Dr. Tom Woods has reported on the appearance of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger in front of the House Select Committee. I have reproduced his report on Taibbi’s opening statement below.
In a House Judiciary Committee meeting today, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified about the kinds of issues they uncovered in the so-called Twitter Files, which revealed an outrageous collusion between government and Big Tech in the suppression of dissident voices.
Matt Taibbi is firmly on the left, and Shellenberger voted for Biden. These are not partisans. But, of course, the general run of journalists has either stayed silent about the ridiculous attacks on them or actually joined in. Why, Taibbi and Shellenberger aren’t working for the team!
I thought you might enjoy reading Taibbi’s opening statement:
“Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, Members of the Select Committee, thank you for having me today. My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for 30 years and a staunch advocate of the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine.
Ranking Member Plaskett, I’m not a “so-called journalist.” I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I’ve written ten books, including four New York Timesbestsellers. 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 Vegas slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of a 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 when we read things like “flagged by DHS” or “please see attached report from FBI for potential misinformation” — this would be attached to an Excel spreadsheet with a long list of names whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
Again, Ranking Member Plaskett, I would note that the evidence of Twitter-government relationship includes lists of tens of thousands of names on both the left and right. The people affected include Trump supporters, but also left-leaning sites like Consortium and Truthout, the leftist South American channel Telesur, the Yellow Vest Movement. That, in fact, is a key point of the Twitter Files: that it’s neither a left nor right issue
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 summarized and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter file, which was also released to the public this morning. We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the 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 thing, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index and many others — many taxpayer funded. A focus of this fast growing network, as Mike noted, is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation or malinformation. That last 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 amplification or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Zander 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 and deprivation without due process is horrifying.
Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense in such cases. 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 yet been taken. Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought policing system.
I’m running out of time, so I’ll just sum up and say: it’s just not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is, however, possible 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. 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 democratic rights are impossible. Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I’d be happy to answer any questions from the committee.”
Not one word of that can be seriously contradicted. Meanwhile, House Democrats, who reside in an alternate universe, behaved as if the actual offenders in all this were the two journalists before them who were standing up against the entire U.S. regime. Taking the case was Rep. Stacey Plaskett, who said that Taibbi and Shellenberger “pose a direct threat to people who oppose them.”
How deranged would you have to be to look at the balance of power here and say that it’s Taibbi and Shellenberger, who are merely reporting on what has been happening, who represent the threat?
Over the course of the proceedings the two journalists offered numerous specific examples of the phenomena they were describing, as they have been doing in their own writing over the course of the past several months.
A particularly chilling one involves Stanford’s Virality Project, which partners with a number of government agencies. It has urged the suppression of content it actually admits to be true. It refers to this kind of material as “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” So now it’s not even so-called misinformation that they’re looking to target. It’s information that they admit is true.
This includes “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
It’s bad that Democrats are trying to pretend that all of this is normal and unobjectionable, but it’s good that it’s out in the open.
If we have any honest historians out there, the story of the years you and I have just lived through will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
Taibbi’s opening statement is a tour de force about how America’s governmental elites were in collusion stamping out the truth ala Josef Stalin or Adolph Hitler. These people must be held accountable or America as a beacon of liberty will be extinguished.