"System Update" journalist Glenn Greenwald and "Racket News" founder Matt
Taibbi discuss what we can learn from this New York Times piece: How
Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation

GLENN GREENWALD: This is the New York Times telling their readers that the
only thing the government is doing is trying to keep everybody safe from
Donald Trump's lies and from disinformation that's designed to help Donald
Trump. And this is why they think that if you stand up and say, "You know
what? On free speech grounds, I don't want the government controlling
online speech. I don't want the government dictating what is and is not
disinformation."

This is why they think you're on the right because they believe that the
only people who would believe in free speech at this point are people on
the right because the censorship is designed to protect the country from
right-wing extremism. I mean, do you see how clear it is when they frame it
this way?

MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely. And notice how many things they gloss over in just
that little passage, like the fact that they presented this entire program
as an effort against foreign misinformation and disinformation and sort of
on the fly converted it to allowing the State Department for whatever
reason to be involved in combating domestic misinformation and
disinformation.

But leaving all that aside, you're absolutely right. They frame this as
being about Trump, being about things like Sharpie Gate, whereas in fact,
it's a whole galaxy of topics that most of them, most of which have nothing
to do with Donald Trump.

A lot of them are just sort of broad switch from basically from what one
source of mine called "CT to CP" counterterrorism to counter-populism.

It's just the government going out stories that run counter to official
narratives and they just don't like that idea.

A great example is again in this case, you had Dr. Jay Bhattacharya... I
know Jay and Jay is more interested in board games than politics. He's the
farthest thing from a Trumpist than you could possibly imagine.

But if you remember early in the pandemic, Glenn, the WHO put out this
terrifying press release in March saying that they were estimating the
infection mortality rate to be 3.4%, which is an enormous number. I mean we
were looking at a specter of millions of deaths, possibly even that in that
year.

So Dr. Bhattacharya had conducted an experiment in Santa Clara County that
found that they had overstated that number by roughly a factor of 22. That
the real infection mortality rate was closer to 0.015 which was exactly
matched the numbers that came out of the cruise ship on the Diamond
Princess.

He also found that the disease was far more infectious than the government
was letting on, which meant that interventions like masking and lockdowns
were not likely to be effective, not because of any ideological reason, but
just because they wouldn't work, the disease is gonna be, people are gonna
get it anyway.

So they suppressed this true information because they were advancing this
other idea that this was the most terrifying thing in history, and they
stood behind it for a year and a half, and suppressed doctors who had an
opposing view, that they later conceded was correct.

Now, that's, that's why we have the First Amendment.

We have the First Amendment to prevent the government from creating a
hegemonic opinion that no one can challenge.

It was a misuse and overlooked exactly as the constitutional framers feared
in this case. And that is what is so terrifying about the situation.

GLENN GREENWALD: The thing that is so important in what you just said that
I just have to draw out and emphasize is it is not confined to one issue.

It's not like this was done as an emergency against election questioning of
2020 because of the "insurrection."

It wasn't done as an emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is a framework that is being used in every major political debate. We've
seen the same kinds of censorship on the same basis when it comes to the
war in Ukraine, where people were constantly being censored because they
were challenging the NATO narrative about Ukraine.

Rumble is not available in France because France demanded that Rumble
remove RT and other Russian state media as a condition to remaining in
France.

And when Rumble said we're not going to remove Russian state media because
if people want to hear it, they should be able to, now Rumble as
unavailable in France.

This is a precedent that they have created. And of course, after October
7th, it has been applied to Israel as well. The first case, the EU brought
under their new censorship law to claim that X is violating EU law by
allowing to this information is based on an allegation that Elon Musk and
Twitter did not censor enough anti-Israel content and therefore became
guilty under the law.

It is a framework that is going to be applied to every major political
debate, which is what the purpose of censorship precedents are.

<https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/19/taibbi_governments_online_censorship_regime_has_expanded_from_counter-terrorism_to_counter-populism.html>

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