The Free Speech Wars: From Jawboning to Kimmel—America's Digital Colosseum, By Charles Taylor (Florida)
Welcome to the coliseum of 2025, where thumbs-up and thumbs-down aren't decided by emperors in togas but by faceless bureaucrats, algorithm overlords, and late-night monologists with a microphone and a grudge! Last Tuesday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing, titled, with all the subtlety of a Trump tweet, Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech into Silencing American, was less a sober inquiry and more a gladiatorial smackdown in the endless Free Speech Wars. Republicans brandished emails and depositions like rusty swords, decrying a "vast censorship enterprise" that turned the First Amendment into a suggestion. Democrats? They parried with a monologue about Jimmy Kimmel's temporary benching over a quip about Charlie Kirk's assassin, as if the ghost of broadcast decency standards had risen to haunt the room. It's a microcosm of America's great schism: One side sees government as the Thought Police, the other as the only bulwark against "disinformation" that might hurt feelings, or worse, elections.
Let's rewind the tape, not to 1776, when the Framers etched free speech into the Constitution like a "no refunds" policy on liberty, but to the digital dawn of the 2010s. Social media promised a town square for all: Hashtags birthing movements, memes toppling dictators (or at least embarrassing them). But then came the wars. Enter Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the legal shield that lets platforms like X (née Twitter), Facebook, and YouTube moderate content without becoming liable publishers. It's the "we're just pipes, not editors" loophole that's kept the internet humming, and haemorrhaging lawsuits. Republicans now call it a cartel enabler; Democrats, a necessary evil against troll armies. Fast-forward through the 2016 election: Russian bots, Cambridge Analytica, and suddenly, "free speech" splits into camps. The Right cries "censorship!" when accounts get nuked for "misinformation." The Left counters with "hate speech!" and points to January 6 as Exhibit A for why platforms need guardrails.
The Biden era turbocharged the battlefield. Missouri v. Biden (Schmitt's brainchild as AG) unearthed a treasure trove of emails: White House aides jawboning Meta execs to zap vaccine sceptics, FBI flagging "extremist" posts pre-January 6, CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) playing whack-a-mole with "disinformation." It wasn't outright orders, oh no, that'd be too on-the-nose for the Administrative State, but "strong suggestions" laced with regulatory threats. Witnesses like Sean Davis of The Federalist testified to a "coordinated and global, multi-year censorship campaign" involving U.S. agencies, the UK's Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and even whispers of foreign intel. Davis didn't mince words: "The drive to silence speech ends in the violent elimination of speakers and is driven by a totalitarian desire for total power." He invoked Charlie Kirk, not just the late Turning Point USA founder, but his 2025 assassination as the bloody endpoint of suppressed dissent. Kirk's killer, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old with a transgender partner and texts raging against "hatred," became fodder for both sides: MAGA spun him as a deep-state plant; critics like Kimmel as a symptom of Right-wing vitriol.
Enter the hearing's star witnesses, the grizzled vets of the speech wars. Alex Berenson, the erstwhile NYT reporter turned COVID contrarian, recounted his 2021 X ban for tweeting facts that clashed with Fauci's gospel: Natural immunity trumps vaccines for the previously infected. "What I said was true," Berenson deadpanned, slamming a legal "loophole" shielding feds from lawsuits via proxies. His suit, Berenson v. Biden, got tossed on sovereign immunity grounds, government goons can sic private companies on you, but good luck collecting damages. Eugene Volokh, the UCLA free-speech oracle, dissected "jawboning" as unconstitutional coercion: When Uncle Sam leans on tech titans, it's state action by stealth, eroding the First Amendment's firewall between power and expression. Gene Kimmelman, the Yale-Harvard policy wonk, offered a bipartisan olive branch: Sure, curb the feds, but don't gut Section 230 entirely, platforms need flexibility to fight spam and scams without becoming libel farms.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), presiding like a prosecutor fresh from the Missouri AG glory days, channelled his inner Churchill: "Congress must act to dismantle this unconstitutional alliance between Big Tech and Big Government." He hawked two bills like snake oil at a revival: The COLLUDE Act, yanking Section 230 immunity from platforms that play censor ball with Uncle Sam; and the Censorship Accountability Act, greenlighting citizen suits against rogue bureaucrats for First Amendment fouls. Schmitt's pitch? Empower the little guy: "An army of citizens to hold their government accountable." Ted Cruz, the committee chair, piled on with his own report: CISA as the "Orwellian Ministry of Truth," pressuring Big Tech to shadow-ban conservatives on everything from Hunter's laptop to election integrity. The GOP vision: Strip the shields, let lawsuits fly, and watch the censors scatter like roaches at dawn.
But oh, the Democratic dodge, a masterclass in whataboutism that would make a Soviet apparatchik blush. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) swerved straight to the Kimmel kerfuffle: FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Trump's pick, had thundered that ABC/Disney deserved "accountability" for Kimmel's September 15 monologue. Kimmel, in a YouTube clip gone viral, snarked that MAGA was "desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them." Robinson's texts, "had enough of his hatred," painted a messy picture, but Kimmel's jab at Right-wing hypocrisy lit the fuse. Carr fired back: "Truly sick," hinting at license reviews, mafia-style. Disney yanked Kimmel indefinitely on September 17, affiliates like Nexstar and Sinclair piled on with preemptions and tribute specials to Kirk. Kimmel slunk back by September 23 amid ACLU howls and guild protests, but not before Trump crowed on Truth Social: "Great news for America."
Cantwell accused Carr of "retaliatory rhetoric" that "may have threatened retaliation in a way that would violate the First Amendment." Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) waxed poetic — "The freedom to express yourself... is the cornerstone of America" — before pivoting: This hearing's just "settling old political scores" against a "no longer in power" administration. (Never mind Trump's back in the White House, signing EOs to "end federal censorship" on Day One.) Rosen demanded Carr testify, labelling his threats "mafia-like" and "reprehensible." The irony? Democrats, who once cheered platforms nuking Trump posts as "incitement," now clutch pearls over a comedian's benching. Republicans, fresh off indicting Biden-era censors, cheer Carr's strong-arming as "holding media accountable." As X lit up post-hearing, posts hailing Davis's "murder of people" line racking 3K+ likes, Kimmel defenders decrying "MAGA snowflakes," it crystallised the hypocrisy carousel.
So, where does this leave the Free Speech Wars? In a trench of tribal trench warfare, where "disinformation" is whatever the other side says, and the First Amendment's a Rorschach test. The GOP bills could be game-changers, COLLUDE forcing platforms to choose: neutrality or naked liability; Accountability unleashing a plaintiff tsunami on deep-state dabblers. But Democrats warn it'll chill moderation, unleashing floods of bots and bile. Volokh nails the tightrope: Jawboning's poison, but so's anarchy. Trump's EO hints at executive end-runs, while EU's Digital Services Act looms as a dystopian import, fines for "harmful" speech that'd make Xi Jinping jealous.
Satirically speaking, it's a farce worthy of Swift: Uncle Sam as the ultimate hall monitor, Big Tech as hall monitors with venture capital, and us plebs as kids fighting over the last swing. Kimmel's saga? A late-night Twilight Zone where joking about a dead provocateur gets you preempted for a Kirk hagiography, because nothing says "free speech" like mandatory mourning. Yet beneath the snark lurks a chill: When power flips, so do the scripts. Biden's jawboners became Cruz's villains; Trump's FCC enforcer is Rosen's mafioso. The pendulum swings, but the arc bends toward control.
America's fix? Bipartisan spine: Pass Schmitt's bills with carve-outs for genuine threats (no, "my pronouns hurt" doesn't count). Rein in jawboning without torching section 230. And remind everyone: Free speech isn't "speech I agree with" — it's the messy, MAGA-mocking, vaccine-doubting, Kirk-lamenting cacophony that built this republic. As Davis thundered, censorship's endgame is violence; Kirk's blood a stark reminder. In this colosseum, the real lions aren't the feds or the funnymen, they're the grudges we nurse. Time to drop the swords, unplug the mics, and talk like adults, or tweet about it.
https://reclaimthenet.org/senate-hearing-big-tech-censorship-federal-pressure
"At his arraignment on charges of making false statements and obstruction, former FBI Director James Comey produced a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials testifying to the fact that he's totally innocent.
At his highly publicized hearing in a Virginia federal courtroom, Comey produced the letter as evidence to show that these trusted members of the intelligence community were just as confident in his innocence as they were in the fall of 2020 that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian misinformation operation.
"This is rock-solid proof of my innocence," Comey told the court as he held up the letter. "If the country has learned anything over the last five years, it's that our intelligence officials are above reproach and would never mislead anyone or be blatantly dishonest. That is why the court should take this letter as a clear and definitive sign that I am in no way guilty of any of the crimes with which I have been charged. It's got signatures and everything. Totally innocent."
The media described the letter as a "bombshell" that sealed Comey's defense against the charges. "There's nothing more concrete than former U.S. intelligence officials," said one reporter. "The intelligence community has never shown itself to be anything less than completely forthright, principled, and altruistic. The people who signed this letter would never lie. About anything. And Mr. Comey would never falsify anything to provide cover for himself. We've never seen any evidence of that. Ever."
At publishing time, Comey had helpfully offered to personally lead the investigation into whether or not he committed any crimes.
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