The internet was once hailed as a revolutionary force, a great equalizer where the voices of the oppressed could cut through the static of state and corporate propaganda. But as any student of history knows, no tool remains in the hands of the people for long before the ruling class seizes it, fences it off, and slaps a price tag on entry.
Enter Brendan Carr, Trump’s handpicked hatchet man at the FCC, a functionary whose entire career has been spent ensuring that the digital sphere is policed, privatized, and stripped of its last remaining democratic vestiges. Carr is not a man of ideas—he is a bureaucrat of empire, a diligent servant of monopoly capital, a man who has never met a corporate merger he didn’t love or a public good he didn’t want to auction off to the highest bidder.
In other words, he is exactly the kind of man the American state elevates in times of imperial crisis.
The Making of a Corporate Yes-Man
Carr did not claw his way to power on the basis of talent or vision. He was manufactured in the factory of the American elite, processed like a lump of raw material and refined into the kind of creature who moves effortlessly between corporate law firms and government agencies without so much as a moment’s crisis of conscience.
Like so many of his kind, he got his start at Wiley Rein LLP, a Washington law firm that functions as a laundering operation for corporate influence over the federal government. Wiley Rein is the type of place where men like Carr learn how to speak the language of regulation while working diligently to ensure it never applies to their real masters—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecom cartel.
From there, it was a predictable path: a cushy clerkship, a legal advisor role at the FCC, then a rapid ascent under Trump, where he became Ajit Pai’s most eager enforcer in the war against net neutrality. Carr played his part well, delivering the death blow to the idea that the internet should be a public utility rather than a corporate-controlled toll road.
Now, in Trump’s second reign, Carr has been handed the FCC’s top position, and he intends to finish what he started.
The FCC as a Weapon of Capital
The Federal Communications Commission, for those who still hold illusions, was never an agency meant to serve the people. From its inception, it was an instrument for managing and structuring the control of mass communication in a way that ensured the supremacy of capital and the interests of the U.S. state. But even by its own sordid standards, Carr represents something new—the full-blown corporate takeover of the regulator itself.
Carr’s first priority at the FCC is to cement the death of net neutrality. His allies in the telecom monopolies are not content with merely charging higher prices for access—they want to fundamentally alter the structure of the internet, transforming it into a fragmented, pay-to-play system where working-class and independent voices can be throttled, restricted, and erased at will.
And Carr is happy to oblige. Under the guise of fighting “government censorship,” he has taken up the far-right’s favorite rhetorical trick—weaponizing the language of free speech to justify handing total control of digital infrastructure to private corporations. He wants you to believe that the government regulating telecom monopolies is an attack on free speech—but allowing those same monopolies to dictate access to information is somehow a defense of liberty.
This is the kind of Orwellian doublespeak that makes a man useful in Washington.
Elon Musk’s Man in Washington
Carr has spent the last few years grooming himself as a loyal servant of Elon Musk, another of the ruling class’s favorite megalomaniacs. The relationship between the two is telling: Musk provides the infrastructure, and Carr provides the regulatory green light.
At the center of their alliance is Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, which Carr has worked tirelessly to integrate into federal broadband initiatives. Musk presents Starlink as an egalitarian project, bringing internet access to underserved areas—but in reality, it is a private military communications network, already deployed in Ukraine, Gaza, and other theaters of imperial conflict.
Carr is doing exactly what men like him always do: repackaging a corporate-military project as a great leap forward for democracy, while ensuring that its real beneficiaries remain hidden behind a smokescreen of techno-optimism.
This is not about “expanding broadband access.” It is about ensuring that the future of global communication is locked firmly in the hands of U.S. capital and its state enforcers.
The Surveillance State and the Death of Digital Freedom
Let us be clear: Brendan Carr is not just deregulating the internet—he is militarizing it.
Everything about his tenure at the FCC has been designed to facilitate the seamless merger of private telecom, government surveillance, and corporate data mining. His push to expand 5G infrastructure, his alignment with Musk’s Starlink, his hostility toward Chinese telecom firms—these are all part of a larger project:
To ensure that U.S. digital infrastructure remains the uncontested domain of capital, empire, and surveillance.
Carr is part of the same ruling-class apparatus that gave us the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, the Pentagon’s integration with Silicon Valley, and the militarization of every communications platform Americans use daily. He is not an independent actor—he is a technocratic cog in the machine of imperial control.
The Road Ahead: Fighting for Digital Liberation
The consolidation of power under Carr’s FCC will not go unchallenged. The fight against him is not simply about policy; it is a battle for the digital commons, a fight against the forces that seek to turn every public resource into a fortress of private control.
The future of the internet will be decided by struggle. We must:
1. Build independent digital infrastructure – Community broadband networks, decentralized platforms, and encryption-based communication systems are no longer luxuries; they are survival tools.
2. Expose and resist corporate capture – The telecom monopolies that Carr represents must be named, shamed, and fought at every turn. Their profits are extracted from the people, and their power can only be broken through mass action.
3. Align with the global fight against U.S. digital imperialism – Carr’s war on Chinese telecom and his support for U.S. digital dominance are part of a broader imperial strategy to maintain control over global information networks. The fight for digital sovereignty is an international struggle, and it must be waged accordingly.
4. Disrupt the enforcers of technofascism – The FCC under Carr is a hostile force, and it must be treated as such. Whether through legal challenges, mass mobilization, or direct action, the machinery of digital repression must be resisted at every level.
Brendan Carr is not some neutral bureaucrat. He is a soldier of monopoly capital, an enforcer of imperial power, a functionary whose entire career has been dedicated to tightening the noose of corporate control around our collective necks.
History is littered with the bones of men like him—technocrats who believed they could carve up the world for profit without consequence. But history also remembers those who fought back.
The struggle for digital freedom is the struggle for liberation itself. And that struggle is far from over.
Weaponized Information 
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