When the Anti-Sharia Law Demagogues Fall Silent

The stench arising from the proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount isn’t just the concentration of market power by the merged studios nor the likely takeover of CNN by President Trump’s fanboys. It’s also the fact that the purchase is funded by investments from the sovereign wealth funds of three foreign nations, none of which are in any way, shape, or form democracies: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Together, those three nations’ funds will own 49.5 percent of the merged company, with the possibility that that share might grow to a majority interest. 

Under their deal with the Ellison family, which controls Paramount, the three nations are not to have any governance or policy-making powers over the company. But CNN, along with the BBC, is the world’s leading television news service, and its ownership by foreign nations would, at minimum, put its news coverage under question. So, of course, would its ownership by the Ellison family, which hosted a salute to Donald Trump dinner in the nation’s capital earlier this year, and whose takeover of CBS’s legendary news division has prompted numerous reporters and producers to leave rather than submit their work to the Trump-lite filter through which it now has to pass.

But while the Ellison takeover has been put on temporary hold by a federal court, where it’s being contested on classic antitrust grounds by a number of state attorneys general, the purchase of Warner Bros. by foreign nations has not been investigated by the governmental body that customarily handles such matters: the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-departmental body headed by the Treasury Department. As Trump has made clear that he wants the Ellisons to control CNN, his cabinet secretaries have refrained from having CFIUS do its customary job. This failure on the job has led a number of Democratic senators—Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, and California’s Adam Schiff—to tell CFIUS’s chair, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that he and the rest of this particular national security agency are MIA when it comes to fulfilling their mission to screen foreign purchases of key American institutions.

Read: The challenge to Paramount–Warner Bros. merger focuses on theaters, basic cable

But the most glaring absence from these duties isn’t CFIUS’s. It’s that of the far-right Republican elected officials who’ve sought to generate and mobilize anti-Muslim bigotry by campaigning against the completely nonexistent threat of Sharia law infiltrating and overtaking American jurisprudence. Last December, Texas Republican Congress Members Chip Roy and Keith Self founded the Sharia-Free America congressional caucus, in which they were quickly joined by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville. (Roy has since waged an unsuccessful campaign for Texas attorney general, having been defeated in the Republican primary; Tuberville is currently seeking election for Alabama governor—both likely calculating that mobilizing anti-Muslim sentiment on their behalf might help and couldn’t hurt their campaigns.) “No more Muslims,” Roy posted on X. 

Roy and Self are hardly outliers among their fellow Texas Republicans. This year’s Texas Republican primary ballot included a ballot measure, Proposition 10, calling on their state to prohibit Sharia Law. A hefty 94 percent of Republicans voted yes on the measure.

So you might think that Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros., funded as it is by Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar, might provoke at least some questioning from such staunch Sharia foes. After all, Saudi Arabia’s Basic Law states that the nation’s governance derives from the Koran and its courts routinely apply Sharia law in a wide range of cases. In Abu Dhabi and Qatar, Sharia law is applied chiefly in family law cases. Given that their courts base some of their decisions on Sharia law, you might think that these nations’ substantial ownership of Hollywood studios and a news network would concern these Republican stalwarts, as the purchases represent the only overlap between the dreaded Sharia code and American studios and networks. 

And yet, I can find no mention of Paramount’s proposed takeover of these American institutions, and the ownership stake of these nations, in any of these presumably Sharia-phobic officials’ statements. My efforts to question them or their staffs about the pending purchase have yielded no response. Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ desire to convert CNN into a Fox News lookalike clearly overpowers any of the anti-Sharia demagogy that Roy, Self, Tuberville, and their ilk spout in the hope of boosting their careers. The real career-killer, they understand, would be triggering Trump’s disapproval. 

They don’t cease to invoke their anti-Sharia rants because they’re patently absurd. Rather, they cease to invoke them—in this one sole instance when they could in fact draw a line between American institutions and nations partially reliant on Sharia jurisprudence—because it might thwart their ambitions.