ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: What’s oozing out of campuses is polluting society.

Campus administrators have famously declined to restrain or rebuke mobs of students who fancy themselves social justice warriors who press to block conservative speakers and attack them violently if they dare to appear. Charles Murray was violently attacked at Middlebury, Ben Shapiro at Berkeley, and Brown students asserted that conservative columnist Guy Benson isn’t covered by the First Amendment.

The result, says Sullivan, is that “silence on any controversial social issue is endemic on college campuses” and, he adds ominously, “now everywhere.” Last year, Google fired engineer James Damore for writing an internal memo which the CEO with pathetic dishonesty characterized as bigoted.

There is increasing evidence that Google, Facebook, and Twitter — whose leaders flatter themselves as enablers of free communication and neutral disseminators of information — are suppressing conservative opinions as ipso facto “fake news.” Those aware of campus life will not be comforted with the knowledge that the decisions about what gets downplayed or deleted are being made by social justice warriors recently hired from campuses.

Corporate human relations departments are doing their part as well. Anti-harassment rules are used to punish those uttering speech deemed politically incorrect and actions of even the most anodyne nature considered sexually improper.

Companies may have the legal right to do this. But their practices, amplified by bureaucratic empire-building, tend to undermine what Sullivan calls “norms of liberal behavior,” including “robust public debate, free from intimidation.”

I’m not sure that companies do have that legal right, or that they should. We’re long past the notion that what private enterprise does is beyond government supervision, and I think companies like Google and Facebook need a lot of adult supervision. You want a libertarian world? Fine, me too, but that’s not were we are now.