The Censorship Grievance Industrial Complex: Part 2 - The War on Truth
Last week the independent journalist Matt Taibbi spoke at an event that was essentially a softcore Trump rally. It wasn’t a Jonestown tent revival, it was a pop-up market stall just outside of Jonestown, enticing the public with a taste of the goods and the promise of some much harder stuff in the back. Manning the stall and handing out the candy were various “anti-woke” centre-right types like Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, and Jimmy Dore.
“In the back,” of course, the “harder stuff” in the caboose of the Trojan horse, were Tim Pool, who’s called for the imprisonment of Democrats, Charlie Kirk, who’s called for the street lynching of LGBT people, and Jack Posobiec, who’s written a book called “Unhumans,” about how leftists probably shouldn’t be considered people for the purposes of dealing with them.
Taibbi’s most prominent and, these days, just about only topic of interest is freedom of speech on social media. He along with the much more conventionally right wing Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss, were hand picked by Elon Musk to pen a series of hit pieces on Twitter’s former and outgoing staff, throwing them under the bus as self-promotion for the new direction he was planning on taking the company.
The premise was that Twitter under its former management had been cooperating with three letter agency directives to moderate content. Although Trump was president for much of the time covered, the offending agencies were seen as “Deep State” liberal saboteurs and social media companies, themselves insidious hives of treacherous liberals, were arms of that same Deep State.
Political grievances had been boiling for some time on social media as the platforms, being private companies, had codes of conduct. That’s fine for a Planet Fitness, but for a social media platform that runs you afoul of the dreaded censorship.
Musk promised to allow racism on Twitter again but he couldn’t just say it that way, and it’s hard to elicit sympathy for a supposed conspiracy of censorship against conservatives if you’re drilling down and just finding people who really just want to be allowed to say the N-word. There needed to be a meatier story. They needed evidence that the censorship of right wing speech was partisan, egregious, and ideally, illegal.
The juiciest stories—the home run winners—were perceived to be Twitter’s handling of the notorious Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and its handling of public health misinformation during the first year of the Covid pandemic.
As I’ve pointed out before, right wing operatives, particularly of the so-called “new right” of the Trump era, see politics not as a sport but as a war. There are no true rules in war, you do whatever wins it. As I explained in last week’s piece, the appearance of being a victim of censorship is persuasively appealing whether it’s true or not. The Twitter Files, the Musk-Taibbi-Shellenberger-Weiss collaboration, was an early volley into making a rhetorical case for returning the Republicans to power in 2024.
There is, I’ll argue, no coincidence in the fact that the right’s anti-censorship heroes—these Three Horsemen of the Twitter Files, Torch Bearers of the First Amendment—have each been ironically involved in campaigns to silence academics. But I’ll get to that.
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