Representative Gym Jordan’s latest “weaponization of government” hearing rolled around today, and it was as unpleasant and lie-filled as you could imagine, with Jordan scrambling to make up ground after the previous hearing was widely seen as a flop. This episode was about the “Twitter Files,” Elon Musk’s effort to unveil the company he had bought as unfairly biased against conservatives despite large amounts of evidence to the contrary, and suffice it to say, it once again didn’t produce the fireworks Jordan wanted.
In Thursday’s hearing, two of the handpicked “journalists” to whom Musk fed internal Twitter information to produce the desired narrative did their best to give Jordan what he wanted just as they had given Musk what he wanted. Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly used some of his time to show that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had been very selective in what they looked for when they built their narrative about bias at Twitter.
Connolly’s basic question was simple: What did you find about Donald Trump leaning on Twitter to get what he wanted? And the answer, basically, was that they never even looked.
“When you release information,” Connolly asked, “have you released any
information of for example right-wing elements or the Trump White House
attempting to moderate content at Twitter?”
“I did not find that,” Shellenberger answered. “You didn’t find that?” Connolly asked in mock surprise. “So we had a hearing the other day, on Twitter, and we had four witnesses, and all four testified under oath they had never received a request for content moderation or takedown from the Biden White House, but they did from Donald Trump’s White House.”
Taibbi copped to having heard about this in the news, but said he had
not seen any email exchanges from the Trump White House, then rushed to
mention that he had seen requests from Democrats. “Yeah, nice try,”
Connolly responded. “We’re talking about the Trump White House and
people under oath confirming it, and my question is, in the Twitter
Files, did Elon Musk or Twitter provide you with that exchange with
Chrissy Teigen?” (The incident when the Trump White House asked Twitter to take down Teigen's tweet calling Trump a "pussy-ass bitch")
Taibbi lamely responded, say, “No, but that’s probably because the searches that I was making ...”
“Well, it’s probably because it didn’t confirm the bias that this is all about, as the gentleman from Texas would say ‘the left’ attempting to control content when in fact the evidence is that the Trump White House most certainly attempted content at Twitter. Mr. Shellenberger, were you aware of that or is this all news to you?”
Shellenberger admitted that “the Teigen exchange was news to me.”
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