Journey

Well, Representative Jim Jordan has invited Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, both investigative journalists that you may have heard their names from the Twitter files drops amongst other places.

They’re actually both going to be testifying in front of the house on really the disinformation, the war on disinformation that we have been seeing over the last while. What they’ve been exposing in the Twitter files is that there is this concerted effort by the powers that be to silence people. They claim they’re doing it under the guise of “we’re stopping disinformation and misinformation”. But ultimately, they’re just targeting regular old people.

Here with us now is Michael Schellenberger, investigative journalist, very involved in the Twitter drops going to be testifying also founder of Public, a Substack publication. Michael, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Kim. Good to see you again.

Yeah, so, Defying representative Jim Jordan has brought you in for this. What is it exactly that you guys are going to be talking about? What’s the scope of this investigation?

Sure, well, we were invited because the Twitter files provided a glimpse into how censorship is occurring inside of social media organizations and the involvement of federal government and other government officials, as well as government contractors. You know, we’ve now done about 17 of these. We’ve seen a lot of different things.

We’ve seen White House putting pressure on Twitter executives to de-platform specific people to censor particular content. We saw a kind of disinformation campaign aimed at convincing people that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow not real when, of course, it was real. So you’re seeing a lot of different things going on. It’s taken us a little while, it’s been about three months now since we’ve been looking at it, and other things have occurred as well that we will, I will be talking about. I don’t know about Matt’s testimony, but I will be talking about to put it all in some context.

I think the big picture here is that there is something that is basically a censorship and disinformation complex or a censorship industrial complex, in the sense that you’ve got a lot of government contractors, including ones very tied to National Security, tied to CIA, tied to DOD, tied to FBI, that are involved in actively demanding the censorship by social media of information, some of which is true information, some of it just accurate information, and some of it may or may not be.

But there are big problems relating to the First Amendment, to our freedom of speech when you have the government directly involved in demanding censorship, particularly of disfavored views. You know, one thing that’s keep coming for me as I’ve been doing the research is just that you have a right to be wrong in the United States. The First Amendment actually doesn’t prohibit that. In fact, I think people, if you think about it for a minute, being wrong is actually part of the process of getting things right. It’s debate, it’s having a difference of opinion, different points of view. And those, there’s a concerted effort to censor those kinds of things. And so we’re going to raise the alarm about the rise of the censorship industrial complex.

What do you think the agenda is like, who is behind this? Because one of the criticisms, of course, has been about the Twitter files drop has been this is really just focused on, you know, the right being censored by the left. And it seems to be this disproportionate attack where when are you going to expose, I see that sometimes the comments, “When are you going to expose what the right is doing to the left?” And so, you know, is it a big left liberal conspiracy against the right? I mean, who do you think is behind all of this?

Well, I mean the interesting thing is, so I think that basically this can be understood as a sort of counter-revolution of the elites against the revolt of the public signified by the rise of social media, particularly the rise of populism and particularly right populism, Trump and Brexit. So, when we now have a better understanding of the history of how we got to this place, and there was definitely a huge reaction to the election of Trump, but already in Britain, to the election to the Brexit vote in the summer of 2016, those two things were considered cataclysmic for sort of the defenders of the global liberal order.

And I should say that I am not an enemy of the global liberal order. There are parts of the global liberal order that I actually really support. I’ve been actually a defender of Western civilization, most recently in other contexts. But nonetheless, you see a kind of the military-industrial complex, the National Security State clearly making being clearly viewing social media as a threat to the long existence of NATO, of the Western Alliance.

It’s basically the revolt against populism that we saw from the establishment against Trump and really then going further and taking a life of its own, then moving from what started as really a genuine campaign to prevent ISIS from recruiting on social media, sort of evolves into an exaggeration of the influence of Russian disinformation efforts during the 2016 campaign to then it just becoming a much bigger effort to basically label legitimate opinions and even wrong ones, but nonetheless ones that have a legal right to be heard, labeling those opinions misinformation or even disinformation as a pretext to censorship. And I think that’s an important part of it. When you get sucked up into the disinformation kind of language, it’s easy to miss the fact that really most of the time it’s pretext for censoring speech that in any other context would be constitutionally protected.

You know, it’s a good phrase to call it the “censorship industrial complex”. Is that what you’re calling it? I think it’s fair to say it this way because what you’re describing is they start off with these good intentions, right? It’s okay, we legitimately need to stop ISIS from recruiting on Twitter, so they have to create a department or hire a person that does this, right? There’s like some somebody’s got to do that job, and it’s a job, and that job receives a paycheck, and or a department is created. And then when you stop this, you have this department, you have these people, you have paychecks, and they’re like, okay, well now what do I do? And they have to come up with something else for that department to do. And that’s sort of the issue with the military-industrial complex, right? It’s that, okay, well when the war is over, what happens? All these jobs, what happens to all this manufacturing? They don’t want to quit.

So, and then you’ve got lawmakers who represent those people who have those jobs, who rely on those paychecks, and it just kind of becomes this monster in and of itself. And a lot of times not because of sinister reasons, because it’s actually not sinister at all to say, I want to keep my job, I need my paycheck, right? That’s actually a very legitimate thing to want.

But when your job is reliant on demonizing people, you know, finding spreaders of misinformation and you’ve captured all of them, let’s say, then what do you do? You have to make up who this new spreader of misinformation is or you’ve got to create a war.

Or even we had a guest on last week, it was talking about the FBI, now they’ve got to meet a quota, you know, they’ve created these anti-terrorism units, and they’re like, well okay, you know, we’ve stopped all the terrorism that there is, so we got to make up, you know, find terrorists in America essentially. And so, that is sort of, is that what you’re saying has happened in this censorship realm as well?

Definitely, and you just described absolutely accurately the fundamental bureaucratic dynamic, the kind of desire for more power, for bigger budgets. Somewhere between 40 and 100 million dollars just over the last 18 months of government of taxpayer funding has gone to financing this complex of organizations which includes universities, non-governmental organizations, groups like the Stanford Internet Observatory is a very influential one, Graphika, we see Atlantic Council being very involved in this which is a long-time NATO advocate.

So you definitely have a big institutional financial motivation, and then of course, right along with it or inseparable from it is this really strong kind of religious zeal, I would say, a kind of ideological missionary desire to stamp out disinformation.

And you know, if the people that are more careful, the leaders of the censorship industrial complex will say things like, “We know we can’t get rid of all misinformation,” but they what’s amazing when you read these pages, and I’ve now read hundreds of pages of these documents, is that they don’t spend time talking about the obvious First Amendment issues at stake here.

In fact, they downplay it, or sometimes they’ll even say things like, “This is just a cybersecurity and national security issue. This is not a free speech issue.” That’s obviously wrong.

You’re talking about censoring, and often they’re actually aiming to de-platform specific people. In the election integrity project, there was, I think, like 20 super-spreaders that were viewed as the really bad guys that these guys wanted to de-platform, and they were all right-wing populists.

So you know, you’ve got a group of people here who, you know, I mean, some people say to me, you know, they say, “Show us the both sides.” Whenever we have found both sides, we have reported it. Like when Trump wanted to get, you know, Chrissy Teigen’s tweet deleted, you know, when some Republican will call who, but I mean, it’s impossible to read this literature or see the community and not observe where it’s sitting on the left-right spectrum.

I say this as somebody that is politically homeless myself. I don’t identify with either pole right now, and I have things about the global liberal order that I think are really great and support. I believe that you do need NATO. I actually support supporting the Ukrainians against the Russians. I don’t have right-wing populist views, but I do think that there is this tendency among elites, and it’s a very familiar group of people that you would see when you read this stuff, it feels very familiar.

These are people who think they know better, they think that people really can’t be trusted, they’re just going to fall for all this QAnon cults and climate denialism and race hatred, and they’ve got a very snobby, I guess would be the technical word I would use, view of people. And you know, I mean, the funny thing is, when you look back through history, it’s precisely these kinds of folks, I think on online sometimes people refer to them as like the hall monitor types, you know, the ones who want to go and get up in everybody’s business about what they ought to be saying and get in control of language. And so, on the one hand, it looks sometimes, I think, well, is it House of Cards or is it Veep? And it’s a little bit of both. But you see, I think people kind of behaving badly and really abusing their powers, particularly operating behind closed doors in a secretive way, trying to get censorship done.

And I think we need more people like you with your viewpoints actually to be exposing this sort of thing because so often it is people that, you know, that maybe fall on one side politically, not saying right or left, I mean, I think many of us are politically homeless, but many of us would criticize.

Like, for me and you, we would disagree on maybe on NATO or the war in Ukraine or something like this. And so often those of us that are speaking out against censorship tend to be on one side or tend to align on many viewpoints.

And I think it’s really important to have people that, that way, you know, people that are more liberal, they hear your viewpoints and they say, ‘Well, okay, we agree on these things, so you’re not one of them. I can’t just write you off as a right-winger, right?’

Like, they can’t just say to you, ‘Oh, Michael, you are totally, you know, you’ve gone full on Tucker Carlson or something.’ They can’t really accuse you of that, but you’re still calling out the censorship. I think that is so important to have because, you know, we are supposed to disagree and debate on a variety of topics, and that has been lost, it seems like, in this country where if you take a certain viewpoint, you’re suddenly told you are, you know, a right-winger, even if you’ve been historically always on the left.

Same thing happens on the right, though. ‘Oh, you’re a big liberal’ because you take a certain viewpoint. And we just have seemed to lose the ability to even have discussion, to disagree, to not then call each other conspiracy theorists, which is the label of the day. So I just think that’s so important.

But also, what do you think when you’re going into this meeting on Thursday? You’re gonna go testify to the House. Is it the whole House, or is it a committee that you’re testifying?

Yeah, it’s a select committee.

Okay, what do you think the goal is for the House then? I mean, Jim Jordan’s bringing you in, you’re going to do these testimonies, and then what? Like, what do you think? Have they revealed to you what maybe the outcome would be after this, or is it just for public hearings?

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I just don’t know the answer to that. I am going to make recommendations, though, and I have really three specific recommendations. The first is that we have to stop financing censorship organizations. That’s what these are. When you’re funding an organization that claims to be fighting disinformation, you’re actually funding an organization advocating for censorship and doing that censorship behind closed doors. I mean, it’s one of the most un-American things you can imagine, which is sort of having taxpayers pay elitist organizations at Ivy League universities to privately demand censorship of ordinary Americans on social media platforms. We have to stop funding it, and if we do that, that will take that will make a huge difference. Not it won’t solve the problem because there’s a bunch of people that really want censorship, but it’ll make a lot of headway.

The second thing I’m going to recommend is that we have immediate and instantaneous reporting by both government officials and social media executives whenever they speak. And the way this would work is that if the White House emails Facebook to say, “We want you to take down that content because even though it’s true, it’s causing vaccine hesitancy,” the White House official can send that email, but they need to email it to some address and have it instantly tweeted out, put on Facebook, sent out as a press release, on email, and put on their website. That’s all very simple, no cost, instantaneous, no additional bureaucratic burden. They must do that, and the social media companies must do it too. And so I think that would reduce the chance of any kind of creeping around like we see secretive stuff going on because you would know the other guy could always make it public. And if you don’t make it public, that would need to be, there would need to be some sort of prosecution of that because that would be threatening our first and most important amendment, the one that all of our democracy rests upon.

And then I think the third part of it is that Section 230 does need to be reformed. There’s a lot of arguments on both sides of it. I actually think that there is potential with that issue in particular but also the first two to get moderate, reasonable Democrats and Republicans to agree, because I think that for me, just when you go through what’s been going on and the skulking around and the creeping around by people demanding censorship, I think most reasonable people will look at that and say, hey, that’s not what we signed up for in the United States. Maybe they’ll do that in Europe, though I think even many Europeans I know would not do not care for that sort of government involvement in censoring freedom of expression on online platforms, but it’s not American. It’s not what we do. We have very strong strong protections of freedom of speech.

You can’t incite violence. You can’t use your speech to incite Lynch Mob to go and hurt some group of people. That’s not legal or it’s not, it’s just like, it’s not legal to threaten somebody with violence. But beyond that, a heck of a lot of speech, including rallying many supporters to engage in widespread protests and political opposition and also to claim that elections were fraudulent, I think it’s terrible. I don’t think people should call elections fraudulent if they’re not fraudulent, but that is protected speech, and I think we have to be careful when we start repressing the right and censoring people’s right to say that.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think censorship is one of those topics that I feel like so many of us should be able to agree on, no matter where, no matter if we disagree on absolutely everything else. As an American, we should all just say, yeah, we absolutely don’t want censorship, but you know the pendulum swings. I’m very aware of this, the pendulum swings. Right now, it does seem the right is being censored by the liberal order, you know, that’s trying to go after the right. But in the past, it has been the right going after the left, and there, it kind of goes back and forth. I mean, I thought it was really timely, ironically almost.

I don’t know if anybody else really noticed it, but when the Trial of the Chicago Seven came out, that movie came out and it was in 2020, and I just thought, I hope people are watching. I mean, this is from the right censoring the left, but people watched it and I couldn’t believe it just kind of glossed over them that it’s such a similar thing to go after protesters and it was just so similar to what had happened even in January. I just felt like it was, it’s such a similar thing but people just, you know.

You want liberals to be back in touch with this. I think, you know, Matt Taibbi and I are both the same age, you know, we’re both Gen Xers and we’re in our early 50s, and so we came of age when the left was very different than it is today. I mean, I remember back the year I graduated from high school, 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that you have a constitutional right to burn the flag, you know, who wanted to ban flag-burning, it was not lefties, it was righties. So, yeah, things have definitely changed. I will note, though, that I think that the censorship is overwhelmingly elitist against populists, and so the demands for censorship have also been aimed at Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and Bernie Sanders, and so it’s, I think the reason it switched from the right demanding censorship to the left, demanding censorship over the last 30 years has to do with the populist turn on the right and the more elitist turn on the left.

Everybody knows that this is happening because we can see it with working-class voters moving more into the Republican camp and more professional business-type folks moving from Republican to Democrats. So some of that’s just a reflection, I think, of the changing dynamic of populism.

But there’s a sense in which the folks that are censoring that are part of the censorship industrial complex: They really want to control the information environment, and they get really freaked out when people start talking about challenging, particularly challenging the liberal global order, but also just kind of challenging the system. And there’s just a kind of defense of the system here. It’s too aggressive. You know, there is freedom of speech, is not absolute, as we just talked about. But these guys are just going way too far, and I think if we push back against them and expose it, I think most people will say, “Yeah, we really don’t want a bunch of secret censors trying to decide what is permissible on the internet.”

Because even if you agree with them now, you won’t agree with them later. You know that’s it, they’ll turn on you every single time without fail. Michael, thank you so much for being here. Good luck Thursday. Definitely, I’ll be watching for sure, and covering it here on the show. So best of luck to you on that. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me, Kim.