Catherine D’Ignazio is, by all progressive measures, a serious academic. Tenured at MIT, Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, author of Data Feminism, Counting Feminicide, and perpetrator of assorted epistemic disobediences. A woman who has stared into the server room and seen the elephant.

This semester, having completed all available disobediences, she turned her MIT-credentialed gaze on a new menace: technofascism, which she defines as “the collusion of large technology firms, right-wing billionaires, and tech culture with authoritarian and anti-democratic political agendas” — specifically including the censorship and silencing of free speech.”

One pauses to admire the precision.

The most thoroughly documented example of tech firms colluding with government to silence political speech is, of course, the Biden administration’s operation, in which the White House and the DNC directed Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million to handle censorship requests, and the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA ran what federal courts later called a “primary facilitator” of unconstitutional speech suppression — a censorship switchboard that laundered government takedown requests through Stanford University and the Election Integrity Partnership, created at the request of DHS/CISA. The settlement, reached this past March, was described as reining in an “Orwellian” censorship machine.

D’Ignazio had not a word to say about the technoprogressive weaponization of the federal government when her ideological brethren were running the show. But that was then. This is now. The Women’s & Gender Studies luncheon at which she promoted her newfound advocacy overflowed with admiring listeners. You go, girl!

Anonymous sources have since revealed that Governor Gavin Newsom has recruited Professor D’Ignazio to chair his newly formed Digital Truth Commission, where her first assignment will be classifying the Twitter Files as cisheteropatriarchal disinformation.

“None of this is inevitable,” she told the audience — apparently including the irony.