There has never been a statue built to commemorate the swift, brave, world-changing, and smart actions of a committee.
There’s a reason for that.
Far too often – in every walk of life – committees are where ideas go to die and the careers of dullard timeservers are justified and extended.
Not every committee falls into that uncanny valley of looking like work but not actually being work; some have been, in their own terms, successful in swiftly creating and implementing policies - Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety comes to mind, for example:
But, for the most part, committees are places people either do nothing and still get paid or pontificate and still get paid or make complete fools of themselves and still get paid – hence this installment of “Stupid of Evil?” – the Democrat half of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
In case you missed it, the committee held a hearing Wednesday and invited Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – two of the many reporters bringing the “Twitter Files” to light – to testify on what they have found so far.
And what they have found so far is astonishingly chilling. To sum up, many federal government agencies and the “foundations” and “non-governmental organizations” they fund bombarded Twitter (and other social media companies) with “content moderation” demands, suggestions, HINTS!, cajoleries, cash, and wink wink say no mores over the past three or four years in order to shut down public opposition and discussion of numerous important topics. From Hunter to COVID to Trump to the Deep State, if it happened in the last 40 months and the government didn’t like what people were saying about it they shut those people up, or down, or sideways, or six ways from Sunday.
For example, here is the latest dispatch in the Twitter Files saga -
– detailing the “censorship-industrial complex.”
So on Wednesday the committee, chaired by Republican Jim Jordan, wanted to find out from the horse’s mouth what was really happening and if government agencies were actively suppressing free speech.
Again, to sum up, the answer was yes, an unequivocal, absolute statement in the affirmative that could not possibly be misunderstood by anyone with even a passing relationship with the English language.
That is not at all what the Democrats on the committee wanted hear, would allow themselves to hear, and really don’t want anyone else to hear it, either (though the circular nature of censoring a discussion about censorship was fascinating to watch -
If you are not of a mind to sit through those three-plus hours, you can find condensed versions of Taibbi’s written testimony here: https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/big-techs-digital-mccarthyism/ and Shellenberger’s here: https://nypost.com/2023/03/10/censorship-industrial-complex-uses-power-to-threaten-democracy/ .
While none of the Democrats came out looking good – and none addressed the core issue of government censorship - four of the committee members deserve special attention for their particularly egregious behavior.
Let’s start with the top Democrat on the committee, Delegate (she’s from the Virgin Islands so is technically not a member of Congress) Stacey Plaskett. She began by referring to Shellenberger and Taibbi as “so-called journalists,” not the most accurate way to describe long-time award-winning reporters and best-selling authors.
She also inexplicably claimed that the Twitter Files exposure effort is physically dangerous. “I am not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses (Taibbi and Shellenberger) who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said, eventually adding that no censorship occurred.
For that and her other conduct throughout the hearing, she gets an evil.
Then we have Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida who hammered at both writers for having made money while publishing the exposes. She also noted that simply because Taibbi was a Republican-called witness he really couldn’t be trusted and claimed that Elon Musk (considering the tenor of the entire meeting it seems Musk has not given the Democrats enough of his vast fortune to earn political cover like Sam Bankman-Fried did) “spoon-fed” the pair “cherry-picked” information.
Both Taibbi and Shellenberger - life-long liberals, by the way - stated clearly that no access or file request they have made thus far has been resisted, let alone refused.
She did add a rather odd bon mot - "Hypocrisy is the hangover to an addiction to attention" – claiming Taibbi had violated his own journalistic standards by, um, earning a living? It seems she thought it was a really great line, though I think it’s putative profundity lay only in its incomprehensibility.
So Wasserman-Schultz could go either way, but considering she got bounced as Democrat Party National Committee chair for rigging the 2016 primaries to ensure Hilary got the nomination tips her, in general, to the evil side.
Then there was Dan Goldman of New York. A former prosecutor and current zillionaire (scion of the Levi Strauss fortune,) he is almost assuredly not stupid. However, during the hearing he displayed a warped vision of the First Amendment and, also, said no actual censorship occurred. When chairman Jordan gave him a very specific example of the Biden White House directly doing that very thing, Goldman wondered if the tweet in question was “lawful.”
A lawyer wondering about the lawfulness of speech…definitely evil.
But fear not – we do have a winner for stupid: Sylvia Garcia of Texas. She doesn’t understand how posting items on Twitter works, she literally said she doesn’t understand Substack -
and she ended with wondering in Shellenberger and Bari Weiss – a pretty famous person - https://www.bariweiss.com/ - she had no idea existed – were in a journalistic “threesome” -
- much to the amusement of Bari’s wife, who tweeted ‘How many more, Michael?”
So the final verdict? Evil with a big side of stupid.