"The censorship cartel must be dismantled," Brendan Carr declared two days before President-elect Donald Trump picked him to chair the Federal Communications Commission. Trump described Carr as "a warrior for Free Speech."

Carr's plans for "reining in Big Tech" understandably appeal to Trump, who has long complained that the leading social media platforms are biased against him. But Carr's agenda is blatantly inconsistent with conservative principles, including limited government, free markets, freedom of speech, and opposition to lawless regulation.

Carr, a Republican telecommunications lawyer who has served as an FCC commissioner since Trump appointed him during his first term in August 2017, says "the censorship cartel" includes businesses such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. It also supposedly includes NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of news and information sources.

As Carr tells it, these businesses have conspired to silence "core political, religious, and scientific speech" by "defund(ing), demonetiz(ing), and otherwise put(ting) out of business news outlets and........

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