RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/big-techs-digital-mccarthyism/

Editor’s note: The following is the prepared statement by journalist Matt Taibbi before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. You can watch the hearing here.

Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the  Select Committee,

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment.  Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love.  I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack. 

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-assault-on-social-security-tax-increase-labor-productivity-wage-degrowth-education-medicare-acbc7704?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Biden released his 2024 budget request Thursday while continuing to accuse Republicans of scheming to cut benefits for seniors. But he’s got it backward. By advancing policies that hinder the economic growth that drives prosperity, Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues are the ones depriving Social Security and Medicare of the hundreds of billions of dollars those programs need to remain solvent.

Economic growth has worked miracles, producing new technologies, sharply reducing world poverty, and inventing the concept of retirement—a stage of life that previous generations never enjoyed. The Biden budget’s degrowth agenda would sacrifice all that in pursuit of vaguely defined social and environmental goals. It’s no coincidence that real wages have fallen during his administration while real investment returns have turned negative. Retirement savings plans have lost $4 trillion in value since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, according to a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

My own research on the Biden agenda’s effect on Social Security and Medicare makes clear that low economic growth translates into smaller benefits for seniors. These programs give the elderly a share of the earnings of the nation’s current workers. The more people who work, and the more each worker earns, the more payroll tax revenue is available to fund Social Security and Medicare. I estimate that degrowth policies since 2020 will cumulatively reduce Medicare and Social Security tax revenue by at least $400 billion—and perhaps as much as $900 billion. The tax base will shrink even more if Mr. Biden succeeds in levying higher wealth and business taxes.

In the near term, payroll-tax revenue shortfalls hasten the day when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out and both political parties will be forced to consider benefit cuts. By statute, less national labor income also means lower Social Security benefits for every worker entering retirement.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/09/twitter-files-congress-censorship-network/

Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday about the online censorship network behind Twitter’s censorship practices.

The House Judiciary Committee invited Taibbi to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government as part of a hearing about the Twitter Files, a series of reports on the inner workings of the social media platform based on documents released by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and reviewed by Taibbi and other journalists.

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said. “What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi is a left-leaning journalist with 30 years of experience reporting primarily for Rolling Stone. Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who reported on the Twitter Files, also testified in front of the Subcommittee on Weaponization.

https://victorhanson.com/our-lethal-frenemies/

Over 100,000 Americans are dying from opiate overdoses per year—mostly fentanyl coming across the southern border. China ships to the cartels the raw product. They refine it and stamp it into pills for export solely to the U.S., deliberately using shapes and sizes to make their export seem similar to other less deadly drugs.

China sees fentanyl as divine nemesis for the 19th-century Opium Wars: Just as Great Britain in the 1830s and 1840s once sent mass death and addiction into China via opium, so it now will do the same as payback to the U.S.

Ditto Mexico. It feels that the loss of the American southwest by intrusive Texans and others in the 1840s is now divinely paid back by millions of Mexicans pouring northward de facto to reclaim lost lands (this fantasy is often explicitly boasted about in radical La Raza literature).

Or as President Lopez Obrador of Mexico recently boasted to a visiting clueless Biden of massive unchecked and green-lighted illegal immigration into the U.S: “Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!”

Lopez Obrador strangely thought it reflected well on his Mexico that 40 millions of his own citizens wanted to leave his country as soon as possible and at any cost.

The open border is now a conduit to mass death. Let me be clear: The cartels, the Mexican government (Mexico’s top drug enforcement officer is currently on trial in the U.S. for involvement in drug trafficking), and China are making billions of dollars on the mass death of Americans, a toll each year about 12 times more than all the Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over some 20 years.