Paul, I’m not unsympathetic to protesters and don’t love a lot of these laws - the amount of bullying influence oil and gas companies throw around at the state level is the bailiwick of a few colleagues of mine - but these sorts of statutes are minuscule in scale compared to the “anti-disinformation” bureaucracies being built. The latter are surveillance mechanisms that algorithmically dispense punishment or deamplification based on crimes of the mind. The potential penalties may not be as severe in the US (yet; there are other countries already incarcerating for things like jokes or satire), but “anti-disinformation” isn’t bothering with concepts as quaint as physical protests or library books. Their most dangerous ideas, like “building resilience,” are designed to condition people from a young age to mistrust their own instinct to question authority. Others, like “pre-bunking,” involve pumping the news landscape full of false information, to inoculate populations against future revelations of corruption. If you have the wrong opinion about, say, war in Ukraine, you’ll be deranked, removed, find yourself unable to sell ads or distribute, and swarmed by AI bots publishing defamatory posts about you. This is all aimed at the idea of protest, not the physical act.

Also, you’re at least talking about laws. The other thing is just a network of bureaucratic procedures within which you generally have no rights. It’s just much more advanced than what you’re talking about. But I appreciate the comment.