Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?
from the what-are-we-even-doing-here? dept
The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership’s response is… to help them? Earlier today, Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal joined MAGA Republicans to reintroduce the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — a bill that Heritage itself has proudly proclaimed as central to its strategy of censoring progressive content around LGBTQ issues and abortion. The new bill appears to be effectively identical to last year’s version.
It raises a huge question of… what the fuck are they thinking?
The press release touts its “bipartisan” nature, with Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal sponsoring the bill, alongside Marsha Blackburn and John Thune.
Last year, when Heritage Foundation declared its desire to use KOSA to censor LGBTQ content and announced it would leverage the bill to remove pro-abortion content if Trump won, perhaps some could dismiss it as empty rhetoric. But now? The Trump administration is systematically implementing every element of Heritage’s Project 2025 censorship playbook. There’s no more room for wishful thinking about how KOSA might be used.
And yet, Democrats seem to act as if none of that is happening, and we can just assume good faith in how KOSA will be implemented and enforced by an FTC that has loudly proclaimed its willingness to conduct partisan, culture war witch hunts on behalf of Project 2025’s goals.
Yes, we expect Richard Blumenthal to reflexively support any anti-internet bill. But Chuck Schumer? After everything we’ve seen, how can Democratic leadership still pretend there’s any good faith here? Trump is already using every available tool to wage his censorial culture wars. Heritage has explicitly laid out how they’ll use KOSA to silence progressive voices. What possible justification could there be for Democrats to hand them an even more powerful weapon?
Even some Republicans recognize the danger here. Senator Rand Paul has consistently maintained that censoring the internet won’t help children. And last year, House GOP members actually stopped the bill after realizing it was a censorship tool that could be used against their own speech. But now that Trump has won (and the GOP acts as though there will never be another free election), that objection may evaporate.
The bill’s lead sponsor, Marsha Blackburn, was already openly stating last year that her support for KOSA was about using it to censor LGBTQ content. That was before Trump’s victory made Heritage’s censorship plans a reality.
So here we are: Heritage Foundation explicitly laid out their plans to weaponize KOSA against progressive speech. Marsha Blackburn openly admitted it’s about censoring LGBTQ content. The Trump administration is systematically implementing every element of Project 2025’s censorship agenda. And the FTC stands ready to enforce it all.
Yet Democratic leadership isn’t just standing idle — they’re actively helping to build the machinery of censorship that will be used against their own constituents. Either Schumer and Blumenthal are catastrophically naive, or they’ve simply decided that appearing “bipartisan” matters more than protecting vulnerable communities from state-sponsored censorship.
The real question isn’t what they’re thinking. It’s whether they’re thinking at all.
Filed Under: abortion, censorship, chuck schumer, free speech, kosa, lgbtq, maga, project 2025, protect the kids, richard blumenthal
Comments on “Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?”
Schumer’s fucking cooked. Assuming he doesn’t just outright agree with the fascists, I have to some he’s doing performance art of a doormat.
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He isn’t just cooked, him, Blumenthal and Durbin are gonna cook us and the internet as well if they’re not loudly pushed back against.
If anyone needed concrete proof that Schumer has no intention of fighting the Republican party, this is it.
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He’s putting holds on DOJ nominees over the Qatar jet. It’s not that he has no intention, per se, his brain is just completely broken. Which in either case is not up to the moment.
Blumenthal needs to be stopped along with the “fake advocates”.
I figured he would revive KOSA again after it came closer than it ever did last year.
Blumenthal has become obsessed with passing KOSA to the point where he will do whatever means it takes to get his unconstitutional bill thru.
He also nominated several of Trump’s nominees to Cabinet positions and he praised Elon fucking Musk out of all people to push for his bill and it still failed.
He’s 79 years old and I strongly suspect he has dementia because his obsession with KOSA is getting more repetitive where the bill doesn’t even change at all and he still thinks with all the shit going on that’s it’s going to pass. JFC.
Several fake advocacy groups like FairPlay and Issue one are already praising KOSA’s return where they still think it’s going to happen.
The repetitive bullshit and lies from anyone who supports KOSA needs to be called the fuck out because these fake advocates will lie how much support they have and make up some dead children story to get people on their side.
KOSA should stay dead and Blumenthal/Blackburn/Fake advocates need to be called out and make them feel shame for harming others for their twisted “crusade”.
Because you can only feel fine when you implement another one terrible idea as your own idea.
Does anyone have a link to the bill text? The couple news stories that have come out so far had some puffery about improvements, which sound like they’re just echoing the sales talk of the politicians themselves.
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Is this any use? It’s the original text with all the revisions.
They’re at least thinking something they were thinking in 2024: “We as a party must appeal to people who would never vote for us in the hopes that we will somehow convince them to vote for us. This is an excellent plan.”
Any word on when the bill could go to Senate markup?
Why? Because They Are Also Grifters
LOL Why?
Why do Democrats, from Newsom to Shumer, seem to be caving to the fascism?
Because people like Newsom & Shumer are performative grifters. They do a REALLY good job of it “most” of the time.
Except once in a while, their true nature comes to the surface.
It’s like asking “why hasn’t anyone in power at the time of the election, done ANYTHING to sincerely try to stop MUSK, DOGE, or anything Project 2025?”
Because they benefit by riding the new wave of fascism.
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In the tiniest bit of fairness, Democrats no longer have any real power in the halls of Congress. They can gum up the works a little and that’s about it. That said: They could be doing so much more outside of Congress to draw attention to the encroaching fascism of the Trump administration, such as its desire for resegregation (by way of attacks on DEI and civil rights laws) and the impending revocation of the civil rights of all Americans (by way of suspending habeas corpus), but that would involve any of the major players in the Democrat party to have a fucking spine.
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….
Looks back at all the times republicans blocked dems over the years.
Funny how they always bring nothing to a gun fight.
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Dems are handicapped by the general drive that government should at least function a little while the GOP has spent seemingly endless cycles shitting on the floors.
Re: Re: Dems stopped calling me to ask for money
On the last call, I told the caller that I wasn’t going to donate a cent until they got rid of Schumer (I was somewhat insulting about Schumer).
They haven’t called me since. Clearly, they got the wrong message.
If they haven’t changed the writing, it’s just as likely to get tossed out in court as last time.
If anyone actually bothers to take these laws to court, that is. Still waiting for someone to take TAKE IT DOWN to court before they start abusing that to take down anti-GOP content.
Every day they do nothing is a day the US moves closer to oblivion, and take the world with it.
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Its likely the TAKE IT DOWN act will end up in court soon.
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My favorite Techdirt article type is the writer slowly coming to the conclusion that all Americans came to roughly 20-30 years ago.
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FTFY. YW. ☺
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Mate, even in my country everyone knew about the US uniparty in the Bush era. Your comment makes no sense.
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Every accusation a confession.
They pass this shit, everyone should flag anything that might be remotely sex (writ large), gender, or relationship adjacent.
No diaper ads, no wedding photos, no mentions of dating or “status”, can’t say “First Lady”, no boner pills, no gendered toys or clothing. Gonna do it? Do it all the way.
That’s a silly question.
It’s because the democrats strongly agree that censorship powers are desperately needed, and have at best minor (to them) disagreements on the exact parameters of what should be censored. They’re helping because they genuinely want to build the censorship machine.
They’ve made no secret of this. They run on more censorship in elections, they actively pass censorship laws in states they control, they’ve attempted to pass federal censorship laws multiple times before.
It is only the high levels of partisanship over the last 15 years that have shot down those efforts. What little bipartisan legislation has come up has been continually held up as a bargaining chip, with one party or the other (or both) digging in their heels in an attempt to extract concessions over it. Nobody wanted to appear too bipartisan, and so bipartisan legislation languished. While that’s undeniably a good thing, in that very little of that bipartisan legislation has successfully passed, it’s hardly a sustainable equilibrium.
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If only democrats would become the party of sensible legislation on the internet..
It feels hopeless now.
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[https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/243850-obama-signs-nsa-bill-renewing-patriot-act-powers/][They never were and can never be. Wake up and grow up.]
Turns out that when people like Schumer talk about “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship,” what they really mean is that the division between Republican and Democrat is far less divisive than the uniting force of being an out-of-touch septuagenarian in the pockets of corporate power brokers.
'No see, I'm on your side, go after THEIR faces!'
The real question isn’t what they’re thinking. It’s whether they’re thinking at all.
At this point I don’t think it’s unreasonable to posit that Schumer has decided to just throw in entirely with the GOP in the hopes that a show of submission and loyalty will convince the leopards to ignore his face.
My understanding is there are two versions of the bill- Senate and Congress. The US Congress bill carves out exceptions for smaller platforms. The Senate bill does. Anyone know which version of the bill is likely to get passed?
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You mean Senate and House. Both chambers make up Congress.
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Ah yes the third house of the Legislature.
The senate, the House, and Congress. =p
Daily reminder that DEMOCRAT PARTY OFFICIALS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS
The Democratic party has long been sustained by capitulating to some corporate interests (typically IP stakeholders) in order to campaign and stay elected, hence that’s who they work for and not the public.
Much like liberal media, their interest is the status quo (or at this point a status quo — an Obama-era state — in which neoliberalism reigns supreme) and the problem is, this favors too much interests of big commerce and the wealthy, and pushes out too much of the working class.
Precarity is (and has been for a while) around 60%-88% depending on the metric used. Most US households cannot manage a $600 crisis, are one paycheck away from homelessness, would fall into impasse if one of the adults lost their job. For the majority of households a bout of debilitating sickness would be catastrophic. It is no wonder that top-down worker abuse goes mostly unreported.
And while there is a small movement of socialist democrats in the Democratic party that are looking to offer reform, another New Deal that restores social safety nets, they are the disliked minority, the red-haired stepchildren of the rest of the party.
And rather than implement reform, they will sooner resort to appeasement of the autocratic factions so they can keep their [shadowy] corporate masters happy, even if it means ultimately those officials will be arrested, jailed and eventually executed as the autocrats take more power ( acting on your best behavior / turning back on mother nature… ).
This is why resistance against the Trump regime needs to be a popular one, and organized at the communities. It appears to be happening, and curiously the protests are being under-reported by liberal media agencies.
In the Behind the Bastards two-parter How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win Evans notes how German newspapers owned by Jewish families sided with NSDAP against their working class Jewish brethren for being more loyal to their class (and their elevated status in society), until Hitler seized the papers and packed those families into the cattle cars.
We know the words with which this history rhymes, and they’re pretty bleak.
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Meanwhile, not coincidentally, satirical political cartoonist Eli Valley got flak seven years ago for his “The Chuck Stops Here” portrayal of Schumer telling fellow jews bound for the camps as they boarded the nazi trains that “if you’re nice to them, you might get a window seat”. This pattern of behaviour has been obvious to anyone paying attention, and some voices were sounding the alarm for a long time.
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America has two parties; a hard right party and a fascist party. The Overton window is so far to one side its fallen off of the building.
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This is the correct take.
Both parties share the worldview that things are better when a party in power can control more things. Exactly which things is the way to differentiate them.
This is why there has been so little organized opposition to Trump’s wildness. The Democrats are just as power-mad as the Trump party, and they realize that this law will give them more control when it’s their turn to fuck things up.
The DNC told you who they really were back in 2009. Most of you ignored them. Hell, most of you even got angry at anyone who noticed it and pointed it out.
Welcome to the government you said you wanted by not telling them you didn’t want it when team blue helped make it.
“Kids are people, too.”
KOSA: “Nuh-uh!”
… I mean, I don’t imagine the Head Dem endorsing it is going to be convincing the hardline Reps in the House to vote on it again. Sure, it’ll convince Dems (as what happened with Take It Down), but Johnson and his crew?
In many aspects the Democrats are the other side of the same coin. The right without the far- attached. In the emergency button for capitalism when crisis hit is inevitably authoritarianism and fascism.
the Democrats take money from the same people / corporations as Republicans. At this point, establishment Dems are pre-Trump era Republicans. Vote them all out.
Stop the “Blue no matter who” BS. Or else they’ll be just as fascist as the MAGAtz are now