These days, it’s hard to turn on a television or open a newspaper without running into a fawning profile of Lina Khan, the embattled chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). From 60 Minutes to the New York Times to Bloomberg, the legacy media just can’t get enough. With Khan’s term at the FTC technically expired (although she can stay on indefinitely until replaced), speculation is rampant about her next move. The most recent thumb sucker included a suggestion from one observer that Khan has set her sights on higher goals — perhaps even the Supreme Court.

It may sound laughable to put someone with such extreme views on our highest court, but don’t dismiss the idea too easily. Unlike other members of today’s progressive left, Khan softens the edges of her extreme ideas underneath a less threatening veneer. Her words don’t sound like they came from a Soviet manifesto, even if her ideas do.

At the core of Khan’s ideology, as well as that of her partner in crime, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, Jonathan Kanter, is the idea that successful companies that grow beyond an arbitrary size automatically warrant intense scrutiny and even intervention from regulators. In Khan and Kanter’s eyes, success is not the result of innovation, hard work and ingenuity, but somehow comes from bending — or even breaking — the rules. 

It’s the antithesis of the mentality that made America the global superpower we are today.