Matt Taibbi – Truth Based Media https://truthbasedmedia.com The truth is dangerous to those in charge. Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:24:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://truthbasedmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/cropped-Favicon-32x32.jpg Matt Taibbi – Truth Based Media https://truthbasedmedia.com 32 32 194150001 Matt Taibbi Gets It: Today’s Speech-Squelching Authoritarians https://truthbasedmedia.com/matt-taibbi-gets-it-todays-speech-squelching-authoritarians/ https://truthbasedmedia.com/matt-taibbi-gets-it-todays-speech-squelching-authoritarians/#respond Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:24:02 +0000 https://truthbasedmedia.com/?p=194077 I remember when we had all these precious ideals in America. It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was curtailed, somewhat, in the second term of Obama administration. That’s when I began to worry about it and write about it often.

As a kid, I took it for granted. As a citizen, I believed in it. I never doubted it as a working journalist. That began to change a few years ago.

When I noticed things had fundamentally gone off the rails I got scared; my confident demeanor shifted ever so slightly. In 2018, I believe it got to me. I could think of scarcely anything else to write about. It was about either Christianity or the menace of the deteriorating condition of the nation. A series of strokes followed, in 2018 and 2019.

Even the joy I took in my faith wasn’t enough to keep me on an even keel.

Journalist Matt Taibbi is much younger than I. But I look up to him now. He’s given me some hope for the future of the free press.

“Isn’t that a beautiful phrase, a redress of grievances?” he writes. “Great, memorable language. Like a lot of Americans, I know the First Amendment by heart. I’ve recited it to myself enough to know it doesn’t say the government gives me the right to speech, assembly, a free press. It says I have those things, already. As a person, as a citizen.”

He continues with the thought.

“This is a very American thing, the idea that rights aren’t conferred, but a part of us, like our livers, and you can’t take them away without destroying who we are. That’s why in other contexts you’ll hear some of us say things like, ‘I’ll give you this gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands!’ Some people roll their eyes and think that sounds crazy, but we know that guy actually means it, and to a lot of us it makes sense. We’re touchy about rights, especially about the first ones: speech, assembly, religion, the free press.”

This was the essence of Taibbi’s recent address in London, along with appearances by Russell Brand, Michael Shellenberger and Stella Assange in which he segued in and around his experience with Twitter.

“I entered that story lugging old-fashioned, legalistic, American views about rights, hoping to answer maybe one or two questions,” he commented. “Had the FBI, for instance, ever told the company what to do in a key speech episode? If so, that would be a First Amendment violation. Big stuff! But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.

“What Michael [Shellenberger] and I were looking at was something new, an internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself,” Taibbi explained. “We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.”

He continued: “In fact, after enough time online, users will lose both the knowledge and the vocabulary they would need to even have politically dangerous thoughts. What Michael calls the Censorship-Industrial Complex is really just the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons.”

Taibbi mentioned George Orwell, who predicted so much of what we’ve been seeing.

“One of the big themes of ‘1984’ was the reduction of everything to simple binaries,” he said. “He described a world where ‘all ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged,’ where it wasn’t really necessary to have words for both ‘warm’ and ‘cold,’ since as he put it, ‘every word in the language – could be negatived by adding the affix un-.’”

It’s true.

“A political movement has long been afoot in America and other places to reduce every political question to simple binaries. As Russell [Brand] knows, current political thought doesn’t like the idea that there can be left-neoliberalism over here, and right-Trumpism over here, and then also all sorts of people who are neither – in between, on the peripheries, wherever. They prefer to look at it as, ‘Over here are people who are conscientious and believe in science and fairness and democracy and puppies, and then everyone else is a right-winger.’ This is how you get people with straight faces calling Russell Brand a right-winger.”

He mentioned the “Virality Project, which was a cross-platform, information-sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook shared information about COVID-19.

“They compared notes on how to censor or de-amplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat ‘misinformation’ about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages. One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as ‘standard misinformation on your platform … stories of true vaccine side effects … true posts which could fuel hesitancy’ as well as ‘worrisome jokes’ or posts about things like ‘natural immunity’ or ‘vaccinated individuals contracting COVID-19 anyway.’”

He says, “This is straight out of Orwell.”

“Instead of having ‘ambiguities’ and ‘shades of meaning’ on COVID-19, they reduced everything to a binary: vax and anti-vax.”

This is how they punished speech. This is always how they punish speech. How long must we endure it?

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]]> https://truthbasedmedia.com/matt-taibbi-gets-it-todays-speech-squelching-authoritarians/feed/ 0 194077 The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” Is a Much Bigger Story Than Most Realize https://truthbasedmedia.com/the-censorship-industrial-complex-is-a-much-bigger-story-than-most-realize/ https://truthbasedmedia.com/the-censorship-industrial-complex-is-a-much-bigger-story-than-most-realize/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 18:53:03 +0000 https://truthbasedmedia.com/?p=190977 I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“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.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even “malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am, celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about “Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join in the fun. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the planet in January of 2020 … that is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!

Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.

]]> https://truthbasedmedia.com/the-censorship-industrial-complex-is-a-much-bigger-story-than-most-realize/feed/ 0 190977 Elon Musk Reveals What REALLY Happened to the Hunter Biden Laptop Story https://truthbasedmedia.com/elon-musk-reveals-what-really-happened-to-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story/ https://truthbasedmedia.com/elon-musk-reveals-what-really-happened-to-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2022 22:32:44 +0000 https://truthbasedmedia.com/?p=185770 The debacle known as the 2020 election was at least partially derailed by media suppression and Big Tech censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October that year. NY Post had published an article exposing much of what they found on the laptop that belonged to then-candidate Joe Biden’s son. But it was three weeks before the election and the powers-that-be pounced.

Now, new Twitter owner Elon Musk is revealing what REALLY happened. He teased his reveal on Twitter, of course:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598781950478716928

But then… nothing. 5pm came and went. After just over 20-minutes of silence, he announced they were double-checking some facts.

He ended up going well beyond 40-minutes, but eventually he delivered. Here’s the drop (updated as more posts are added to the thread)…

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598845423979884544

Musk’s reign at Twitter has been a mixed bag as both conservatives and leftists equally dismayed by his actions, depending on the hour. This move goes a long way to making conservatives trust him more, if not like him for it.

Now the real question for both Elon Musk, Big Tech, and the corporate media industrial complex is what is going to be done to prevent this from happening in the future?

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