GRAY LADY DOWN: “Free Speech Is Killing Us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?”, asks Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer in the pages of the New York Times. Among his proposals:

The Constitution prevents the government from using sticks, but it says nothing about carrots. Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

I thought nationalizing and socializing media was strictly a Salon idea — wait until he discovers that Congress already created “a robust public media in the mold of the BBC” in 1967. But give this man credit for being the equivalent of George Orwell enlisting to fight in the Spanish Civil War:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

He’s embedded with Internet trolls! I’m so old, I can remember when the left roundly mocked the idea of being a keyboard warrior.

Exit quote: “It never ceases to amaze me how a seemingly intelligent person can talk about the dangers of an authoritarian administration in one breath and advocate for expanded powers in the next, without a thought of how it could backfire.”

As long as the sex is great, the Gray Lady is always up for more and more totalitarianism.