Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA? from the what-are-we-even-doing-here? dept Wed, May 14th 2025 10:57am - Mike Masnick 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.