Trump taps Brendan Carr for communications chair, calls him ‘warrior for free speech’

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – President-elect Donald Trump named Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Brendan Carr as the incoming head of the agency Sunday.

“I am pleased to announce that Commissioner Brendan Carr will be Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) … because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman,” Trump said.

Trump hailed Carr as “a warrior for Free Speech” who “has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy.”

Accepting the nomination, Carr said he was “humbled and honored to serve as Chairman of the FCC.”

“Now we get to work,” Carr continued. He will take over from Democratic FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel.

Carr  — nominated to the FCC first by Trump in 2017 and 2018 and then by President Joe Biden in 2023 — received unanimous Senate confirmation on each occasion, according to his bio on the FCC’s website.

The senior Republican member of the FCC, Carr flayed the Biden-Harris administration in an October Wall Street Journal op-ed for “costly delays” to the administration’s promised delivery of broadband to rural America. “If only we could be unburdened by what has been,” Carr wrote. He also rued the FCC’s revocation of its $885 million award to X owner Elon Musk’s Starlink three years after the company won the award “to offer high-speed internet to more than 640,000 rural homes and businesses.”

In a May 2022 op-ed for the Daily Wire, Carr also slammed potential attempts to prevent Musk’s Oct. 2022 purchase of Twitter —now X — as “motivated by a desire to prevent the free exchange of political views on Twitter” rather than “the neutral application of competition and antitrust laws.”

Carr praised the House for overwhelmingly voting back in March for TikTok to divest from its China-based owner ByteDance or else be banned in the U.S., branding the social media app’s actions “a serious national-security threat” and occurring outside the protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Carr also decried Big Tech’s approach to content moderation and called for “transparency, accountability and user empowerment.”

In a Nov. 13 missive to Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, Carr accused the companies of having “played significant roles” in “an unprecedented surge” in censorship over the past four years.

He called on them to provide the FCC with information about their work with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” — “a for-profit company that operates as part of the broader censorship cartel” that helped to “enforce one-sided narratives” — by Dec. 10.

Congratulating Trump on his election victory, Carr wrote, “When the transition is complete, the FCC will have an important role to play reining in Big Tech, ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest, and unleashing economic growth while advancing our national security interests and supporting law enforcement.”

Soon after accepting Trump’s nomination, Carr vowed to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

“Based,” replied Musk.