“Why are you harassing Twitter?” Jim Jordan asked Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week. That harassment began when Elon Musk brought journalists into Twitter to expose the federal government’s censorship regime. 

The FTC tried to demand that Musk reveal his contacts with reporters in December after the first publication of the Twitter Files, arguing that it could violate a consent decree protecting customer data. Now an analyst at Ernst & Young has testified that the FTC attempted to pressure him into a negative report on Twitter to justify punitive action. Twitter parent X Corporation filed a motion last week to terminate the consent order over this corruption, leading to Jordan’s question during the hearing.

We now know that the censorship empire will not go quietly. A federal judge put a temporary halt to the federal government’s suppression of speech and dissent this month. The FTC has shown its colors as Big Brother’s enforcer –providing us a warning that authoritarians do not retreat easily.