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The last 10 days or so have contained a flurry of stories regarding Donald Trump’s picks for staffing his administration. He hit the floor running, making some outstanding picks for various cabinet positions. And then there’s Matt Gaetz, an understandable disruption but, in my opinion, a terrible pick who I predict won’t even make it to the hearings. Fortunately, Trump got back on track with his choices for key roles at the FCC, Energy, and Interior.
As much as we have written about the Left’s assault on free speech in recent years, it stands to reason that Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) matters a great deal. In fact, Trump’s statement specifically praised Brendan Carr as a “warrior for Free Speech” who “has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms.”
Carr got right to the point, posting on the sole Big Tech bastion of free speech called X, “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” Before officially being nominated, Carr wrote a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai rebuking them for viewpoint censorship. “Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship,” he wrote. “Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct.”
Carr is no novice, having worked at the FCC since 2012. There’s also a factor that will undoubtedly consume most of the Democrats’ attention and fury: his role in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Indeed, that’s in the first sentence of NBC News’s story: Carr “wrote a chapter on the regulatory agency in the conservative Project 2025 playbook.”
In that chapter, he argued that the FCC should prioritize “reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.” He also advocated banning TikTok in the U.S. if the company refused to detach from its ChiCom overlords.
To a tyrannical leftist, that’s stunningly scary stuff.
The systemic redlining of free speech is arguably the greatest threat to Liberty posed by the Left today. Carr’s role at the FCC will be not just to hold the line against that assault but to get back on offense and regain ground.
Turning to the economy, and specifically the energy sector, Trump made two other solid picks in the form of North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum for the Interior Department and Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Both signal Trump’s intention to follow through on his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.”
Indeed, Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based oilfield services company. He’s an outspoken critic of the Left’s climate cult, too. “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” he said last year. He’s a big proponent of fracking, an issue that probably cost Kamala Harris Pennsylvania. In announcing the nomination, Trump called Wright “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence.”
The Leftmedia love to point out, as Reuters did, that “U.S. oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under [Joe] Biden.” That’s meant to make you think Biden deserves credit for that boom instead of the reality that his inflationary bomb that drove gas prices to a record $5.02 per gallon in 2022 created an incentive. Reuters even says in the next paragraph, “Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.”
There are two other inconvenient truths. First, the U.S. reached energy independence during Trump’s first term. Second, one of Wright’s chief tasks will be replenishing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which Biden depleted to help his poll numbers.
As for Burgum, the Interior Department manages oil and gas drilling leases on public lands. Roll Call notes, “North Dakota is home to the oil and natural gas rich Bakken Formation and produces the third most crude oil of U.S. states, much of which is obtained through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.”
Leftists decry both Wright and Burgum as tools of Big Oil bent on destroying the planet for profit. The truth is that, unlike the Biden administration, which featured a long roster of players with no business experience who hampered businesses at every turn, Wright and Burgum both earned their fortunes succeeding in the free market. They know how to unleash American energy to make all of us more prosperous, and it won’t come at the cost of environmental destruction.
Free speech and energy independence, here we come.
Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.
