I don’t gawk at car crashes. I did not watch the ISIS beheadings. Bloody slasher movies aren’t my thing.
And neither was the recent hearing held by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It was so hard to watch I could hardly take more than a few minutes at a time.
Before the committee appeared two of the three heroes of Twitter Files fame: Michael Shellenberger, listed as “Author, Co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition”; and Matt Taibbi, Journalist.
Or, as Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands) referred to them, “so-called journalists” — before she asked her first question.
Mr. Schellenberger testified about “The Censorship Industrial Complex” and Mr. Taibbi’s testimony was a less elaborate narrative about how he got involved in the Twitter censorship issue, and what he discovered in working through the files. But Del. Plaskett and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fl) were far more interested in discrediting what they said by attacking their qualifications and methods, not dealing with the facts they found.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tx) was the worst. I hand it to you if you can stomach her full interrogation — I came away wondering mostly about her IQ.
My negative reactions? Hardly an outlier.
“Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were a credit to their profession and to all Americans who genuinely care about a free press and the First Amendment,” wrote Maud Maron in an op-ed for The New York Post explaining why she was walking away from the Democratic Party: the party has fully endorsed censorship. The Democrats at the hearing “questioned, mocked, belittled and scolded [Taibbi and Schellenberger] for not meekly accepting government knows best” — proving themselves “an embarrassment.”
It might be good for our side when our enemies make fools of themselves. But it’s hard to watch.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Invitation to a Beheading”
During the years of the Obama Administration, the Democrats in particular and the corporatist left more generally thought they were in a position to tear away the liberal mask and go full “progressive”. Now, someone as a practical matter might advise “Never go full ‘progressive’”; but the “progressives” could not get much further towards their objectives without that mask falling off.
Their present embarrassments not-withstanding, they may recover. They have levers of power that they have yet to throw. War, financial crisis, falsified environmental crisis, engineered scarcities of food and of energy, and induced and exaggerated pandemics can be used to shift us much further towards totalitarianism or altogether into it.
Meanwhile, the central tool of liberalism — reasoned argument — has been robbed of much of its social efficacy. The corporatist left have conditioned a large share of the ostensibly educated public to dismiss such arguments by reference to race, to gender, or to class.
The right has always been over-invested in beliefs that they think simply should not be questioned. Conservatives are unsuitable custodians of liberalism, and the Republican Party has never had a real commitment to conservatism, let alone to liberalism. (Those who use the term “RINO” for opportunistic, pragmatic, or technocratic Republicans seem oblivious to the history of that Party.)
never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake_paraphrased from Napoleon
Republicans enthusiastically endorse lies!
Indeed, censoring even genuine falsehoods is a great evil, but what the corporatist left was keenest to censor were facts.
The supposed falsehoods suppressed by the Censorship-Industrial Complex include:
• the authenticity of the laptop computer of Hunter Biden
• the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to human populations by a lab leak
• the fact that natural immunity could reduce the severity and spread of COVID-19
• the fact that early administration of HCQ is significantly helpful in treating COVID-19
• the fact that masks do virtually nothing to hinder the spread of viri
• the fact that six-foot or two-meter social distancing is grossly inadequate to meaningfully reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2
• the evidence that the benefits of mRNA injections were wildly exaggerated
• the evidence that serious threats to health from those injections were under-reported
The inclination on the left to censor has developed because, in general (and not just with respect to recent events), the left cannot win in a contest of reasoned argument.