u2019s litigation over pandemic-era jawboning, or who watched the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, understands that this is a description of events rather than a theory.<\/p>\n

Michigan State\u2019s student paper ran a records-request story whose most damning revelations were that Candeub had, in private emails, described the 2020 election as \u201ccrooked\u201d and the Georgia indictment of Trump as \u201cbullsh-t.\u201d That was the scandal. A law professor held a few widely shared opinions and expressed them in emails to colleagues.<\/p>\n

Senators will recycle that material because they have nothing better. What they will not want to litigate is the substance, because the substance is a nominee with two Supreme Court citations, a decade of published scholarship, actual courtroom experience in the defining speech cases of the era, and an on-the-record refusal to sign up for the anti-business populism that would have given them their best line of attack.<\/p>\n

The Senate should confirm him quickly. The Antitrust Division has spent enough time without a leader, and the coalition between the platforms and the permanent government has not been waiting around for one.<\/p>\n

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Adam Candeub understood the alliance between Big Tech and the administrative state long before most Republicans did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1092],"tags":[3338,3339,1295,357,547,2483,2338,365,551,3340,3341],"class_list":["post-1109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-censorship","tag-adam-candeub","tag-antitrust","tag-big-tech","tag-censorship","tag-doj","tag-federal-communications-commission","tag-federal-trade-commission","tag-free-speech","tag-justice-department","tag-online-speech","tag-project-2025"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump’s Antitrust Pick Adam Candeub Fought Big Tech Censorship Before It Was Cool - Property Transition Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=1109\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump’s Antitrust Pick Adam Candeub Fought Big Tech Censorship Before It Was Cool - 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