Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms.
Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh:
This week’s big letdown is the No Fly List. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Roger “Doc” Marshall of Kansas were both critics of Big Tech censorship and campus speech codes. “Like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s novel,” Marshall wrote in the wake of the J6 riots, “educational institutions and news outlets have pitched in to stamp out segments of society that dare to disagree with their ideas.” Marshall joined Blackburn, who professed to be horrified by the Twitter Files, in promoting the Campus Free Speech Resolution of 2021. A tick of the clock ago, they explicitly sought to enshrine legal speech and protest on campuses: