Democrats Are Mad At Taibbi and Shellenberger Because... Reasons
The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are mad at Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger for... reasons.
There was quite a clown show on Capitol Hill on Thursday in the House Judiciary Committee hearing when all the Democrats on the committee scolded Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger for telling the truth.
This particular hearing actually turned out to be a lot stupider than your run-of-the-mill house judiciary hearing because of the ridiculous and immature behavior of the Democrats on the committee.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, both left-leaning individuals, and Shellenberger a Biden voter himself, wrote a riveting series of articles exposing Twitter's shady anti-free speech behavior over the past couple years, which for some reason, made the Democrats very angry!
The purpose of the hearing, led by Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-OH), was to investigate federal government influence on Twitter's censorship, shadow-banning, and account termination of dissenting voices on Twitter.
For the past couple years, Twitter has been primarily targeting right-wing and libertarian voices for censorship, account termination, and shadow-banning, but has also targeted various anti-establishment left-wing voices as well.
Some of the most entertaining moments of the hearing came from Democrats trying (poorly) to outsmart journalist Matt Taibbi into revealing his sources of information from his reporting on Twitter. Taibbi, who is clearly sharper than any Democrat politician on the committee, didn't fall for their tricks, and expertly pummeled them during their lines of inappropriate questioning about his journalistic sources. Of course, trying to intimidate Taibbi into revealing his journalistic sources would be a violation of Reporter's Privilege, but the Democrat committee members pushed forward with their inappropriate lines of questioning anyway. One particularly entertaining moment came when Taibbi sparred with Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), during which she actually tried to tell Matt Taibbi who his sources were (claiming his source was Elon Musk). When she's finished her inappropriate line of questioning with Matt Taibbi, she then turned to Michael Shellenberger, to whom she hilariously asked if he was in a journalistic "threesome," which was followed by many chuckles from Taibbi and Shellenberger, and the members of the peanut gallery. We've taken the liberty of iFraming a video clip of the moment below, courtesy of the
Forbes Breaking News YouTube channel.
Much like the example above, many of the minority members' lines of questioning were similar in nature, pressuring Taibbi to reveal his sources, and many of them spent a good chunk of their time talking at Taibbi and Shellenberger, rather than questioning them. One such example was when time was yielded to Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), one of the single-stupidest and most disingenuous members of the House of Representatives, who spent a good chunk of his time whining about... you guessed it, Donald Trump. Rep. Connolly then, during his time, also attempted to mischaracterize the purpose of the hearing by claiming the only reason they were having the hearing was for the Republicans to claim that the left was trying to control speech on the internet, and Taibbi respectfully corrected him; then Rep. Jim Jordan, who at this point was visibly frustrated, told Connolly that he seemed to not understand that the purpose of the hearing was to protect the 1st Amendment, as it's probably unlawful for the federal government to try to weaponize a private company as a tool to censor speech. We've taken the liberty once again of iFraming this funny exchange below, again courtesy of the Forbes Breaking News YouTube channel.
And yet another similar line of hilarious but inappropriate questioning came from the ranking committee member Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) (who by the way, is a non-voting delegate in the House because she represents the Virgin Islands, which thankfully isn't recognized as a state in the U.S.), who spent a good chunk of her time asking stupid and irrelevant questions that made absolutely no contextual difference in the hearing whatsoever. Some of her questions consisted of the time period of when the 'Twitter Files' were from (as if it would make any difference whatsoever when the federal government attempted to weaponize a private company against free speech), more inappropriate inquiries into who Taibbi's and Shellenberger's journalistic sources were, and whether or not they've had "conversations with Elon Musk." Rep. Plaskett, much like her colleagues, also spent a good chunk of her time talking at them , claiming that there might have been millions of files handed to them at Twitter, a point which Shellenberger and Taibbi respectfully corrected her on, as well as claiming that "user data" may have been given to them somewhere within the files (which, despite no evidence of that, even if it was true, they didn't report on it, so it's irrelevant), and when Taibbi tried to respond to Paskett about the ridiculous, idiotic point she'd brought up about user data, she told him "[she] didn't ask him a question." HA! This hilarious exchange is iFramed below, again courtesy of the Forbes Breaking News YouTube channel.
There are so many more examples of idiotic lines of questioning from the minority committee members in the hearing just like the ones we've outlined above, that it would be irrational to outline every single one (because it was at least half the entire hearing), but we've taken the liberty of iFraming the entire hearing at the close of this article so you can grab some popcorn and watch the three ring circus yourself! It's still unclear as to why the Democrats were (and still are) so mad that Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dared report the news to the American people, but at least their anger and stupidity provide us with some quality entertainment! We recommend you take an evening to watch the entire hearing yourself, because it's certainly a riot!
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