Speaking of the First Amendment: Matt Taibbi and the “Alamo Moment” for Free Speech

​Journalist Matt Taibbi testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. He noted that many politicians, such as former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, are publicly justifying curtailment of free speech, saying that the First Amendment gets in the way of building “a consensus.”

Matt Taibbi told the committee that building “consensus” is not his job as a journalist. He went on to say:

“This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.

“Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act that empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like ‘false communication’ or causing ‘psychological harm.’ Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.

“These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.

“Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.

“She gave a talk about ‘building trust and combatting misinformation’ in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a ‘really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,’ vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when ‘mixed information on vaccine efficacy’ got out, hesitancy ensued.

“We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote ‘unity’ or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.

“Bourgault also once said that to fight ‘bad content,’ we need to ‘work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists’ and ‘really try to focus our ad dollars’ toward ‘the good news.’”

“Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode ‘trust’ in media is by having government sponsor ‘exclusion lists,’ you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, ‘fact-checking,’ ‘anti-disinformation,’ commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.

“It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.
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“Is there ‘right-wing misinformation’? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.”

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