Matt Taibbi Goes Full Congressional

I listened to this week's Taibbi/Shellenberger testimony before the House Special Committee on Avoiding the Real Problem

*Sigh* So that was painful. Painful because it turned out to be a childish Dem-GOP pissing match, of course, and also because I know the vast majority of people watching it, mainstream or alt, inevitably took a side on that, essentially cheering for their team. But beyond that, digging through all the crap, it focused on exactly what I would have predicted it would: the intelligence agencies’ efforts to influence Twitter censorship, as agents for “the government”.

In that sense of course it feeds one of the biggest GOP monkeys over the last four decades plus, the hate of government, and the GOP controls this show. But it also allows for avoidance of the real matter here, which I have discussed before and will get to again. The important discussable aspect of this take is that Twitter as a private sector corporation isn’t subject to the first amendment, unlike the government, and so this has the appearance at least of agencies of the government using Twitter as a conduit to violating its own constitution.

On the Dem side, the issue is the general claim that Twitter specifically and social media generally have been and are biased against the right, which the Dems object to as false. They are clearly doing everything they can to define this set of hearings as a kind of political witch hunt, without any acknowledgement of there being a real problem here. Part of these efforts on this day was to discredit the two witnesses as biased on partisanship grounds, even though I guess they are both Democrats or Democratically-aligned.

Part of that was established by minority ranking member Stacey Plaskett, who is an interesting case herself: she is a non-voting representative of the Virgin Islands, although born in Brooklyn NY, moved to the Virgin Islands in 2007, and was a Republican until she switched parties in 2008 (claiming not because the Dems had nominated Obama for president, but apparently because there are no Republicans in the VI). Her education was enhanced by her race (selected for preferential treatment as a minority member), and one of her constitutional law professors was Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Jew. She first ran for the House in 2012 in the VI, again which is overwhelmingly Democratic, won in 2014 (with over 90% of the vote) and served as a House impeachment manager in the 2nd Trump trial; the lead impeachment manager was Raskin.

Her questioning was all about framing the witnesses as pawns of Musk, although in attempting that she allowed herself to be framed as trying to reveal the witnesses’ sources by committee chairman Jim Jordan, the king of soundbites on the House GOP right. In this particular case the revealing of sources is purely on journalistic principle; we all know that Musk is the driver here, whatever that really means - nobody is sneaking stuff out of Twitter. So this all got quite silly if also contentious, and Jordan came out looking much better than Plaskett or even Taibbi. Plaskett’s describing the witnesses as “so-called journalists” did give Matt a chance to recite his bona fides in his opening statement, however. Round one to Jordan, I guess, but the general tone was set.

Btw, Jordan’s opening remarks were about the FBI’s foreknowledge of the Hunter Biden laptop “leak”, which again kind of tips the balance away from the surface real issue of government influence and toward another GOP fan favorite, the “stolen” election. Gotta feed the monkey. He did bring in the Russiagating aspect, and then another important aspect of this bit, the Aspen Institute’s digital hack-and-dump working group - remember, when you hear “Aspen”, think “Jew”.

Two of the Dems, Lynch and Garcia, pushed the Russiagate yes of no? bit, and of course that didn’t have any measure of degree or effectiveness included in it, nor did it ever actually define what “Russia” means - Putin himself, the whole government, oligarchs of various stripes with various interests, teenage hackers, the whole damned country? I was disappointed that the witnesses didn’t push back on any of that.

The hated (by progressives especially) Jew Wasserman Schultz pushed the Musk spoon-feeding cherry-picked data, and got on Taibbi about profiting from all this, a rather nasty bit of business that wasn’t handled that well by Taibbi; she also questioned his credibility related to accepting this project. She said “I support the FBI and law enforcement agencies”, momentarily forgetting the BLM company line on psychologically defunding the police in order to question the witnesses’ commitment to an orderly society. She’s a particularly scummy piece of work.

Rep. Bishop (R-NC), who was up next and gave Taibbi a chance to respond to DWS’ accusations that she didn’t, raised Hamilton 68 and tied FBI frontman Clint Watts to that, which is one of the things on which I’ve been critical of Taibbi, but then he raised JM Berger, the Jew who Taibbi says was the author of the dashboard. They drill down on the Ham68 and GEC connection, particularly through Berger, and then Taibbi goes off on a three-letter dance on intelligence agencies that Bishop drops. Then Bishop raises Richard Stengel, who Taibbi says was the first head of the GEC, and Bishop plays a short recording of Stengel talking:

“My old job at the State Dept was as people used to joke the chief propagandist job. We haven’t talked about propaganda - propaganda, I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population.”

Taibbi responds with something Stengel had said in one of his books about effectively creating a propaganda ministry to deal with the information problem. Bishop then links him to Ham68, Taibbi only says there were links between Ham68 and GEC, and then Bishop says, “I think it’s closer than that, that’ll come out.” Taibbi responds, “I’d be anxious to hear that”, and laughs.

From Stengel’s wiki:

“Stengel is an American editor, author, and former government official. He was Time magazine's 16th managing editor from 2006 to 2013. He was also chief executive of the National Constitution Center from 2004 to 2006, and served as President Obama's Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2014 to 2016… Stengel is an on-air analyst at MSNBC… and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. His 2019 book, Information Wars: How we Lost the Battle Against Disinformation and What to Do About It, recounts his time in the State Department countering Russian disinformation and ISIS propaganda… Stengel was born in New York City into a Jewish family, and raised in Westchester County.”

Last year he also joined the notorious MIC think tank corporation WestExec Advisors. I had not heard of this guy before, at least in this context, but again we have a State Dept. link in the transition from a focus on the middle east to Russia late in Obama’s administration, like the CSCC to GEC transition I covered related to Taibbi previously, and another Jew like Laura Rosenberg of ASD apparently neck-deep in it. And he sounds like a guy who has really embraced his work, as it were.

For a better sense of his worldview, watch this video of a talk he gave in his State Dept. days titled Why we need to harden our soft power, which is about the world over the last 30-35 years - the end of communism and the parallel rise of the internet and the post-communist world dominated by neoliberal capitalism. Here he describes two worlds, the good one dominated by “us” and the bad one dominated by the middle eastern Arab/Muslim states and Russia (and China too, of course, plus various scattered illiberal democracies). At about 8:35 he gets to the point about an open media environment (ours) vs. a closed one, which is ironic given the Twitter Files and the closing down of open exchange on the internet that is so obvious over the last three years or so. In this he does talk about CSCC, again which evolved into GEC.

Back to the hearing - the questioning heated up about halfway through the two-and-a-half hour session, when the questioning returned to Plaskett and Jordan. Rep. Connolly (R-VA) says, “…the premise of this subcommittee, which is that the federal government has been organized to weaponize against conservative voices”, a claim that Taibbi pushes back on by saying his understanding is that the committee is concerned about freedom of speech. That claim by Connolly set off Jordan again, and he establishes the witnesses as Dem left, recites all the alphabet agencies, and then gets into the FTC thing post-release of the first Twitter Files in December.

Plaskett had drilled down on the funding for Musk’s acquisition in her opening, citing various sources of money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, some crypto Chinese nationalist who lives in Canada, and “possibly even Russia”, using this generalization which appeared repeatedly. Apparently this is officially all dirty money now, and all of that being in Israel’s neighborhood or part of this new cold war, a neocon definition. Oh, and she did cite the Jew Larry Ellison of Oracle fame, because he’s apparently a GOP donor of some note and even some to “election deniers”, which makes even these shekels dirty.

She came back at Shellenberger in her turn at questioning on this, in addition to the Musk/source probing. She also gets back into the Musk angle revolving around sourcing, and waffles between them getting selected information and too much information, related to Twitter employee personal information. This all about undermining the Twitter Files project and its fruit.

Rep. Garamendi (D-CA) pursues the nutter angle in social media and promoting lies, which he echoes regarding Fox News, so an attack on the right as the source of this stuff. Rep. Stewart (R-UT) makes it clear that private media companies can and should censor whatever they want and he doesn’t care - “they can mute, they can de-platform… I don’t care about that” - but the concern comes in when the government gets involved in that, via the FBI, CIA, etc., which of course means a country and its media landscape dominated by corporations has little freedom of speech, unless you want to hand out paper flyers on the street like Lee Harvey Oswald. And then he goes off on lies in the media, which is owned by those corporations. Wtf - the anti-government incoherence of the right; are you really going to blame the government for what the NY Times says? Again, I guess the argument is that the CIA, FBI, etc. were the source of the WMD and Russiagate lies that the media giants innocently reported, which is ridiculous. He ends with “the federal government cannot contract out suppression of free expression” - but if ultimately the deep state controls these agencies and the deep state controls these new media platforms (as components of that deep state), does it matter which is suppressing free expression? To what extent is this a coordinated dance?

Jordan then gets more time and gets back into the laptop business and the FBI possession of that in 2019. Then we get to another interesting advocate of suppression of speech from the Dem side, Rep. Allred from Texas:

This of course is the Black-Jewish Alliance raising its ugly head, the focus on “hate speech”, and particularly relating to “N-words” and “K-words”, the brothers in arms. It’s ironic that he starts out quoting Kanye with his butchered ebonics about “death con 3” and implying in an image that Jews are the real neo-nazis, the authoritarians of today, given that his use of the “N-word” in his “art” partially led him to becoming the billionaire he used to be before he turned on the Jews so visibly and got erased along with most of his wealth.

After using an infamous Killary quote he goes after illegal Russian oligarch money being spent to unseat him, also ironic considering that Killary’s own largest donor, Haim Saban, is an American-Israeli dual citizen whose only political interest is “the security of Israel”. I guess the difference is that Saban had obtained US citizenship first, which kind of feels like a technicality. There’s Saban and his wife on the lower right, next to George Soros; also note Spielberg top center:

He finishes (he never actually asked the witnesses any real questions, so this is just his declaration) with this: “It may be possible, if we can take off the tin-foil hat, that there’s not a vast conspiracy, but that ordinary folks, and national security agencies responsible for our security, are trying their best to make sure that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt or see our democracy undermined. And that the very rights that you think they’re trying to undermine, they may be trying to protect.”

Maybe. And maybe that nugget of wisdom, my friends, is the result of a half-century of cultural Marxism and neoconservatism wrapped up in one jagged little pill. In any case, the black proxywarrior did his assigned job here, including flushing one of his own who did not respect the unholy Alliance.

The next Democrat starts out reminding everyone that the first amendment applies to the government and not private companies (Twitter is actually a publicly-traded corporation, but never mind that - I guess the idea is that money in the form of stock price will vote on the extent to which a corporation supports the spirit of free speech, and this country is a “one dollar, one vote” democracy). He is the one designated to push back on Jordan’s laptopping, and he does so by quoting Twitter top cop Yoel Roth saying the FBI was “careful not to cross the line in advocating for Twitter to take any particular action”. What he goes after specifically is the Biden-Burisma prosecutor firing story, with his evidence simply being the record of the Senate Ukrainegate impeachment trial, the claims of the Democrats who prosecuted that.

This congressman is Dan Goldman; from his wiki:

“Daniel Sachs Goldman is an American attorney and politician who is the member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 10th congressional district. He previously served as lead majority counsel in the first impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump and lead counsel to House Managers in Trump's subsequent impeachment trial. Goldman is among the wealthiest members of Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of up to $253 million according to financial disclosure forms. Goldman was born in Washington, D.C., to Susan (née Sachs) and Richard W. Goldman. His father was a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. who died when Goldman was a child. His paternal grandparents were Rhoda Haas Goldman and Richard Goldman; his great-grandfather was Walter A. Haas, president of Levi Strauss & Co.; and his great-great-grandfather was Abraham Haas, the founder of the Smart & Final chain of food stores. He was raised in a Conservative Jewish family with his brother, Bill Goldman, who died at age 38 in a plane crash, and sister, Alice Reiter. He is an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune.”

Rep. Gaetz (R-FL) pushes back on that claim and then sets up Taibbi to make his statement on press freedom in authoritarian countries (incl Russia under Putin, harkening back to his eXile days) and the US, where Taibbi describes the government looking for info on reporters (the FTC thing) being a canary in the coal mine - “something worse is coming, in terms of an effort to exercise control over the press.” Right, Matt, the corporate media is trying to good, it's just that nasty government…

He then ironically mentions what was reported that morning, the Aspen Istitute’s report recommending “that the FTC be empowered, to have unlimited power to search all data of private companies, so they could more freely and more accurately search the speech of ordinary citizens” - the Aspen Institute is not the government, and what did I say earlier about this think tank?

Then Goldman gets more time to come back on Russiagate, and he hammers Taibbi with black-and-white simplicity (“yes or no??”) on the evidence of Russian tampering presented by special prosecutor Mueller, and then about the FBI pursuing foreign interference in US elections on the same simplistic yes-or-no basis. Taibbi pushes back but not that effectively.

Goldman then goes after Shellenberger on FBI’s involvement with Twitter, actually trying to make the case that the FBI saying tweets may violate the company’s terms of service isn’t the same thing as directing them to take them down. Now, the FBI has no legal ability to “direct” Twitter at all, they can only lean on them, and that’s definitely leaning. He then goes on about this not being the burning of books but only Twitter (“it's Twitter… Twitter!”), and then about Trump jailing his former counsel over the publishing of his tell-all book - I assume that’s a defense of Goldman’s co-ethnic sleazy fixer Michael Cohen, who is not named.

Rep. Stefanik (R-NY) gets back into the Aspen Institute’s hack-and-dump exercise related to Hunter Biden, and Shellenberger talks about the Stanford Cyber Policy Center advising journalists to “abandon the Pentagon principle”, which relates to the release of the Pentagon Papers (he cites Ellsberg, the NY Times and Washington Post, and even Spielberg and his film The Post elsewhere in this regard, all Jewish/Jewish-owned in a different deep state era), and then the Aspen Institute along those same lines. The mention of that Stanford multi-discipline initiative reminded me of the Stanford Internet Observatory, almost certainly involved in that, and one Renee DiResta, who Taibbi again tweeted about this week:

“Perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations is the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), whose ‘Election Integrity Partnership’ is among the most voluminous ‘flaggers’ in the #TwitterFiles… EIP research manager Renee DiResta boasted that while filling ‘gaps,’ the EIP succeeded in getting ‘tech partners’ Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter to take action on ‘35% of the URLS flagged’ under ‘remove, reduce, or inform’ policies. According to the EIP’s own data, it succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote… Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC, and other agencies. In the video below from @MikeBenzCyber, Stamos introduces her as having ‘worked for the CIA’: DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals. DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the #TwitterFiles.”

He then gets back into Ham68, which gets us back to the linkage between these two fine young ladies:

Me, I’ve been talking about Renee DiResta as a Jewish operative for four years now, since she spewed her lies on Jewish culture warrior Sam Harris’ podcast in January 2019, weeks after the NY Times had busted New Knowledge.

The last subject ends up being covid and vaccines, raised by Rep. Cammack (R-FL), and Shellenberger makes perhaps his best statement here; I particularly like the reference to populism:

“We use the language of disfavored ideas and disfavored people because it doesn’t fall neatly along left and right lines. If there’s anything going on here it tends to be more of a disproportionate blacklisting of more populist voices. Or just ideas that we would consider to be outside of the Overton window, the mainstream opinion at the time. But the Overton window moves, and so the idea that you’re just going to narrow what’s acceptable on social media to what is mainstream at the time would basically freeze us, and not allow the society to progress and for knowledge to grow and for democracy to function.”

Hear, hear. Taibbi follows up on that with the suppression of information on vaccine injuries or negative side effects, and the efforts to make “reality” match the desired outcomes. While the vaxx stuff is probably the most clear example of manipulation and censorship, it has a couple problems - it tends to fall along party or left/right lines still, and it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter underlying all of this.

The GOP-Dem pissing match is the most obvious problem with this hearing, with the Dems’ “nothing going on here, move along” posturing being the most blatant issue. Taibbi sent out a substack article email yesterday titled The Democrats Have Lost the Plot on his day in DC saying:

“The Democrats made it clear they were not interested in talking about free speech except as it pertains to Chrissy Teigen, seemed to suggest a journalist should not make a living, and finally made the incredible claim that Michael and I represented a ‘direct threat to people who oppose them.’ Of all that transpired yesterday, this was the most ominous development — perhaps not for me but for reporters generally, given our government’s recent history of dealing with people deemed ‘threats.’

“Regarding the former, both ranking member Stacey Plaskett and Texas Democrat Sylvia Garcia repeatedly asked questions about when I first got Twitter Files information, and from whom. It was a bizarre collective display of a whole group of politicians not understanding some pretty basic things about how not to act around journalists...”

Unfortunately, one has to pay Matt for more of that teaser. But the Republicans were clearly playing political games as well, which is part of the reason that the Dem reaction was what it was; they were just lucky to be “less wrong” on this matter.

The second-level deception here is all the focus on the intelligence agencies as agents of the government, and so the problem is “government”, which has been a general narrative for nearly 50 years, since the end of the Vietnam debacle, Watergate and the rise of Reaganism. There is no answer there, because the issue isn’t state, it’s deep state, and that isn’t the intelligence agencies, it’s who they work for.

Meanwhile, the matter of free speech is being eroded, because all this speechifying reinforces the idea that corporations have no obligation to support the spirit of the first amendment in any way, and that came from both sides of the aisle. It’s the government only, stupid.

All that focus tends to deny what is equally as clear here, which are the issues with new media ownership and/or control, and the co-ethnic control in government and particularly related to the State Dept. and foreign policy generally (since so much of this is tied to Russia). So we get Taibbi talking about Clint Watts of the FBI, that being echoed in this hearing, but no mention of Laura Rosenberger or Renee DiResta who he’s also talked about, just without the critical labeling. And oddly over the course of all this there’s been the shift away from Yoel Roth as a villain and toward him being a victim. Here is Plaskett replaying some Roth testimony early in the hearing:

So the revealing of his college thesis subject resulted in not only a homophobic but an antisemitic reaction? Yoel, are you admitting that Jews have played a disproportionate role in the promotion of sexual perversion?? That his claim of he and his husband being forced out of their home having resulted in the Twitter top cop being looked at so sympathetically says a lot about the power of the paradigm of cultural Marxism (homophobia) and the modern faith of Holocaustism (antisemitism), and shows why this hearing and the Twitter files more generally will fail to achieve much of anything. Once we get to “hate speech” the wheels simply come off.

The Overton window has to shift much more dramatically before it allows people to see through it what is actually going on in our society.

Postscript: A day after posting this article I tried doing a search for it on three search engines, using not only the title of the article but also the description below that, to give them plenty to identify it and not something else. I did the search in duckduckgo and it came up first on the list, and I tried it in bing and had the same result. Then I did the search using google, and not only was it not first, it didn’t show up at all. The last hit they give me is for this: 'As easy as ordering pizza': How fentanyl-laced pills are killing America's youth Close - but still a miss…

So as far as Joogle is concerned, my work doesn’t exist and I don’t exist, and they want to keep it that way. And surely because I “engage in hate speech”, I am an antisemite in their eyes, without question. This is a reflection of what is apparently acceptable on both sides of this political debate, there is no issue with limiting free speech and access to that, as long as the limiter is a private company and not the government, they have that absolute right and no one is criticizing them for exercising it.

As far as I’m concerned this is the ultimate consequence of what really started 40 years ago with the implimentation of neoliberal economics, that including the outsourcing of government services. And that service is censorship - why should the government, now essentially controlled covertly by 2% of the population, bother to censor the public square when they have the new media giants to do it for them? And this isn’t “undo influence” in Ike terminology, the government is just stepping aside and letting it happen, condoning it.

I think the closest anyone got in the hearing to questioning this was when Taibbi was asked by Allred about censoring hate speech, and he said it’s a difficult question (I do have to applaud Allred for allowing Matt to answer fully, btw, something his fellow Dems rarely did). But it’s not a difficult question related to the terms of service as determined by these new media giants, they are very specific about “hate speech”, at least regarding the consequences of it as they choose to define it. And at least regarding Google’s Youtube, that quite clearly means you cannot talk about Jews (as a group) critically in any way, specifically including questioning certain “historical events”.

And that’s where Allred stepped in, because Musk’s Twitter wasn’t sufficiently playing by the old rules. And there is no question about it, he said Ye’s criticism of Jews should be condemned and censored, once Ye starts talking about Jews we should not be allowed to hear him. I guess because… what, we’re all children? We’re all potential murderers? We’re all closet antisemites? 😱

Allred’s justification was about people getting hurt, but beyond Ye stupidly saying “death con” instead of “def con” I don’t see any threat of injury (I don’t count financial), and certainly not in my work. On the other hand, what about, say, FBI agents and employees, didn’t this whole show create whatever physical risk arises out of this kind of criticism for them? I guess they don’t count, maybe because they can just fade into the background if they want, unlike at least some others?

In any case, this hearing barely scratched the surface of the real issues regarding free speech, which relates to the new public square having been sold to the highest bidders (in the case of Youtube quite literally), who apparently have no obligations under the constitution, as openly acknowledged and essentially applauded by both Dems and the GOP here. And Taibbi and Shellenberger basically stayed silent on that. Boo.

Outsourcing, isn’t it great?