These two have been up on the Hill before outlining the increasingly illiberal and creepy censorship mentality that’s engulfed the Democratic Party, the progressive activist wing, and its leeching into the mainstream media that have pundits who defend this Politburo nonsense. Michael Shellenberger of Public and Matt Taibbi of Racket News have been two of the most visible independent reporters who have been made uneasy by the actions of the Biden administration.
On Wednesday, both reporters testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” The entire hearing will be posted below. However, their opening statements mentioned a familiar agency whose actions have been uncovered, thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which would be USAID. Both had lengthy opening remarks, with Taibbi noting that right-wing misinformation does exist, but growing up a Democrat, he wasn’t afraid of differing views, even nutty ones. He felt his arguments in the arena of debate could and would neutralize bad ideas from taking hold.
Instead, Democrats and liberals want no debate and have weaponized the institutions of government to go after their political enemies. Taibbi and Shellenberger were part of a crew of reporters who analyzed and wrote about the Twitter Files, the extensive and chilling system of censorship and thought control built at the social media company with the help of the FBI. After these stories about the censorship operation were published, the IRS opened an investigation into Taibbi. These activities ceased and will continue to be dismantled, thanks to Trump retaking the presidency in 2024.
Here are Taibbi’s opening remarks, provided by Mr. 'Camus' who also transcribed it:
Opening statement by Matt Taibbi: "Two years ago when Michael and I first testified before your weaponization of government subcommittee, Democratic members called us so called journalists, suggested we were bought off scribes, and questioned our ethics and our loyalties. When we… pic.twitter.com/couTLqHCVc
— Camus (@newstart_2024) February 12, 2025
Two years ago when Michael and I first testified before your weaponization of government subcommittee, Democratic members called us so called journalists, suggested we were bought off scribes, and questioned our ethics and our loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take our take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things."
"One, there is no digital censorship, and two, if there is digital censorship, it's for our own good. I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. There was no way the party that I gave votes to my whole life was now pro censorship. Then last year, I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talked to the World Economic Forum."
"Speaking about this information, he said, quote, our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to, quote, hammer it out of existence. He complained that it's really hard to govern because people self select where they go for their news, which makes it quote, much harder to build consensus."
"Now, I defended John Kerry when people said he looks French, but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are self selecting their own sources of media. What's next?"
"Letting them make up their own minds? Lastly, building consensus may be a politician's job, but it's not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media's job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem. This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment."
"Most of America's closest allies as both, Rupa and Michael have pointed out, have already adopted draconian speech laws. We are surrounded. The EU's new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a Western democratic society. Ranking member Raskin, you don't have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an online safety act, which empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like false communication or causing psychological harm."
"Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas. These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Some of our own citizens have been harassed or even arrested in some of these countries, but our government has not stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws."
"Take USAID. Many Americans are now in an uproar because they they learned about over $400,000,000 going to an organization called Inner News, whose chief Jeanne Bourgeault boasted to Congress about training hundreds of thousands of people in journalism. But her views are almost identical to Carrie's. She gave a talk once about building trust and combating misinformation in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a really beautifully unified COVID nineteen message, vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%."
"But when, quote, mixed information on vaccine efficacy got out, hesitancy ensued. We're paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn't know that the press does not exist to promote unity or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That's propaganda, not journalism. Bourdieu also once said that to fight bad content, we need to work really hard on exclusionless or inclusionless and, quote, really need to focus our ad dollars toward what she called the good news."
"Again, if you don't know the fastest way to erode trust in media is by having government sponsor exclusion lists, you shouldn't be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone 476,000,000 of it. And USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine Michael and I saw across that long list of agencies."
"Collectively, they bought up every part of the news production line, sources, think tanks, research, fact checking, anti disinformation, commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, straight up censorship. It is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into exactly that consensus machine. There is no way to remove this rod surgically. The whole mechanism has to go."
"Is there right wing misinformation? Hell, yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don't remember being afraid of it. At the time, we figured we didn't need censorship because we thought we had the better argument."
"Obviously, many of you lack the same confidence. You took billions of dollars from taxpayers and you blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they're wrong about things they can see with their own eyes. You sold us out. And until these rather tires tiresome questions are answered, this problem is not fixed.
Thank you."
Here are parts of Mr. Shellenberger’s opening remarks:
Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and members of the Committee: thank you for inviting my testimony.
Nearly two years ago, I testified and provided evidence to a Subcommittee of this Committee about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, including Stanford Internet Observatory, and Big Tech social media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.
[…]
The latest is the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Last October we published a report that noted that USAID had funded the creation of a Censorship Industrial Complex in Brazil, complete with third-party “fact checkers,” committees of experts in charge of deciding for the entire society what the truth is on any given issue.[iv] And, after I published the Twitter Files - Brazil, last spring, the Attorney General of Brazil opened a formal criminal investigation of me, which is ongoing.
In 2021, USAID even published a so-called “Disinformation Primer” that called for “advertiser outreach” to “disrupt the funding and financial incentive to disinform.” Such “advertiser outreach” was precisely the advertiser boycott strategy used by groups with ties to the US intelligence community. These groups, with uncritical support and amplification from the media, were able to use this strategy to successfully get Facebook and Twitter to censor more content.
[…]
In my March 2023 testimony before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, I described the emergence of the “Censorship Industrial Complex” comprised of a vast and coordinated network of government agencies, academic institutions, and private organizations that had been working together to suppress lawful speech under the guise of combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
[…]
We still do not know how much money other US government agencies have routed to censorship advocacy, in part because they hide the money through multiple shell organizations. An investigative journalist from Romania in 2021 denounced USAID for “hiding the flow of media development money” to supposedly independent journalists around the world through an “offshore structure… US public money -> Delaware -> Eastern Europe -> Sierra Leone -> Mexico.”
The CIA whistleblower whose complaint became the basis for the 2019 impeachment of President Trump relied upon reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of USAID. In a censored 2024 documentary by German television broadcaster NDR, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP’s “annual work plan” and approves new hires of “key personnel.”
The journalistic collaboration behind the documentary revealed that OCCRP’s original funding came from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the State Department and quotes a USAID official who says, OCCRP founder Drew Sullivan is “just nervous about being linked with law enforcement. If people who are going to give you information think you’re just a cop, maybe it’s a problem.” It appears that this was the beginning of OCCRP’s practice of hiding US government funding.
OCCRP does not operate like a normal news organization. Its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, with an eye toward causing regime change. Sullivan told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.”
As such, it appears that the CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad.
This one example fits the pattern. The government employees and contractors who have engaged in information operations and censorship advocacy over the last decade have been overwhelmingly focused on silencing populists. That is as true in the United States as it is in Europe and Brazil.
Two years ago, I described the reasons for this. Since then, our understanding of the development of the Censorship Industrial Complex over the last two years has deepened.
Shellenberger said that while this censorship push is in retreat in the United States, it remains systematic in Europe, Australia, Britain, and Brazil.
