Somehow I missed this, but it does fit in nicely with the previous post on the totalitarian drift of our oldest political party.
Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting Democrat Representative of the Virgin Islands, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, authored a letter that accused journalist Matt Taibbi of perjury in his testimony before Congress on the flimsiest of pretexts. In one “Twitter Files’ tweet and in his subsequent Congressional testimony, Taibbi, suddenly a villain in Democratic eyes because he was one of the independent reporters given access to “the Twitter files” for public release purposes, had mistakenly confused CISA, the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with CIS, the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit private entity. Or he had added an “A’ by mistake, which is what I would have done. Taibbi corrected the tweet, but Plaskett accused him of deliberate dishonesty in his testimony that quoted it, writing,
“While these inaccuracies may seem minor to you, they could lead Congress to rely on inaccurate testimony in considering and/or passing new legislation which would impact all Americans,” she said. “In light of the potential for such serious consequences, I would like to offer you the opportunity to correct your statements before the panel….Under the federal perjury statute … providing false information is punishable by up to five years imprisonment.”
Prof Turley—I wonder if he’s still a Democrat?—found this effort to intimidate and harass Taibbi for daring to expose how the pre-Musk Twitter engaged in pro-Democratic Party propaganda and censorship chilling in a searing column for the conservative New York Post. (Now that he’s been red-pilled, Turley can only get a platform on conservative media outlets like the Post and Fox News—by the way, did you know that the FBI regards the use of the term “red-pilled” as evidence of support for violent extremism?) Turley writes in part,
I testified before this same subcommittee and warned the Democrats not to adopt McCarthy-like tactics in threatening and targeting critics.
Members seemed to take that warning as more of an invitation than an admonition. Immediately after the hearing, figures like former Sen. (and MSNBC contributor) Claire McCaskill denounced witnesses as “Putin lovers,” while current members accused free-speech advocates of supporting “insurrection.”
Democrats have continued to attack virtually every witness who has appeared to discuss the dangers to free speech or the need for transparency on the government’s censorship efforts. They often attack witnesses and then refuse to let them respond. Recently, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) used that tactic on a gun-rights advocate in cutting her off as she attempted to explain an answer. Porter later demanded a perjury investigation as a result of the testimony.
Niec.
Oops! I meant nice!
Ethics Alarms 
If typos are jail-worthy offenses, what are autocorrect errors? Hanging offenses? I see how AI is going to wipe out humanity…one word switch at a time.
From Prof. Turley’s piece today on The French going after people who give the finger to politician. ‘It is all about instilling good virtue but punishing the wicked. After all, as Maximilien Robespierre taught the French, “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.”’
On a related note, is the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government set up to discuss and limit government weaponization or the ways and means by which to effectuate authoritarian rule over its subjects?
jvb
The best part is the subsequent revelation that the CISA was indeed complicit.
I mean, the A is directly beside the S.
I’m not sure on whether this was a typo-error or a the-names-are-almost-identical error, but it’s obviously an error. What’s the alternative? Despite all the Democrat hyperventilation, pearl clutching and couch fainting, I’m not sure what point they think they’re making. There’s no material difference in Taibbi saying CIS or CISA because regardless of which org he referenced it had no bearing on the actual material issue.
There’s some odd happenings in the Iowa legislature that’s effectively muzzled floor debate. The radio bit on this seemed to imply that it was a democratic representative that had sued to get a questionable bill overturned, but overall the response by republicans doesn’t look good. https://www.thegazette.com/state-government/iowa-republicans-self-censor-debate-citing-supreme-court-ruling/
You’ve completely misunderstood the issue at hand here. Taibbi used his conflation of CIS with CISA to argue that the government was colluding with Twitter to silence conservative speech. That one is a government body and one isn’t destroys Taibbi’s case (see his disastrous interview with Mehdi Hasan, in which Taibbi is nearly reduced to tears over this, and several other, factual errors.)
That Taibbi argued that this all reflected badly on the *Biden administration* —despite Biden not being in power at the relevant time, and Taibbi’s buried lede that the Trump administration had made the exact same types of requests to take down content as the Biden *campaign* did—demolishes his claims to be an “independent journalist,” when he was clearly acting as a pro-Trump mouthpiece. Seeing him get scorpioned/having his face eaten by Musk after ruining his reputation for him was just desserts, to mix several metaphors.
1. Taibbi is not a Trump supporter. Have you read the guy? He’s a long-time progressive journalist who got disgusted with the dishonesty and bias of his colleagues.
2. “that the Trump administration had made the exact same types of requests to take down content as the Biden *campaign* did—” So what? It’s just as bad no matter which side does it—the difference is that on the Left, all of the news media, social media and Big Tech is ready to jump when Democrats order it.
3. I saw the interview: it was one more part of Taibbi being punished for breaking ranks. He mixed up two organizations and acronyms. It’s easy to do: I’ve done it. This a “gotcha” to discredit an honest professional, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.
1. He is anti-anti-Trump, which means his goal is to make the Democrats look worse than Trump, despite reality.
2. Taibbi’s entire stance is that it’s worse when a Democrat does it, which is why he buried the lede on the Trump administration doing the same thing the Biden campaign did, while pretending the latter was an outrageous example of government interference, despite, you know, not coming from the government.
3. He’s not an honest professional, as that interview made clear.