The free speech fallacy
One of the most prominent strategies of anti-lib populists is casting liberal media as the biggest threat to free speech in America. Taibbi and Greenwald spend a lot of energy warning about cancel culture and opposing deplatforming and speech regulation on internet platforms OKed by a liberal worldview. Some of it is legitimate — I, too, worry about opaque internet censorship and certain aspects of cancel culture like self-sabotaging groupthink and targeting people's jobs for misbehavior. But what’s odd about the anti-lib outlook is its singular focus on liberals.
The right is at least as worrisome on the issue of restricting speech, and in some respects far more. The GOP has become an overt advocate for government censorship on college campuses and in schools and libraries. When he was president, Trump ramped up legal attacks on the media and harassed journalists. The MAGA right endeavors to dampen the very meaning of free speech by embracing disinformation as a political strategy. Billionaires who are hostile to the left own social media platforms and make decisions about speech based on profit motives.
Yet somehow Taibbi has said he finds Republicans “irrelevant” on matters of speech, has downplayed Fox’s enormous influence on the right, and has preposterously argued that all elites are on the left side of the spectrum. Greenwald focuses the lion's share of his criticisms of censorship as a phenomenon tied to Democrats and liberal media.
Taibbi’s blinkered attitude about speech likely explains why Musk, who has revealed himself to be a QAnon-friendly fan of MAGA politics, appears to have entrusted Taibbi with a cache of Twitter documents to report on Twitter’s history of controlling speech on its platform. To be clear, the leaks have helped shine a light on some deeply troubling issues, like the FBI’s apparent input into Twitter’s speech regulation. But it’s notable that Taibbi has exaggerated and misframed the import of his exposé, and that by agreeing to conditions set by Musk (or Musk-connected sources) regarding his access to the information and where he could publish it, he has tainted his findings with the aura of a comms operation. (Taibbi once noted in the past, “Once you start getting handed things, then you’ve lost.”) He has also conveniently lost his sharp tongue when it comes to Musk’s arbitrary suppression of users on Twitter.
If you are a free speech warrior, you should be concerned about threats to robust speech that manifest across the political spectrum, and you should take steps to demonstrate your independence from plutocrats who are whimsically buying public squares. Instead, anti-lib populists finds common cause with the right and designate Democrats as the implacable enemy.
The populist right is not antiwar
Another example of how anti-lib populism tries to nudge the left to come to mistaken conclusions about the nature of the right is the war in Ukraine. Now, Gabbard and other anti-lib populists have correctly pointed out that the Democratic Party has been overly blasé about nuclear escalation with Russia, and has stigmatized even minor dissent over the issue of how the U.S. should approach vital diplomacy with Moscow. That concern overlaps with the leftist antiwar posture of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America.But the anti-lib populists focus almost all their energy on the Democrats, despite the fact that most Republican lawmakers share the Democrats' position. Gabbard cited Ukraine policy as the primary reason she left the Democratic Party and slams it as controlled by "warmongers"; Greenwald trumpets MAGA dissent on Ukraine aid as a sign of the GOP's politico-intellectual health.
