Chris
Hedges: The Democratic Party’s Crucifixion of
Matt Taibbi
By Chris
Hedges
June 08,
2023:
Information Clearing House
-- On Dec. 24, 2022 Matt
Taibbi was in a
room at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco
poring through reports sent to Twitter from an
entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF).
The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force
that forwards “moderation requests” from
numerous government agencies, including Homeland
Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State
Department, to social media outlets. Taibbi was
given access to the internal traffic by
Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk. It revealed how
the FBI and other government agencies routinely
suppressed news and commentary. He published a
Twitter thread that night, Christmas Eve, with
the headline “Twitter and Other Government
Agencies”.
“There would be a list of YouTube videos,”
Taibbi said when I reached him by phone. “There
would be a notation that would say ‘We assess
that these are all created by the Internet
Research Agency in
Russia. We assess that they are promoting
anti-Ukraine attitudes.’ I would see that all
those videos were no longer on YouTube. You can
make your own deduction from that, but that was
the pattern. They would send Excel spreadsheets
full of account names and either all or most of
them would be gone.”
The content that was suppressed included right-wing and left-wing reports
critical of the dominant narrative advanced by
the Democratic Party and the old establishment
wing of the Republican Party, which has been
folded into the Democratic Party. Threads from
the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the
Occupy movement, Global
Revolution Live,
negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the
Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter
Biden about $1 million a year while his father
was vice-president, positive stories about
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports
about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of
the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were part
of the plethora of accounts that were flagged
and disappeared.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
I
was a victim of this censorship. The six-year
archive of my show On Contact, broadcast on RT
America, was erased from
YouTube, although not one show was about Russia
and none violated YouTube’s content guidelines.
Episodes were later reposted on
The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel. The show gave
a voice to those targeted by the FITF —
anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, prison
reform advocates, Black Lives Matter and
Palestinian activists, anti-fracking activists
and independent intellectuals, journalists and
authors including David
Harvey, Noam
Chomsky, Sami
Al-Arian, Glen
Ford, Amira
Hass, Mumia
Abu Jamal, Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz, Medea
Benjamin, Nils
Melzer, Pankaj
Mishra, Glenn
Greenwald, Matt
Taibbi and Cornel
West.
The FBI, before the release of Taibbi’s Twitter
thread on Dec. 24, had denounced the
Twitter Files as the work of “conspiracy
theorists” who fed the public “misinformation”
and whose “sole purpose” was “discrediting the
agency.”
“They must think us unambitious, if our ‘sole
aim’ is to discredit the FBI,” Taibbi responded.
“After all, a whole range of government agencies
discredit themselves in the Twitter
Files. Why stop
with one?”
Taibbi
was acutely aware these Christmas Eve
revelations, which for the first time revealed
the role of the CIA, would further enrage the
intelligence agencies.
“My
understanding is that the FITF has a staff of at
least 80,” Taibbi said. “It consists primarily
of the FBI, but it also includes people from the
Department of Homeland Security and the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. The
FITF was the conduit for content moderation
requests that went to the tech platforms. They
had something called an industry meeting which
was, at first monthly and then weekly, leading
into the 2020 election. It included companies
like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest,
Wikimedia, a series of others, about two dozen
of them. They would have a general briefing on
trends. Individually, each of the companies were
receiving notices. Some of them were receiving
weekly notices from the FITF. Twitter was. We
know that because there were very specific
instructions about how it was done. Requests
that came from the states went through the DHS.
Requests that came from the Federal Government
went through the FBI. They went through a
program called Teleporter. That’s how we got
those documents.”
In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called
to testify before
the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the
Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying
on March 9, an IRS agent visited his
house in New Jersey.
Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case
against him on the day he published his
Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a
letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to
IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about
Taibbi’s case. It was a Saturday. It was
Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The
case was four years old. All this suggests that
the IRS case was politically motivated and the
FBI was monitoring Taibbi.
“There’s probably little doubt that they were
at least closely following all the Twitter Files
reporters, but probably they were monitoring in
other ways too,” Taibbi deduced.
“One of
the reasons I agreed to testify before the
weaponization of government committee — and I
got a lot of grief from old lefty friends who
were upset that I was appearing before a
Republican-led committee — was that the other
mainstream news reporters weren’t picking up a
lot of these stories that I thought really
needed some attention. I needed other reporters
to do some work on this. My thinking was, if I
testified in Washington it might get some more
attention, not just nationally but maybe
globally.”
Taibbi ran into a buzzsaw of orchestrated character
assassination.
The Democratic members of the committee rarely
let Taibbi speak. They delivered vicious and
insulting diatribes. Here is a clip of
Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, along with Sam
Seder and other
hosts at The
Majority Report, attacking Taibbi.
“I
expected there to be hostility in the
questioning, but what happened in that hearing
was amazing, even to be involved with as a
spectator,” he said. “Rather than engage with
the material of the Twitter Files reporting on
any level, even negatively, it was pure
character-assassination. The ranking member
called us a direct threat to people who oppose
us. We were ‘so-called journalists.’ We were the
lapdogs and scribes of Elon Musk. We didn’t
believe in Russian interference. We didn’t
respect authority. I had a tin-foil hat I was
told to take off by one member. It was one
member after the other creating clips of video
that were replayed on MSNBC and CNN later that
night. That was how people got the news about
that hearing.”
“We
grew up in an atmosphere where the Democrats
were always the champions of free speech, more
so than the Republicans,” Taibbi told me.
“Through the 70s, 80s, 90s and even the early
2000s. Suddenly, on this issue, it was
wall-to-wall hostility. There wasn’t a Dennis
Kucinich or Bernie Sanders type who stands out
from the crowd. There are no dissenters in the
ranks of this party anymore.”
“The
old school ACLU-like liberals, they’re just gone
now,” he said. “There’s this new movement that
doesn’t believe in countering bad speech with
better speech. They believe in closing it off
and shutting it down. That’s what the Twitter
Files were about. That’s why there was so much
hostility.”
Taibbi
was informed there were problems with his 2018
tax return. The IRS said it had sent him letters
about the issue, but Taibbi had not received any
letters and the IRS refused to produce copies.
He also had electronic confirmation from the IRS
that his 2018 tax return had been received.
It was only when Congressman Jordan wrote to
the IRS asking for clarification that Taibbi
became aware of the files the IRS had amassed on
him. These included information
taken from search engines and
commercial investigative software such as
Anyhoo, Consumer Affairs and LexisNexis. They
had his voter registration records, whether he
possessed a hunting or fishing license, whether
he had a concealed weapons permit, his telephone
numbers, articles he had written and articles
written about him.
“Why
would an IRS agent need to know anything about
my professional history or about controversies
that I’ve been involved with or things that I
had written about?” he asked. “That seems pretty
dubious.”
“They’re not worried about the optics, about
doing something like sending an IRS agent to the
home of a journalist who has a big platform and
a reputation for not being afraid to say
something about it,” he said. “They’re not
worried about how this looks. It is concerning
for a number of reasons. It reminds you of
things you would see in a third world country.”
Taibbi was interviewed by
MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. Hasan, or his
researchers, had combed through Taibbi’s reports
and found a couple of very minor errors,
including a confused timeline and a misplaced
acronym. Hasan argued that the errors were
evidence that Taibbi intentionally lied to
Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconded the
accusation. The ranking committee member, Stacey
Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing
him of lying to Congress. Plaskett threatened
Taibbi with a five-year prison sentence.
There
are three steps to destroying a reporter who
can’t be bought off or intimidated. The first is
a campaign by the powerful, whose lies and
crimes have been exposed, along with their
obsequious courtiers in the press, to discredit
the reporting. The second is a sustained
campaign of character assassination. The third
is persecution carried out once the reporter’s
credibility has been weakened, his or her
ability to publish or broadcast is degraded and
public support has eroded.
This is what happened to Julian
Assange. It
happened before Assange to Don
Hollenbeck, I.F.
Stone, Gary
Webb, Ray
Bonner and many
others. It is what is happening to Taibbi whose
revelations of widespread censorship — by the
FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security and other
intelligence and government agencies — have
enraged the ruling class.
I don’t
know if they will win. Let us hope not. But the
deafening silence by nearly all press outlets to
what they are doing to Taibbi, as is true for
Assange, is ominous and self-defeating. It sends
a signal to those who attempt to report about
the inner workings of power that no matter how
well known you are or how high a profile you
have, you too will be targeted. The concerted
attacks on Taibbi are an example of how the
walls are steadily closing in to impose an iron
conformity, one more piece of our emergent
corporate totalitarianism.
“Nobody
wants to deal with a full-throated negative
media campaign that you volunteer for when you
do this kind of work,” he said. “It never goes
away. That’s kind of a drag. We’ve seen it
happen with you, with Glenn Greenwald after the
Snowden business and it happened with him again
during Russiagate. It’s not fun. People don’t
want to go through it. It’s a disincentive to do
counter-narrative work.”
“It’s funny, Chris, I thought a lot during this
process about your book Death
of The Liberal Class,”
Taibbi said. “There have been so many different
instances where the basic story we’re looking at
with a lot of the Twitter Files reports was a
breakdown in the system of checks and balances.
Civil society organizations, the media, private
industry and the government, they’re all
supposed to have different interests. They have
a check on each other. But what we’re seeing is,
underneath the surface, they’re engaged in
anti-competitive behavior…It’s basically media,
these internet censors, the enforcement agencies
and NGOs, all acting in concert against the
population as opposed to checking each other.
You were predicting this. When these
institutions break down, when they don’t work
anymore, this is what happens. It’s a pretty
quick step to consolidation of authority. That’s
the scary part. Once upon a time, if you were in
media, even a small offense in this direction
would’ve attracted solidarity amongst the ranks.
Now there’s nothing.”
He decried the role major media organizations played in
hunting down Jack
Teixeira, a
National Guard technology support staffer who
posted classified documents online.
“Instead of reporting on the contents of big
intelligence leaks, the Washington Post and The
New York Times worked with Bellingcat to deliver
this suspect to the authorities,” he said. “This
is a new
role for the
media. It is a big shift in how the press thinks
of itself. It doesn’t see itself as something
separate from government or law enforcement. It
sees itself as on the same side.”
“There
were probably a lot of people who were
frightened by the spectacle of the rise of
Donald Trump,” he said. “They were told over and
over again that this was a Christian nationalist
neofascist movement. There are elements of that.
There’s real truth to that. But in response to
it they became exactly the thing they were
telling everybody they were fighting against. By
the time people wake up it might be a little bit
too late, which is unfortunate.”
A
discredited ruling class, which has disemboweled
the nation for its corporate masters and whose
primary mission is the perpetuation of
permanent war, has no intention of carrying out
reform. It will not permit an exchange of ideas
or allow its critics a platform. It knows it is
hated. It fears the rise of the neofascists its
dysfunction and corruption have spawned. It
seeks to perpetuate itself only through fear ——
fear of what will replace it. That is all it has
to offer a demoralized citizenry. Constitutional
guarantees of free speech and the right to
privacy are noisome impediments to its tenuous
grip on power. These constitutional rights have
been effectively abolished. What the Twitter
Files revealed is massive government blacklists
and the craven acquiescence of media platforms
to marginalize and ban individuals and groups on
these blacklists. Taibbi, not surprisingly, is
being targeted by the totalitarian machinery he
exposed.
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