An American Colosseum
How Social Media Could Remake the Courts in Hollywood’s Image
Dear Reader,
Move over Hollywood, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rebrand administrative adjudication as the nation’s primary engine of satirical content creation. In late January, the President asked the Supreme Court to legitimize Truth Social, a for-profit company the President owns, as a lawful administrative tribunal if he wants it to be. Specifically, he claimed that making a post on Truth Social and giving Lisa Cook a chance to respond on Truth Social was notice and an opportunity to be heard.
Notice and an opportunity to be heard is the magic language federal courts use to signify that the Due Process Clause is satisfied. The Due Process Clause requires that due process must be provided before a person’s life, liberty, or property can be taken from them by the government. Some legal professionals characterized the request of the President to use Truth Social as a way to provide due process as an avoidance of more administrative process, but this characterization is constitutionally backwards.
If the President is allowed to define what process is due, he could expand upon the process through social media and use it to facilitate a panoply of star chambers in America, without congressional approval. For example, his administration has already discussed producing a reality TV game show where immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship. If the Court allowed the President to royally dispense with statutory requirements of due process, as he is requesting, Trump’s use of Truth Social as a method for providing due process may be a total overhaul of the administrative state.
About a month after arguing that Truth Social is a legit administrative tribunal if the President wants it to be, the President personally scuttled Netflix’s $82.7 billion bid and backed Paramount’s hostile takeover in a Truth Social post that Netflix would have to fire former Obama/Biden official Susan Rice if it wanted the federal government’s approval. If the Court allows Truth Social posts as legitimate due process, the President’s post about firing Susan Rice could be all the due process the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) is required to give before legally penalizing Netflix. According to the chapter of Project 2025 written by FCC Chairperson Brenden Carr, Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act allows him to treat online service providers as if they were common carriers.
Translation: Carr thinks he can legally go after Netflix (and YouTube, and Hulu, and Google, and Facebook, etc.) for facilitating anti-Trump speech. But even if Carr did not pursue Netflix, the President has the Federal Trade Commission, the Security and Exchange Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice at his fingertips. Despite a panoply of options the President might use, Carr’s public threat of revoking ABC’s broadcast license for airing a broadcast of Jimmy Kimmel Live! that criticized the late Charlie Kirk was thought to be the chief threat against free speech in the United States.
The FCC’s threat of revoking licenses to scare media companies into compliance with the federal government is exactly the type that King Charles II used to put himself above the law in Thomas v. Sorrell. The Sorrell decision repeated the very errors that caused the English Civil War by violating the Case of Monopolies that caused the royal oppressions of the star chamber that led to the trial and beheading of King Charles I, and nevertheless it was shockingly extended by King James II in Godden v. Hales. As Godden alone seemed to receive criticism by the royalists of England, Sorrell was sometimes cited in American Courts as legitimate precedent despite doing practically the same thing as Godden: placing the king above the law.
Trump loyalists may have similar dividing lines as the English royalists did over Sorrell and Godden. For example, Charlie Kirk appeared to think that it would be “pathologically insane” for a President to dispense with the current War Powers Resolution of Congress to go to war in Iran. As the President prepared to engage in just such a military exercise, Trump allies Jared Kushner and David Ellison organized the bankrolling of Paramount Skydance’s hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery with the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle Eastern monarchs of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi.
Did Kushner and Ellison successfully identify the key to peace in the Middle East through Hollywood movie deals? Probably not. More likely, Millennials like Kirk, Kushner, and Ellison believed the generational lies of the Boomers embodied by Trump who dressed up Larry Ellison’s company Oracle’s purchase of TikTok as though it were a free market purchase rather than a potential arm of Trump’s new administrative state that could reshape the meaning of notice and an opportunity to be heard. The Boomer generation’s worst, led by the OG “gray champion” Donald J. Trump, appear to be banking on the power of TikTok and other social media companies to appeal to the masses as they appear to be test-ballooning their running of the new administrative state through them.
When the Boomers told Millennials not to worry about America’s wars in the Middle East, because the internet would “democratize” the nations America attacked, we learned not to trust everything the Boomers told us. It is notable that David Ellison’s father Larry’s company Oracle quietly secured majority control over TikTok in America with the President’s help, while Secretary Hegseth publicly supported the Warner Bros. merger as necessary for the war effort in Iran. Trump is poised to “democratize” both the people of Iran and the people of the United States by destroying any potential for democracy in either country through the royal prerogative as given in Sorrell and Godden that allowed the king to dispense with the laws of Parliament in the very way the President dispensed with Congress’s decision not to declare war with Iran.
The Framers of the Constitution strenuously opposed the powers of a future tyrant, yet believed in the honor and integrity of future officeholders to stave off royalism. They left us to struggle with our current Supreme Court’s “originalist” limitations of Article II of the U.S. Constitution to restrain a reality TV star with kingly or even godly aspirations to rule the Oval Office like a throne room or chapel for state-worship. Barring that, the Framers left us to overcome tyranny as they themselves did, through activism and action by citizens and lawyers alike to vindicate our freedom.
Yours Respectfully,
Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.