Twitter Files Journalist Shellenberger: Govt. Censorship is ‘Mechanism’ Only Seen in ‘Totalitarian Societies’
“It’s not a slippery slope.”
Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists chosen to publish the Twitter Files, is testifying in front of the Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee’s hearing on the files.
Shellenberger explained the path of government censorship:
SHELLENBERGER: “Seeing this censorship industry go from, well, we’re just fighting ISIS to well, we’re just fighting Russian disinformation bots to well, now we need to fight domestic misinformation, which is just saying we need to fight against people who are saying things we disagree with online, that’s all that means. And I — I mean, it’s not a slippery slope. It’s an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that I — we only see in totalitarian societies of attempting to gain control over what the social media platforms are allow — are allowing.”
SHELLENBERGER: "It's not a slippery slope. It's an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that we only see in totalitarian societies of attempting to gain control over what…platforms are allowing." pic.twitter.com/HjXmBt56Dl
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 9, 2023
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The Democrats are beclowing themselves. These former champions of against government overreach and abuse have become cheerleaders of the oppressors.
Dan Goldman, the new Adama Schiff.
Let’s just say in the past, as both Taibbi and Shellenberger also interated.
By “former” you mean several generations ago, right?
Subotai Bahadur
See above, please. Sorry about the comment disorganization.
They are absolutely against government overreach when they are not in control.
It’s what Communists do, every time and every place.
They are soiling themselves to the point they like the smell.
Check out Shellenberger’s TED talk on Youtube on why renewables won’t save the Planet.
Ruinables not renewables
For Leftists in and out of government, the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper that is no impediment to their totalitarian dreams. Leftists seem not to realize that the federal government lives only because of the Constitution. If the federal government refuses to abide by the Constitution, it has abdicated its right to even exist, and so, why do we the people have to abide by the federal government’s dictates?
Nullification of non-constitutional acts by fedgov is the solution,
https://jbs.org/nullify/nullification/
But this will only work if a state asserts this authority which in inherent in/to each state because of its status as a state.
And a big oh-oh on the horizon to the whole idea of a republic will come about where is a state refuses to assert its inherent nullification authority. That all-too-real possibility exists because of the super-charged lefty states like NY, IL, CA, DE, CT, MA which appear to be more than happy to have an unlimited NWO government in DC.
You left out MD.
My short list was simply to give examples. Certainly a more comprehensive list would include MD, NJ, ME, VT, MN, OR, WA, DE, MI. Wherever Democrats are entrenched danger looms.
Agreed.
Liberals have never fixed anything. Their only contribution is speeding up the timeline to failure. And the true irony is that they are destroying the very system which allows them to exist. I don’t know if it is fueled by ignorance (blinded by idealism), hatred (of themselves which they project onto others), or a combination of the two. When I watch the news these days I feel as if I am retaking Bob Neil’s “Germany Since 1914” class at Oberlin. The parallels are truly frightening.
Liberals? More like National Socialists.
They go by “Democrat Socialist” nowadays.
Same evil, destructive policies, but they’ll “do it better” this time.
1) Shellenberger’s thesis in the headline is correct.
2) We have overt censorship by the government and those in power.
3) The first thing censored is always the fact that censorship exists.
Subotai Bahadur
There’s government censorship all over, regardless of the system of government.
Try buying Henry Miller in the 50s.
True and censorship is in general a bad idea. However, not allowing the publication and circulation of a work of fiction like ‘Tropic of Cancer’ occupies quite a different place than the wholesale repression of events such as the grossly mismanaged Covid response where underlying facts were suppressed, lies inserted as truth and dissent squashed.
We can’t live with this. Censorship has already deprived us of our primary advantage over every other government on the planet, namely our American ingenuity.
In an incredibly short period of time, the tunnel vision brought to us by our “Best and the Brightest” has given us medical malpractice on an industrial scale, cataclysmic disruption of our economy, and the beginnings of what looks like World War III.
We need input from our outliers to solve our problems.
You onitted the Russian hoax, spying on Americans, and the Hunter Biden laptop. How many times does this government have to cry wolf before we the people disbelieve everything and anything it has to say?
A boy in a dress is a girl.
Okay, it may be Totalitarianism, but it’s Enlightened Utopian Totalitarianism. Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?!
Carl Bernstein is nowhere to be seen.
The Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi exchange with committee Democrats seems to have all the earmarks of somebody claiming the information that they received was somehow classified, so they never should have turned it over.
It sounds like somebody putting together an Espionage case, probably against Elon Musk, since his name was mentioned by a Democrat.
I seem to remember some of the items in the Twitter release bore the “(u)” markings for unclassified, so it’s just a hop-skip-jump to it also containing “(c)” markings.
Leave it to Merrick Garland’s DOJ to prosecute a case of revealing classified material pertaining to illegal activity by the federal government.