Matt Taibbi: The Collapse of the Censorship Regime

Interview by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe, “Just Asking Questions,” Reason, February 27, 2025.

Excerpt:

The Department of Homeland Security…has this concept, you know, they call it building resilience on the one hand, or pre-bunking on the other, which is this idea of introducing a potentially controversial or difficult idea to an audience early so that they’ll be more accepting of it later. So, for instance, if it’s usually it’s done in a way that’s supposed to be prophylactic, like you warn somebody five months ahead of time that there could be, you know, Russians might interfere with the election, and that will make people more receptive to the idea that there is when you do that story later on. But sometimes they also like to introduce an idea. And this is all about how do we protect people against certain kinds of ideas and how do we conditioned them to accept others, like about the vaccine. And either they talk about building resilience, which is we want the the population to and sort of on their own reject psychologically certain ideas before they’re even posed to them. So there’s a lot of signaling that goes on in media…the 60 Minutes [German hate speech] thing felt to me like a classic seeding of a of an idea.

There’s so much more there, including how Google and most other search engines became much less useful for people who want to know what was actually said and not just read some “trusted” reporter’s view.

I rarely watch a 1-hour plus interview. This was the exception, partly because I had a bad headache that day and had trouble writing. But I’m glad I made the exception. I recommend 1.25 time. YMMV.

 

British PM Is Wrong, There Is No Free Speech In The UK

by Beth Brelje, The Federalist, February 28, 2025.

Excerpts:

Despite draconian laws that punish people for expressing themselves, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer lied about his country’s terrible free speech record during a White House meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday.

And:

Father Sean Gough, a Catholic priest, was arrested in 2023 for standing silently at a closed abortion business with a sign reading “praying for free speech.” He also had an “offensive” bumper sticker, “Unborn lives matter.” He was interrogated by police and criminally charged, according to the Standing for Freedom Center.

UK pro-life activist Isabel Vaughan-Spruce has been arrested twice for silent prayer outside an abortion business.

 

Distribution Tables Distort the Tax Policy Debate

by Adam N. Michel, Cato at Liberty, February 28, 2025.

Excerpts:

As Republicans work to extend and expand the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) before it expires, politicians will relitigatethe deceptive distributional statistics that purport to show who benefits most from tax cuts. These distribution tables are inherently limited, often grossly misleading, result in distorted policy outcomes, and make fundamental tax reform all but impossible.

And:

The first two columns in Table 1 report the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation’s estimates of the TCJA’s effect on after-tax income from the time of passage. This measure tells policymakers if particular groups are made better off after the changes. The two sets of results from the TJCA tell a broadly similar story: all income groups saw higher after-tax incomes in 2018 following the tax cuts. The first two measures are not identical because the underlying models use different definitions of annual income and different methodologies for distributing some tax changes, like the corporate income tax.

 

The accompanying pic is of Weissmueller, Taibbi, and Wolfe.