My Speech in Washington: “Rescue the Republic”

Thank you.

This is every amateur speaker’s dream, to follow Russell Brand. Thanks a lot, God!

I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience.

So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing!

In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.

True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.

Now disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former Presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices.

In the open he said this! I was telling Tim Pool about this backstage and he asked, “Was black ooze coming out of his mouth?”

Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.”

What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment, yes, but more importantly: us. Complainers. That’s our shared experience. We are obstacles to consensus.

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for 35 years, covering everything from Pentagon accounting to securities fraud to drone warfare. My son a few years ago asked what I do. I said, “Daddy writes about things that are so horrible they’re interesting.”

Two years ago, I was invited by Elon Musk to look at internal correspondence at Twitter. This led to stories called the Twitter Files whose main revelation was a broad government effort to suppress speech.

I was invited to talk about risks to the First Amendment, but to spare the suspense: that battle is lost. State censorship is a fact in most of the West. In February our European allies began observing the Digital Services Act, which requires Internet platforms to enforce judgments of state-appointed content reviewers called “trusted flaggers.”

Everything we found in the Twitter Files fits in a sentence: an alphabet soup of enforcement agencies informally is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe’s draconian new law.

Now, is it against the law when a White House official calls Facebook and asks to ban a journalist for writing that the Covid vaccine “doesn’t stop infection or transmission”? I think hell yes. It certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, even if judges are found to say it keeps to the letter.

But this is post-9/11 America. Whether about surveillance or torture or habeas corpus or secret prisons or rendition or any of a dozen other things, WE IGNORE LAWS. Institutional impunity is the chief characteristic of our current form of government.

We have concepts like “illegal but necessary”: the government may torture, the public obviously can’t. The state may intercept phone calls, you can’t. The state may search without warrants, assassinate, snatch geolocations from your phones, any of a hundred things officially prohibited, but allowed. This concept requires that officials have special permission to ignore laws.

Ten years ago, we were caught spying on three different French presidents as well as companies like BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Peugeot, Renault, and Total. Barack Obama called the French to apologize, but did we stop? We did indict the person who released the news, Julian Assange.

Congratulations to Julian on getting out, by the way. And shame on every journalist who did not call for his release.

WE IGNORE LAWS. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authorty, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

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