Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has a new book out, and according to a scorching takedown in American Thinker, it amounts to a blueprint for government control of the internet. The book, titled Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, has been making the rounds for months, and Murphy is still promoting it on podcasts according to J.R. Dunn’s September 22 column. Dunn’s verdict is blunt: Murphy is pitching a plan to “solve every last problem the country has by abrogating free speech and taking control of social media.”
That is a serious charge, but it flows directly from what Murphy reportedly says on the promotional circuit. Dunn notes that Murphy remains on the book tour four months after publication, most recently appearing on the “I’ve Had It” podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch. The senator’s message, as Dunn summarizes it, was a litany of complaints: Trump is bad, social media is bad, America is broken, and the First Amendment has to go. Dunn’s rhetorical response to the senator’s persistent refrain is almost weary: “The First Amendment has to go. Trump is bad.”
Murphy’s core target in these appearances is social media, which Dunn says the senator regards as worse than Trump because it helped bring Trump into being. The platform, in Murphy’s telling, causes isolation, loneliness, disconnection, and interferes with the “fight for meaning.” Dunn is genuinely baffled by the idea that an innovation in personal communication could do all that. “How an innovation in personal communication does all this, I have no idea,” he writes. “I suppose it’s in the book.”
A timeline that conveniently starts after Musk
Dunn’s column is at its sharpest when it examines the political history of social media moderation. The left, he argues, was perfectly comfortable with social media when it controlled the industry. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and loosened content restrictions. Dunn treats October 27 — the day Musk’s purchase closed — as a date that ought to be celebrated alongside July 4. Since then, Dunn writes, there have been repeated attempts to return to the old order, including “blatant censorship” and federal government efforts to shut down opponents of what he calls the Deep State, with assistance from Keir Starmer’s staff and the organization Sleeping Giants.
Into that context steps Murphy, who is now calling for what Dunn describes as the next step in the escalation: having the government take over the internet and run it the way good citizens of Connecticut would like. The senator frames it, as Dunn notes, as an act in service of the “common good” — a way to fight disconnection and loneliness and, above all, to ensure that nobody like Donald Trump ever again takes office.
Dunn does not mince words about where he sees this leading. He compares the proposal to China’s social credit system and to the cartoon cop who appears on Chinese screens wagging his finger whenever someone tries to access a forbidden website. If that image comes to mind, Dunn writes, “you’re probably right on the money.” Government agents showing up at your door to interrogate your internet habits, in his sarcastic formulation, is one way to ensure nobody feels disconnected anymore.
What Murphy does not do, according to Dunn, is address how any of this would actually work. The senator is said to offer very little detail about what the courts would be doing while he is shutting down the Bill of Rights. That gap is not incidental. A proposal to restrict speech through government-run platforms raises immediate First Amendment questions, and Murphy’s promotional material appears to skip past them entirely.
The irony of the medium
Dunn’s column lands one final jab that is hard to shake. Murphy is promoting a book about the evils of social media through a podcast, which is itself a social media product. Dunn’s observation is that this is fine because it is “good social media” — not “the evil, antisocial MAGA stuff you’re reading right now.” The distinction matters to the senator’s argument, whether he acknowledges it or not.
It is Johnson’s argument that whoever gets to define which speech is good will hold enormous power. And if the government is the one making the call, the Bill of Rights as traditionally understood no longer governs the conversation about what the internet should allow. Murphy’s proposal, as Dunn characterizes it, would place that power with the state.
The American Thinker column is an opinion piece rather than a news report, and it is aggressive in tone. But it raises a question that any reader can evaluate: if social media is genuinely a driver of loneliness and political extremism, is the remedy government ownership and operation of the platforms? Murphy’s book and podcast appearances reportedly point in that direction. Dunn’s answer is an emphatic no, and his warning is that a government-run internet would not stop at the behavior the senator finds objectionable.
The larger fight, as Dunn frames it, is about whether the American republic can tolerate speech it does not like. The senator from Connecticut, in this framing, has decided that it cannot — and that the First Amendment is an obstacle to be cleared away. The courts, as Dunn notes, may have something to say about that.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/chris-murphy-vs-the-bill-of-rights/