Democrat FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has ties to a Marxist organization, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project, which supported the pro-Palestinian protesters involved in the encampment at Columbia University.
Khan, who is currently serving as the chairwoman for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is also an associate professor of law at Columbia University who is currently on leave while serving in her present position and has been reported to have helped Amy Kapczynski, a faculty co-director with the LPE Project and a professor at Yale University, “design” her first LPE seminar.
In the Yale Law Report journal from the summer of 2023, Kapczynski spoke about the goals of the LPE movement:
Our goals are to develop new intellectual theories and approaches to understand our legal order and also to develop proposals that substantively can work in favor of more equality and democracy. There is a new peerreivewed Journal of Law and Political Economy, and LPE work is regularly being published in prominent law journals. We also now have major conferences and symposia dedicated to LPE ideas and LPE scholars in the administration in Washington – including Lina Khan ’17, who leads the Federal Trade Commission and who was part of the student group at Yale that helped me design my first LPE seminar. The interest in this work has been quite remarkable. It is pretty common now to hear that LPE is the next new school of legal thought.
Kapczynski has stated that she has “spent formative years studying political theory” along with other “forms of critical thought” such as from the “Frankfurt School, queer theory, post-colonial theory, psychoanalytic theory, and Marxist feminist thought,” according to the LPE Project website.
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is described as being an “assemblage of social scientists and researchers” who were interested in “the application” of Marxism, philosophy, and society.
This kind of knee-jerk overly simplified “red baiting” is so stale. But I guess that’s not surprising since so many of you now want, very much, to regress back in time when “things were better.” I bet none of you have ever even read Marx or the latter legacy works. And you certainly misunderstand them and their significance. But it’s all just a fear response, like your fear of people who are different from you, people with different skin tones, people who speak different languages, etc..
10:43 – I don’t fear people with different skin tones