Just say 'no' to authority

Would-be regulators of "disinformation" are trying to punish deviation from their beliefs, charges journalist Matt Taibbi in The Free Press. It's an eloquent rant adapted from his speech at the Rescue the Republic rally in Washington, D.C.

Taibbi, now of Racket News, reported on evidence in the Twitter Files about "a broad government effort to suppress free speech." The "busybodies" are trying to control speech, he writes. "The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say."

There are no working-class or poor censors, Taibbi writes. "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."

"Defiance is in our DNA" as Americans, he writes.

Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon. . . choose your metaphor, but it’s 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.

"Oscar Wilde noted ours was the only country in the world where being a kook was respectable," writes Taibbi. "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."

Just say "no" to the "snoops and nosy parkers" . . . telling us "we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we're traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of 'dangerous' disinformation," he concludes. "I'm an American. That shit does not work on me."

Author Walter Kirn grew up listening to Peter, Paul and Mary sing "If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out justice. I’d hammer out freedom all over this land," he said at the rally.

He thought of the song when he saw John Kerry complain about the First Amendment in a discussion at an international conference. The former presidential candidate said he wanted to "build consensus," but the First Amendment was a “major block” for stopping "disinformation" by “hammering it out of existence.”

Kirn imagines a rewrite of the song:

If they had a hammer,They’d hammer out disinformation.They’d hammer out vaccine hesitancy, All over this land. . . .

Actually, he concludes, it's not John Kerry's hammer. "That hammer belongs to us. It’s ours. . . . We have it right in front of us. The question is, will we pick it up?"