My Statement to Congress
In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee about the Twitter Files, a few words about why state-funded "anti-disinformation" and free speech can't coexist
Matt Taibbi as written not necessarily spoken at subcommittee.
Editor’s note: at around 10 a.m. EST this morning, Michael Shellenberger and I will be testifying at the “Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on the Twitter Files” for the House Judiciary Committee, in the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Just before, around 9:00 a.m., we’ll also be releasing a TwitterFiles “Statement to Congress” thread, which will be submitted to the record. It contains some surprises. My opening:
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Select Committee,
My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love. I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack.
I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.
It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”
A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.
But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.
The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.
What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.
We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:
Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:
Or:
Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.
This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we’ve summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi.
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.
Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.
As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.
Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.
But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.
[ = Taibbi starts to run out of time during video of speech = ]
Some will say, “So what? Why shouldn’t we eliminate disinformation?”
To begin with, you can’t have a state-sponsored system targeting “disinformation” without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict.
Many of the fears driving what my colleague Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” also inspired the infamous “Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.” The latter outlawed “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president.”
Here is something that will sound familiar: supporters of that law hundreds of years ago were quick to denounce their critics as sympathizers with a hostile foreign power, at the time France. Alexander Hamilton said Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were “more Frenchmen than Americans.”
Jefferson, in vehemently opposing these laws, said democracy cannot survive in a country where power is given to people “whose suspicions may be the evidence.” He added:
It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.
Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy.
This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.
We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we’re now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab “disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI & NYT takes it seriously.
[ = Paragraphs above were skipped due to time restraints = ]
It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.
This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.
For hundreds of years, the thing that’s distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we don’t let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government.
The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere.
If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I would be happy to answer any questions from the Committee.
3 Cheers for Liberal Defectors
Laura Hollis - Town Hall.
Conservative journalists, commentators and on-air talent at organizations like Fox News, The Blaze, Townhall, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, HotAir, PJ Media, The Federalist and others have been working for years to break the stranglehold that the Left has on the media, and therefore news and culture. They have made remarkable strides, and their impact is growing every day.
More recently, a less-frequently discussed but equally notable phenomenon has been taking place. Over the past few years, a notable number of left-wing authors have broken ranks with their comrades in pursuit of a work environment free of the censorship and bias that has been throttling real reporting.
Bari Weiss left The New York Times, moved to Substack, and then founded a new online newsletter called The Free Press that features writers of a variety of political persuasions. Glenn Greenwald was one of the co-founders of The Intercept, created purportedly in response to a perceived need for independent journalism. Greenwald subsequently left The Intercept, citing editorial censorship; he, too, moved to Substack. Michael Shellenberger, who used to describe himself as a progressive, wrote a scathing piece for Forbes magazine in 2019, criticizing so-called progressive policies in California that were contributing to the homelessness crisis in that state. Shellenberger has since authored two bestselling books, "Apocalypse Never" and "San Fransicko," exposing the deceit and damage inflicted by the environmental and homelessness policies espoused by the Left. Matt Taibbi was once a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. He now publishes his popular online newsletter, The Racket, via Substack.
Greenwald has become a relentless critic of American media, newly popular on the Right and now loathed by the Left. Weiss, Taibbi and Shellenberger have also made themselves personae non grata on the Left by helping Twitter's new owner Elon Musk reveal the extent of the censorship that was taking place in the social media behemoth. Twitter's former executives -- often at the behest of Democrat operatives in government -- were falsely labeling political conservatives as Russian operatives, suppressing truthful but damaging information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, and shutting down the accounts of anyone with questions or information that ran counter to the "official narrative" about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, alternative treatment protocols, the efficacy of masks or the risks of vaccines.
These defections provide an opportunity to focus the public's attention on the important differences between "liberal" and "progressive."
Although "liberal" has been painted as left-wing in this country for at least the past hundred years, the Founders of this country would have characterized themselves as liberals, the word connoting at the time a belief in certain fundamental individual rights, including individual liberty (along with corresponding responsibility) and the right of self-governance.
Traditional liberalism was grounded in distinct, fundamental principles. The language in America's foundational documents makes those principles clear. The Declaration of Independence states not only that there is such a thing as truth but that some truths are "self-evident," including the truth that "all men are created equal." It professes that certain rights -- notably, although not exclusively, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -- are inherent in mankind by virtue of our status as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.
Progressivism has revealed itself, time and time again, to be unmoored from principles, which explains so many of the otherwise inexplicable inconsistencies it its application. Of course we want free speech -- until we disagree with what's being said. Justice and equitable treatment for minorities are righteous demands -- unless the minorities are conservative. Women's rights are important -- until some biological men claim to be women. Protecting children is a universal objective -- until some adults want to inject discussions of their own sexual preferences and identifications into preschool and grade school curricula. Preserving the environment is praiseworthy -- until one bumps up against the ugly realities of burying wind turbine blades, acreage needed for solar panels, or mining the metals for electric car batteries. Black lives matter -- except for those lost to abortion. Bodily autonomy is sacrosanct -- other than the government forcing people to take experimental " vaccines."
Progressivism is only about goals, and the power needed to obtain those goals -- "by any means necessary ..." In that respect, it is just another offshoot of Marxism. Indeed, even the goals themselves can change, depending upon who has the power, and what they want. Trying to pin progressives down on fundamental principles is like trying to predict the movement of a school of fish. Without firm societal and governmental restraints -- themselves rooted solidly in principles like liberty and due process -- progressivism ultimately devolves into purity tests with grievous ramifications for those who fail them. Today's "cancel culture" is a warning; what comes next are concentration and re-education camps, imprisonment, torture and executions.
None of this is to say that those who identify as "progressives" are themselves without principles. To the contrary, the vast majority are no doubt highly principled people who believe that the movements they support are manifestations of those principles.
Indeed, the belief in fundamental principles is what's behind so many of the defections from progressivism: journalists who believe in truth; academics who believe in inquiry and collegial debate; politicians who believe in transparency, fair elections and actual democracy; anyone who believes in the protection of children and sanctity of human life.
We should herald those with the courage and integrity to recognize hypocrisy and demand adherence to principles. Individuals regardless of their political affiliations who share a commitment to fundamental principles have the best chance to bury progressivism and relegate it to the history books, where it belongs.
Conservatives, I Apologize
My "Team" was Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda.
Dr. Naomi Wolf Article with related supporting links is HERE
There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.
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It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.
But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.
I owe you a full-throated apology.
I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me - many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases.
The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day, the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police.
This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.
There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed by some Democrats in leadership and by most of the legacy media to have been killed by rioters at the Capitol that day, alive in at least one section of the newly released video. The USCP medical examiner states that this Officer died of “natural causes,” but also that he died “in the line of duty.” Whatever the truth of this confusing conclusion, and with all respect for and condolences to Officer Sicknick’s family, the circumstances of his death do matter to the public, as without his death having been caused by the events of Jan 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a “deadly insurrection.”
Sadly, though the contrary was what was reported, Officer Sicknick died two days after Jan 6, from suffering two strokes.
There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Sen Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr Carlson’s and Fox News’ sin, weirdly, as “Over-Use” of Jan 6 footage. Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public interest events? How can you “over-use” real footage of events of national relevance?
Sen Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate minority leader, did not say the video on Fox News was fake or doctored. He said, rather, that it was “a mistake” to depart from the views of the events held by the chief of the Capitol Police. This is a statement from McConnell about orthodoxy — not a statement about a specific truth or untruth.
I don’t agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos as depicting “mostly peaceful chaos.”
I do think it is a mistake to downplay how serious it is when a legislative institution suffers a security breach of any kind, however that came to be.
But you don’t have to agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was leaked to him.
And remember, by law that footage belongs to us — it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives. You don’t have to agree with Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to notice the latest hypocrisy by the Left. My acquaintance and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg was rightly lionized by the Left for having illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times was rightly applauded for having run this leaked material in 1971.
I do not see how Mr Carlson’s airing of video material of national significance that the current government would prefer to keep hidden, or Fox News’ support for its disclosure to the public, is any different from that famous case of disclosure of inside information of public importance. You don’t have to agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate. From the start, there have been things about the dominant, Democrats’ and legacy media’s, narrative of Jan 6, that seemed off, or contradictory, to me. (That does not mean I agree with the interpretation of these events in general on the right. Bear with me). There is no way to un-hear the interview that Mr Carlson did with former Capitol police office Tarik Johnson, who said that he received no guidance when he called his superiors, terrified, as the Capitol was breached, to ask for direction. That situation is anomalous. There is always a security chain of command in the Capitol, at the Rayburn Building, at the White House of course, and so on, which is part of a rock-solid “security plan.” There are usually, indeed, multiple snipers standing on the steps of the Capitol, facing outward. I made note of this when I was researching and writing The End of America. There is never improvisation, or any confusion in security practices or in what is expected of “the security plan”, involving “principals” such as Members of Congress, or staff at the White House. I know this as a former political consultant and former White House spouse. The reason for a tightly scripted chain of command and an absolutely ironclad security plan in these buildings, is so that security crises such as the events of Jan 6 can never happen. The fact that so much confusion in security practice took place on Jan 6, is hard to understand. There is no way to not see that among the violent and terrifying scenes of that day, as revealed by Mr Carlson, there were also scenes of officers with the United States Capitol Police accompanying one protester who would become iconic, the “Q-Anon Shaman”, Jacob Chansley - and escorting him peaceably through the hallways of our nation’s legislative center. I was oddly unsurprised to see the “Q-Anon Shaman” being ushered through the hallways by Capitol Police; he was ready for the cameras in full makeup, horned fur hat, his tattooed chest bare (on a freezing day), and adorned in other highly cinematic regalia. I don’t know what Mr Chansley thought he was doing there that day, but so many subsequent legacy media images of the event put him so dramatically front and center — and the barbaric nature of his appearance was so illustrative of exactly the message that Democrats in leadership wished to send about the event — that I am not surprised to see that his path to the center of events was not blocked but was apparently facilitated by Capitol Police. A point I have made over and over since 9/11 is that many events in history are both real and hyped. Many actors in historic events have their agendas, but are also at times used by other people with their own agendas, in ways of which the former are unaware. Terrorists and terrorism in the Bush era are one example. This issue was both real and hyped. “Patriots” or “insurgents” (depending on who you are) entering the Capitol can be part of a real event that is also exploited or manipulated by others. We don’t know yet if this is the case in relation to the events of Jan 6, or to what extent it may be the case. That is where a real investigation must come in. But as someone who has studied history, and the theatrics of history, for decades, I was not at all surprised to see, on Mr Carlson’s security camera footage, the person who was to became the most memorable ‘face’ of the ‘insurrection’ (or the riot, or the Capitol breach) — escorted to the beating heart of the action, where his image could be memorialized by a battery of cameras forever. The violence of Jan 6 and its subsequent service as a talking point by the Democrats’ leadership, risks its use also to justify the closing off of our public buildings from US citizens altogether. This would be convenient for tyrants of any party. Leaving aside the release of the additional Jan 6 footage and how it may or may not change our view of US history —- I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media “narrative” pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions. Those who violently entered the Capitol or who engaged in violence inside of it, must of course be held accountable. (As must violent protesters of every political stripe anywhere.) But in addition, anyone in leadership who misrepresented to the public the events of the day so as to distort the complexity of its actual history — must also be held accountable. Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view. Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day. So half of the country has been tarred by association, and is now in many quarters presumed to consist of chaotic berserkers, anti-democratic rabble, and violent upstarts, whose sole goal is the murder of our democracy. Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry. I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times. I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda. Dozens of former intel officials said so. Johns Hopkins University said so.
“Trump specifically cited a “laptop” that contained emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden”, said ‘CNN Fact-Check’, with plenty of double quote marks. I believed this all — til it was debunked. I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped. I believed that President Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart. Was there in fact an “infamous pee tape”? So many other bad things were being said about the man — why not? I believed that Pres Trump instigated the riot at the Capitol — because I did not know that his admonition to his supporters to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read. Because of lies such as these in legacy media — lies which I and millions of others believed — half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled. It damages our nation when legacy media put words in the mouths of Presidents and former Presidents, and call them traitors or criminals without evidence. It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood. Through lies, half of the electorate was denied a fair run for its preferred candidate. I don’t like violence. I do believe our nation’s capitol must be treated as a sacred space. I don’t like President Trump (Do I not? Who knows? I have been lied to about him so much for so long, I can‘t tell whether my instinctive aversion is simply the habituated residue of years of being on the receiving end of lies). But I like the liars who are our current gatekeepers, even less. The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust. I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time. I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in —- journalism. I am sorry I believed so much nonsense. Though it is no doubt too little, too late — Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA: I am so sorry.