Taibbi: Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex

link.

As noted in Lowenthal’s thread, the story of the #TwitterFiles and the Censorship-Industrial Complex is “really the story of the collapse of public trust in experts and institutions, and how those experts struck back, by trying to pool their remaining influence into a political monopoly.” The losers in any advancement of this story would include anyone outside the monopoly, and they can be on either the right or the left. The intense negative reaction by traditional press to the #TwitterFiles stories published to date is rooted in a feeling of betrayal. The new media leaders see themselves as doing the same service police officers in the stop-and-frisk era called “order maintenance,” pouncing on visible signs of discord or disruption. They’re gatekeepers, and the #TwitterFiles — classic old-timey journalism that assumes the public has a right to know things — represents an unacceptable breach of the perimeter.

Taibbi and many others keep trying to make this a bipartisan problem. But as the left itself admits, it's mainly the right that has lost trust in [pseudo-]experts. And that is mainly because the left has taken over all the relevant institutions, including universities, accrediting agencies, professional organizations, etc. So "experts" are now basically spout the politically correct dogmas of the moment. And any expert who doesn't will be dismissed as a kook and face de-credentialling, "de-platforming," and "cancelation." 

   But honestly, of all the amazing lunacy the left has pulled over the last decade, the weaponization of "misinformation" and "disinformation" (and don't forget the latest!: "malinformation"!) is one of the most amazing parts of the story.