Radical Left Democrats are trying to mask their partisan outrage after Warner Bros.-Discovery rejected Netflix’s acquisition bid and accepted an offer from Paramount, a media company owned by President Donald Trump ally David Ellison.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and a dozen House Democrats recently signed a letter to the Treasury and Justice departments to express their “substantial concerns” that the deal violates antitrust law.
According to excerpts from the letter published by Semafor, the lawmakers worry the deal would produce “significant horizontal and vertical overlap in theatrical distribution, premium streaming, and first-window licensing markets, and would likely reduce competition among studios for movies.”
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These “concerns” are fake. If Warren and Blumenthal were so worried about the anticompetitive effects of market concentration, they would have raised similar objections the last few months, when Netflix was the top contender to buy WBD.
In fact, they should have been raising them even more loudly. Antitrust experts largely agree that Paramount’s bid was far less legally problematic than Netflix’s.
Netflix is already the country’s largest streaming service with a market share of around 20%. Letting the company acquire WBD’s HBO Max would boost that share to roughly 35%, well above the threshold at which courts consider mergers presumptively illegal.
The combined streaming share of HBO Max and Paramount+, on the other hand, is around 22%. By creating a strong new competitor for Netflix, this deal will “stabilize streaming prices, increase competition, and drive new investments in infrastructure, programming, customer convenience, and [user experience] design,” one analysis found.
And yet, this cabal of Democrats has consistently attacked Paramount while almost entirely ignoring Netflix.
Warren and Blumenthal made their real motives clear back in November when they cosigned a letter to then-Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater.
In that letter, written before Netflix emerged as the front-runner, the senators make passing references to other bidders but devote nearly all their attention to Paramount — and do so on explicitly partisan grounds.
“According to reports, the Trump Administration has a preference for Paramount Skydance to win the bidding process,” the lawmakers wrote, noting the friendly relationship between Trump and Ellison.
They even came close to defending Netflix when they cited speculation “that Netflix’s bid could face more skepticism because of the Netflix CEO’s and employees’ track records of donating to Democrats.”
These arguments are conspicuously absent from the excerpts of the recent letter that lawmakers shared with Semafor, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who cosigned the November letter, said the quiet part out loud.
He recently took to X with a (not entirely accurate) list of all the media assets the “right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons … will soon control.”
Interestingly, Sanders didn’t seem to put up much of a fight when it looked as though those same assets — including Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and DC superheroes — would end up in the hands of a left-wing company such as Netflix, where 98% of employee donations go to Democrats and 40% of children’s shows feature LGBT content.
Warren, Bernie, and Blumenthal aren’t worried about the finer points of antitrust law. They’re worried that the Left’s cultural hegemony is finally starting to crumble.
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For them, this is a disaster far worse than losing an election. Liberals believe their monopoly on intelligence and empathy gives them an inalienable right to control every major institution in this country — media, nonprofit groups, universities, professional organizations, Hollywood — and use them to force their ideology down Americans’ throats.
Netflix acquiring WBD would have preserved the progressive status quo. Paramount acquiring WBD challenges it. That’s what Democrats are really afraid of.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, where he served as a Senior Member of the House Judiciary Committee. He served previously as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as head of Liberty Guard, and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.