On March 11, 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed Abigail (Gail) Slater as Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Slater received support from the majority of Democrats, but Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was the only Republican to oppose her. It is not a coincidence that Slater was supported by so many Democrats and opposed by the Senate’s leading champion of free markets. New AAG Slater, who previously was chief economic advisor to then-Senator JD Vance, is, like her old boss, a “Khanservative.” A Khanservative is a conservative who believes the right must embrace the aggressive approach to antitrust favored by former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan.
At her confirmation hearing, Slater said she would continue the Biden Administration’s policies in areas such as using antitrust procedures to “protect” workers, limiting “dominant” firms' acquisitions of newer, smaller competitors, and “the critical need to prevent the monopolization of digital markets.” Like her fellow Khanservative FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, AAG Slater supports retaining the revised 2023 merger guidelines. These guidelines give antitrust enforcers authority to challenge almost any merger, acquisition, or other transaction that will increase a business’s market share—even if it will not give the business anything close to market dominance.
AAG Slater and FTC Chair Ferguson’s support for the new guidelines is a disappointment to those who hoped the Trump antitrust team would restore the consumer welfare standard to the center of antitrust policy. As the name suggests, the consumer welfare standard judges a business’s action by how it affects consumers—which is the way businesses obtain success in the free market. Under Khan and Slater’s predecessor, Jonathan Kanter, the consumer welfare standard was replaced with a holistic approach that widens the focus of antitrust. This “holistic” approach can justify using antitrust tools to further progressive goals, like strengthening unions. It can also be used to further conservative goals, like stopping corporations from implementing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). What it cannot do is help businesses create new products, increase employment, and grow the economy.
It is not surprising that progressives would embrace the “holistic” approach to antitrust even though doing so requires disregarding the lessons of history regarding government interference in the marketplace. What is surprising is that a rising group of conservatives shares the left’s disdain for the lessons of economic history. Khanservatism is an outgrowth of the “post-liberal right's” distain for free-market economics, and support for a new conservatism that seeks to use big government to crush the left and impose conservative values on the country.
The post-liberal right sees big tech companies and other “woke” corporations as posing a threat to liberty and traditional values as big government. During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Slater expressed sympathy with that point of view when she commented, “While nobody wants tyranny.gov—tyranny.com is not much better.” The fundamental problem with this statement is that the “tyrants” of tech have no power to force anyone to use their services. In fact, many conservatives are leaving big tech’s social media platforms for smaller and newer platforms. Some of these sites were created to appeal to those dissatisfied with big tech’s content moderation policies.
If big companies like Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) were so powerful, they would not be changing their offerings to better compete with TikTok. Even after making these changes— it still took an act of Congress to give American tech companies the ability to to compete with TikTok. As for the threat of “woke” capitalism—ask Bud Light, Target, and even Disney about how helpless consumers are when it comes to punishing companies that push social or political agendas their customers find insulting to their values.
The post-liberal right ignores the fact they many of the most egregious acts of big tech censorship were done in response to pressure from the Biden Administration. Focusing on how big government is behind big tech censorship leads to the conclusion that the solution is not Khanservatism—but the separation of tech and state. If FTC Chair Ferguson and AAG Gail Slater are unwilling to abandon Khanservatism, then President Trump should ask his friend Elon Musk to talk to them.
