System Update: First Amendment on Trial

Independent Free Press Heavyweights Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald Discuss Murthy v. Missouri, the New York Times and Big Tech Censorship

This report is for those who don’t have time to watch the critical hour-long discussion but want the summary and highlights:

Two renowned investigative journalists and free speech champions recently broke down the truth behind government and legacy media doublespeak within a vast censorship regime now under the spotlight of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update, and Matt Taibbi, editor of Racket News, discussed two top-of-the-news items: opening arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case that now awaits a decision from the Supreme Court. They also focused heavily on a March 17 New York Times article, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

Their conversation centered on the growing threat of censorship through the active collusion of Big Tech, Big Media, and the federal government at the center of Murthy v. Missouri.

Murthy v. Missouri is widely considered the most important First Amendment case to come before the Supreme Court in decades. Opening oral arguments were heard on March 18. The Justices must decide if the often intense pressure to censor individuals and specific media outlets applied by quasi-governmental non-profits, and a host of three-letter government agencies, was coercive or merely concerned advocacy. The court must decide if the right of free speech was actively and aggressively abridged. 

During the interview, Taibbi described the findings of the Twitter Files in which he and his colleagues found enormous quantities of evidence of government censorship on Russiagate, the 2020 election, and COVID (among other critical issues). [For more on this topic, see Honest Media’s analysis in the three part series, “The Collapse of the Mainstream Media.”]

“It was one email after another where we say things flagged by DHS, flagged by FBI, flagged by Treasury, flagged by other government organizations,” said Taibbi, “We found more documents that described a very formalized, elaborate relationship between all these agencies and Twitter.”

There’s been a raucous right wing response to the apparent violations of free speech and a free press with very little objection from the left. This dynamic led to Greenwald’s biggest takeaway: 

The following are quotes, highlights, and notes from this critical and historic interview:

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Reactions to Murthy v. Missouri Opening Oral Arguments

Greenwald: “Not an encouraging oral argument.

“I think what people don’t fully understand about the Supreme Court and these justices is that they are fully embedded in the Washington power structure.

“There seemed to be this naive sense on the part of even some of the conservative justices that look, ‘all that was happening here was that the FBI was calling and just trying to be helpful and the White House was just trying to share their opinions and there was nothing coercive or abusive or aggressive about it.’

“This isn’t so much of an anti-Trump sentiment. The fear is that people, [it’s] too populist, meaning they’ll become too independent of institutions of authority and they need to be constrained, they need to be controlled, they can’t be given too much freedom.

“The two establishment wings of both political parties find themselves much more in agreement than not. I think what that means is that, left, right, is not really the relevant metric any longer. It’s more, ‘are you with that establishment? Do you want to strengthen it? Do you believe in its right to control or do you see it as something to be subverted or liberated from?’”

Taibbi: “[The judges in the Appeals Court] repeatedly compared the conduct of these agencies to the mafia, ‘nice internet platform there; it would be a shame if something would happen to it.’”

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Taibbi notes that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the case. In many instances the plaintiffs were censored for correcting government information, rather than for disinformation. The government now labels this true, but inconvenient, information as “malinformation.”

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Expectation of Obedience and Subservience from Social Networks – Minions & Underlings of the Government

Greenwald: “There was an expectation of obedience and subservience that [Justice] Alito was saying he had never seen before in the relationship between any equals. This was kind of boss-employee.

“They’re not going to American citizens saying ‘we would appreciate it if you would take [down] your post.’ They’re going to third parties, Facebook and Google, and saying we want to censor these American citizens. They’re not talking to the American citizens at all, they’re trying to get the American citizens silenced by… having third-party corporate platforms censor those citizens for the government.”

Taibbi: “They’re holding this sword of Damocles over their head with these gigantic subsidies like Section 230. If [the government] suggest[s] a change to that, it would change the entire revenue structure for these companies.”

Greenwald: “They’ve threatened it before: They’ve said ‘if you don’t censor more, we’re going to take away your 230 protection.’

Greenwald also noted that the government has billions of dollars worth in contracts with Big Tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google who do work for the Pentagon and the CIA. 

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Free Speech as a Right-Wing Slogan

Greenwald: “Nobody ever, until like six years ago, suggested that defense of free speech was a coded right wing value… In the United States if you now defend free speech it almost automatically implies that you are a right wing figure.”

Greenwald cited Noam Chomsky’s famous defense of a French professor who was a Holocaust revisionist. Chomsky said at the time, “The State has no right to dictate what is true and false.”

He continued: “The whole free speech movement was started at Berkeley. The most important free speech precedents of the 20th Century were written by leftwing judges.” 

Greenwald then showed the headline of The New York Times article, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation: Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.”

Taibbi: Taibbi then substantiated Greenwald’s point about the left-wing and free speech by recounting a story of a letter from the FBI sent to Death Row Records after a rap group NWA put out the album “Straight Outta Compton.” The FBI was concerned that the album was advocating violence and suggested censorship. This incident provoked nationwide outrage from the political left and was the focus of countless news stories. 

He explained: “It was condemned when the FBI sent one letter to one record label about one song. What we found [in the Twitter and CTIL Files] was that times a 1,000, 10,000, you know 100,000. 

“I can’t stress enough, this case, this particular case, the plaintiffs were not ‘committing’ disinformation. These were medical professionals who are the most credentialed kind of academics who had conducted true research and were suppressed because the government was in error.

“The most dangerous misinformation is always official. Whether it’s Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, or Russiagate, or whatever it is, those are the most dangerous and the only defense against it is unfettered free speech in which people get to express their opinions and do independent reporting. But they want that suppressed.

“This new vision of American liberalism sees that as the enemy. They have successfully painted that, coded it as a right wing view. That’s a complete 180 that we have to reckon with now.”

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Greenwald: Greenwald traces this new vision and the whole censorship regime to Trump’s surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton and to the UK vote that led to the UK’s departure from the EU. 

He surmised that the conclusion of the liberal establishment at the time was: “‘Holy shit, we can’t allow free speech on the internet, look at these people going wild and ignoring what we’re telling them to do. We’ve lost all control if we allow free speech.’ This is where this disinformation industry was concocted.”

According to Greenwald, this new censorship regime was funded by Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, and Bill Gates.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory,” he said, as Taibbi quietly nodded in agreement. 

Greenwald continued: “Let us put a scientific gloss on the censorship regime so that we can pretend that we’re not censoring political speech or dissent that we dislike. We’re censoring some scientific category that we’ve now invented, a new ‘credentialing;’ it’s disinformation experts, apolitical disinformation experts, who now identify information that is both false and dangerous and that can justify its removal.

“The Biden administration committed one of the gravest assaults on [the] Free Speech guarantee of the First Amendment in decades and I guarantee you most Americans have no idea that happened.”

Free Speech concern is now only a far-right concern and driven solely by Donald Trump, as depicted by The New York Times. – Glenn Greenwald 

Taibbi: “What has been censored has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Instead it is a ‘broad switch’ from what one of my sources called CT to CP, counter-terrorism to counter-populism. It’s just the government going after stories that run counter to official narratives.”

Greenwald: “It is not confined to one issue. It is a framework that is being used in every major political debate.”

Greenwald then noted that the first case in the EU’s new censorship law was against X and Elon Musk because EU authorities allege that X was not adequately censoring content related to war in Gaza, as reported by the BBC.

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The New York Times Analysis: A Bridge Too Far – The “Ministry of Truth”

“This is an explicit pro-censorship Manifesto from the New York Times” —Greenwald [see the report by John Leake shared in the Kennedy Beacon]

Greenwald: “Everyone was like, this is the Ministry of Truth (called the Office of Disinformation); this is what Orwell warned about, explicitly, inside of Homeland Security.”

The New York Times article points to the folding of this Orwellian new office as a victory for Trump and the far-right rather than a victory for free speech over government censorship. 

The New York Times:

Even before the court rules [in Murthy v. Missouri], Mr. Trump’s allies have succeeded in paralyzing the Biden administration and the network of researchers who monitor disinformation.

Officials of the Department of Security and the State Department continue to monitor foreign disinformation, but the government has suspended virtually all cooperation with the social media platforms to address posts that originate in the United States.

“There’s just a chilling effect on all of this,” said Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who in 2022 briefly served as the executive director of a short-lived D.H.S. advisory board on disinformation. “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

“Matt, the New York Times is angry that Homeland Security is no longer allowed to control domestic speech inside the United States.”

Taibbi: “The lengths they went to describe somebody like me as a Trump ally…”

Greenwald: [Interrupting] “…solely because you believe in free speech. This is the thing I think is so important to understand. Every last issue in our political discourse is viewed through one prism and one prism only. Is it pro-Trump or anti-Trump?

“They see free speech as a major obstacle to stopping Trump. Because censorship is their main tool to stop Trump the only people they believe would advocate for free speech are people who love Donald Trump.”

Taibbi: Taibbi interpreted it by saying, “we had to change the way we do business. That we no longer had to worry about just printing facts but printing facts that ‘stand up to history’s judgment,’ if you remember.”

Taibbi connected Jim Rutenberg, a co-author of the aforementioned March 2024 Times piece on censorship, to another very influential piece he wrote in the New York Times in 2016 titled, “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity and Journalism.”

According to Taibbi, this approach was a “clarion call” from the establishment media who had to compromise the First Amendment due to the scale of the threat they perceived Trump as representing.

He continued: “I’m not a Trump supporter but you cannot throw out the First Amendment because you don’t like Donald Trump and this is how they think. It’s unbelievable how this turned on a dime over this issue.”

The Biden Laptop

Greenwald then explained that he left The Intercept in 2020 because its editors refused to publish an article analyzing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and what it exposed about Biden ethics, “because a week earlier they had published an article saying, citing the CIA, that the Hunter Biden laptop and the materials on it were Russian disinformation and therefore not to be trusted.” 

The New York Times now says that the Biden laptop was real, as has most every other media outlet. Greenwald has been vindicated here and yet it’s the 51 former spies who implied the laptop was a Russia disinformation op that claimed vindication, as Honest Media recently reported.

From The New York Times article, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation:”

Social media, with this pipeline of tens of millions of voters, presented powerful new pathways for antidemocratic tactics, but with far fewer of the regulatory and legal limits that exist for television, radio and newspapers.

Greenwald explained the Times’s thinking: “There’s not enough control. There’s too much free speech.” 

The Times article continues: 

The pitfalls were also clear: During the 2020 campaign, platforms had rushed to bury a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concern that it might be tied to Russian interference. Conservatives saw it as an attempt to tilt the scales to Mr. Biden. Administration officials said they were seeking a delicate balance between the First Amendment and social media’s rising power over public opinion.

“We’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure,” said Jen Easterly, the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose responsibilities include protecting the national voting system. “Building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”

Greenwald: “They are lamenting the fact that the government now has a harder time doing things like burying the Hunter Biden story, a true story.

“They didn’t just bury it by the way. They censored it. Facebook censored it algorithmically, suppressed it up to the election. Twitter actually brute-force censored it based on a lie and the New York Times to this day is still citing that as an example of the reporting we need the government to suppress. This is an explicit pro-censorship manifesto from the New York Times.

“What I find absolutely surreal is that 40 years ago this newspaper was going to the Supreme Court to protect the right of newspapers and citizens to express themselves without government censorship. And now they are running op-eds and news articles that have no purpose other than to discredit free speech advocates as far-right extremists and to herald government censorship as the only thing that can save us.”

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Collapse of Journalism Standards

Taibbi: Taibbi describes an Aspen Institute table-top exercise for national security journalists handling a potential release of a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma. He said they rejected what they called the “Pentagon Papers principle.”

He explained: “…this idea that we now think more about where information comes from versus whether or not it’s true. Essentially they’ve convinced the press to consider itself part of the establishment.”

“In this worldview the New York Times and Washington Post are ‘guardians’ – a vanguard that decides what the public can and cannot handle that might rile up the population.”

Greenwald: “What happened inside these journalistic institutions in the age of Trump? They jettisoned every long standing [journalistic] principle.”

Greenwald closed the interview by pointing out that after 2016 and WikiLeaks, media institutions “changed their internal policy to say that if there’s information that we get, even if it’s genuine and even if it’s in the public interest, we should consider not publishing it if it comes from a source with bad motives, namely a foreign source trying to to help Trump win. 

“They explicitly changed the core standards that governed journalism for decades in the name of preventing any kind of reporting that might help Donald Trump win, or his opponent lose. That’s what they did with the Hunter Biden story. They now really don’t pretend anymore that their mission is journalism. [Instead] they see their mission as stopping Trump and everything else is a means to that end.”

Glenn Greenwald is perhaps best known for his leading role in bringing forward the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that exposed the mechanisms of a previously unimagined scale of government surveillance on the American people. 

Matt Taibbi is perhaps best known for his Twitter Files reporting with Michael Shellenberger that revealed the depth and breadth of a vast censorship regime that features collusion between many government agencies and Big Tech, and includes forms of coercion of the latter by the former.

Reporting from Greenwald and Taibbi over the last twenty-plus years bookends the expansion within the national security state as it evolved from the surveillance-industrial complex during the war on terror to the now well-documented censorship-industrial complex discussed here.