Censorship and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring of Power

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz speaking with attendees at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C. PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore

​“The crownless again shall be king” wrote Bilbo Baggins in a poem in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. In America, the conservative party – once crownless – now controls the White House, the Senate, and the House. When it comes to protecting our First Amendment rights, are Republicans going to use their power wisely?
 
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has often exposed and criticized the previous Biden administration and its allies for censoring conservatives on social media and using coercive techniques to silence and “cancel” conservative speakers in academia, media, and corporations. The power to use the law and agencies to punish political opponents and critics for speech is for many an intoxicating temptation.
 
If only those stupid people would just shut up!
 
Cruz, a fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, in a recent podcast interview compared the desire to misuse regulatory authority to silence critics to the almost unbearable temptation exerted by the magical ring of power that could corrupt even the most virtuous.
 
We saw this on full display in the Biden administration, which assigned government agents to secretly censor social media. Now Cruz is applying this literary trope to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who publicly threatened to punish the corporate sponsors of Jimmy Kimmel Live! As we all know, it worked. Kimmel is canceled.
 
Sen. Cruz said:
 
“So the Federal Communications Commission is in charge of granting broadcast licenses. So ABC, NBC, CBS, they have licenses from the FCC. It is true that under statute, they are required to be in the public interest. What he [Carr] is saying is Jimmy Kimmel was lying [about the background of Charlie Kirk’s killer]. That’s true. He was lying. And his lying to the American people is not in the public interest. And so he [Carr] threatens explicitly, we’re going to cancel ABC’s license. We’re going to take him off the air so ABC cannot broadcast anymore.
 
“It’s so attractive,” Sen. Cruz said of censorship. “It’s sort of like conservatives saying, wait, wait, if we have government, we have power. We can ban the media.”
 
Sen. Cruz made it clear he found this offensive to the American ideal of free speech. He also offered a practical “live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword” reason for this administration and conservatives to abandon this path.
 
“Going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again, wins the White House … They will silence us.”
 
An arms race is developing between the two parties, established under President Biden and now racing further ahead under President Trump. Unless sides agree to mutual disarmament, censorship of partisan opponents will become a permanent feature of American political life.

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