This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”
By Sheila Kennedy
July 28,2026
Indiana’s looney-tunes lieutenant governor refuses to moderate his all-out attacks on the Muslim religion (and is scarcely nicer about the Jewish clerics who had the nerve to publicly support their Muslim neighbors). But I’ve heard nary a peep out of him about the decision of his cult leader’s government to effectively turn a huge portion of America’s media over to Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
As the American Prospect has recently reported, if Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers goes through, 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. As the Prospect reminds readers, CNN and BBC are the world’s leading television news services. The ownership of CNN by foreign nations would raise some significant questions about its news coverage–questions similar to those raised by ownership by the Ellison family, whose takeover of CBS and installation of Bari Weiss has prompted numerous reporters and producers to leave that once-storied network.
The purchase of Warner Bros. by foreign nations hasn’t been investigated by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Treasury Department agency that should have conducted such an investigation, and a number of Democratic senators—Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, and California’s Adam Schiff—have protested that failure. But as the Prospect points out, the most striking absence has been the silence and presumed acquiescence of the GOP’s far-Right Beckwithian bigots.
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.
And yet, these “Christian warriors” have yet to utter a peep, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia’s Basic Law states that the nation’s governance is founded on the Koran and Saudi courts routinely apply Sharia law. (In Abu Dhabi and Qatar, Sharia law is mostly applied in family law cases, but it is applied.) Given the role of Sharia law, as the Prospect says, “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.”
Harold Meyerson, author of the linked article, notes that he has been able to find no mention either of Paramount’s proposed takeover of these American institutions, or the ownership stake of these nations, by these Sharia-phobic officials. It’s hard to debate his conclusion–that 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.” (Or, one presumes, anger their cult leader.)
Here in Indiana, our own version of absurdity–Micah Beckwith–continues to spout anti-Muslim diatribes. He has insisted that it is not unAmerican to hate Islam, and refuses to walk back or modify any of his intemperate comments. (In all fairness, Beckwith isn’t just ignorant about religious liberty; he has also called the three-fifths compromise, which did not allow slave-holding states to count enslaved people as whole persons, a “great move.”) When challenged about his anti-religious freedom beliefs, Beckwith’s office responded that he would “never apologize for saying the United States of America is now and always should be one nation under God.” His God, of course…
Given the lieutenant governor’s adamant opposition to Sharia law, I am waiting for him to express his objections to the purchase of Warner Brothers by nations that employ that law. Since he has made it a point of pride that he is willing to piss off anyone who disagrees with his highly idiosyncratic religious views, I can only assume that he will be willing to oppose this takeover.
I hope someone in the media tests my thesis…
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 1th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
