What the West needs is free speech, not tolerated speech

Matt Taibbi

October 11, 2024 16 Reactions

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 authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy.” That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then “the devil’s music,” comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because “freedom of speech” is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination — the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that “free speech is not a free pass” — it’s becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in “reputable” media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.

* * * * * *

To small thinkers free speech is a wilderness of potential threats. The people who built this country, whatever else you can say about them, weren’t small thinkers. They were big, big thinkers, and I mean that not just in terms of intellect but arrogance, gall, brass, audacity, cheek.

Kurt Vonnegut called the Founding Fathers Sea Pirates. He wasn’t far off. These people stole a continent from the King of England. And got away with it. Eminem* said there ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks — there was nothing halfway about the Constitution authors.

James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, foresaw the exact situation of a government that IGNORES LAWS. In fact, he was originally opposed to the Bill of Rights because he didn’t think “paper guarantees” could stop a corrupt government. So he put together a document designed to inspire a personality type that would resist efforts to undo the experiment.

Here an important quality came into play: Madison was a great writer. The 44 words of his First Amendment were composed with extraordinary subtlety:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment didn’t confer rights or entrust government with guaranteeing them. Instead, the Founders stood to the side and, like an old country recognizing a new country, simply acknowledged an eternal truth: the freedom of the human mind.

This is what censors never understand. Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon… Choose your metaphor, but a fool’s errand. You can apply as many rules as you want, threaten punishment, lock people up. The human mind always sets its own course, often in spite of itself. As the poet William Ernest Henley explained:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Unlike the busybodies of the Internet Age, to whom words are just another overproduced, over-plentiful, unnecessary, and vaguely hazardous commodity like greenhouse gases or plastic soda bottles, people like Madison understood the value of language.

In 1787 you might have to walk a mile or five just to see a printed word. It was likely to be the Bible. I’m not religious, but I’ve read the Bible, and so of course did they. They knew the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”

That was a reference to Genesis: In the beginning, God said “Let there be light,” and the world was born. For them, the idea of the word was suffused with the power of creation itself. This wasn’t law. This was metaphysics. It was cosmogony.

A little country run by a bunch of jumped-up tobacconists and corn farmers needed an ally to withstand the wrath of European royalty. They got it by lighting a match under human ingenuity and creativity and passion. It was rash, risky, reckless, and it worked.

What was the American personality? Madison said he hoped to strengthen the “will of the community,” but other revolutionaries weren’t quite so polite. Thomas Paine's central message was that the humblest farmer was a towering moral giant compared to the invertebrate scum who wore crowns and lived in British castles.

Common Sense told us to stand up straight. Never bow, especially not to a politician, because as Paine explained — I want you to think of John Kerry and Hayden and Cheney here — “Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey… are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

Oscar Wilde noted ours was the only country in the world where being a kook was respectable. Every other country shunned the tinkerer or mad inventor and cheerfully donated them to us, turbocharging our American experiment.

We welcomed crazy and the world has light bulbs, the telephone, movies, airplanes, submarines, the Internet, false teeth, the Colt .45, rock and roll, hip-hop and monster dunks as a result. Wilde lampooned our ignorance and lack of artistic sophistication and tolerance for ugly words — hilariously he refused to speak at a town that named itself “Grigsville” — but his final observation was a supreme compliment:

The Americans are the best politically educated people in the world. It is well worth one’s while to go to a country which can teach us the beauty of the word FREEDOM and the value of the thing LIBERTY.

* * * * * *

In my twenties, while traveling through the former Soviet Union, I noticed that people from other cultures often had hang-ups about authority. Men from autocratic countries in the Middle East always seemed to whisper out of the corners of their mouths, as if they were afraid someone might hear, even about meaningless things. They would say: “Listen, my friend, the only good song George Michael ever wrote was ‘Faith…’”

“Why are we whispering?” I’d ask. “I don’t know,” they’d say.

People who grew up in places with the Queen on their money were class-conscious and calibrated what they could say according to who else was at the table. Russians were like us, expressive and free-spirited and funny, but infected with terrible fatalism: they froze around badges and insignias and other symbols of authority as if they had magic power.

Over time I realized: I liked being an American. For the first time I was seeing the American experience through the eyes of foreigners. I did an interview once at a restaurant in Moscow called Scandanavia. A group of European diplomats was having a conference and complained about a table of loud American businessmen. A young Swedish waiter was sent to deal with them.

He leaned over to the biggest and loudest of these finance bros and said, “If you could keep your voice down, sir…”

The American turned and said:

“Is that a question?”

The kid froze. The American said: “You mean ‘Be quiet,’ right?”

“Yes.”

The American got up. “Look, you’re over here because a bunch of Belgians are too afraid to come over here themselves. You’re carrying that like the weight of the world. I can see it your shoulders. Let it go, man.”

Now those diplomats grew spines. “Hey,” they said. “We are not Belgians. We’re—”

“You’re Belgians,” the American snapped. Then he gave the floor to the kid who said, “Please be quiet.” The American took out a $100 bill and stuck it in the kid’s vest pocket. He walked around the rest of the night like he owned the place. He might have gone on to do just that.

After that I realized every American has a little bit of asshole in him. William Blake said, “Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.” Some struggle with this concept. Americans are born knowing it.

Incidentally propaganda is the same trick I saw in that restaurant. It’s always someone trying to make you feel bad for their weakness, their mistakes. Don’t be ground down by it. Stand up straight and give it back.

Which is why I say: Kerry, Hayden, Cheney, Adam Schiff, Craig Newmark, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Leon Panetta, and especially that Time editor turned self-appointed censor Rick Stengel should be packed in a rocket and launched into the fucking sun.

Let's be clear about our language. Madison famously eschewed the word toleration or tolerance when it came to religion and insisted on the words freedom or liberty instead. This became the basis for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which in turn became the basis for the Bill of Rights. That's why we don't have “toleration of religion” or “toleration of speech.” We have freedom of speech. The right word for the right time.

To the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored because they're encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or obstructing consensus: I'm not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority. I'm encouraging you to DEFY authority. That is the right word for this time.

To all those Snoops and Nosey Parkers sitting in their Homeland Security-funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation:

Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.

I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem.

You’re the problem.

YOU SUCK.

Thank you.

*Though Eminem did say this line in 8 Mile, it was originally from Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” (Part II). Apologies to rap greats, and the borough of Queens.  

OK, Matt is strident and coarse – but is he right?  

Matt Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He works at the Racket News on Substack and the America This Week podcast.

Matt's speech has been republished from Racket News with permission.

Image credits: Bigstock