The noise is the point
The noise is the point
Plus: Who is the source behind Elon Musk's Twitter Files? (You'll never guess.)
This week, I gave a talk at James Madison University in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It was hard to miss the irony: I was going to give a lecture about my latest book, which explores historical memory, at a public school in a state whose conservative governor is trying to silence the past.
So I made that tension the focus of my speech: how Republicans like Glenn Youngkin, and more notably Ron DeSantis, are trying to ban and in some cases criminalize the teaching of non-state-approved ideas — especially those that challenge notions of race, gender, and U.S. history cherished by white middle-aged conservatives. Then I talked about how defying those suppressive forces and recovering stories about our past and present is essential if we’re going to have any hope of building a better future.
The talk went well. We had a good turnout and there were great questions from the audience afterward. Except for the very first one, from a guy who I take it was a recent JMU graduate. “OK, let’s make it real, make it modern,” the guy said, clambering into the aisle. “In light of the universal demonization yesterday of Tucker Carlson, for doing nothing but releasing new footage of January 6th … Was either January 6th or 9/11 to some degree a false flag attack? And if so, is the media — mainstream media in general — any better than it was during yellow journalism, in the days of the sinking of the Maine?”
I gamely tried to answer. No, I said, it seemed pretty clear that Trump pumped up the January 6th mob and sent them to the Capitol, and that those who engaged in the violence seemed genuinely eager to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. I noted that I am open, always, to evidence of conspiracies and ulterior motives, as well as malfeasance in the press, but that it seemed the most commonly held view of January 6th as a violent, pro-Trump action was pretty spot on. I thought I was pretty respectful, then moved on to another twenty minutes or so of questions.
When I finally walked off the stage and started to gather my coat, who do I see walking straight toward me but my friend, the 1/6 truther. This time he was more direct. “You’re evil,” he said, muttering something about “a neo-Marxist of the Frankfurt school.”
He was especially incensed that I had criticized right-wing book bans and curricula mandates in light of the fact that, as he put it, those of my “ilk” had “spent years banning people on the right from social media.” I’d better change, he said. Because pretty soon, I was going to find myself on the “chopping block.”I don’t know if he was talking figurately about layoffs (in which case, try me, I’m a freelancer) or a literal guillotine, but either way I didn’t really feel like continuing the conversation. I thanked him for his feedback; he, perhaps a bit taken aback by my polite reaction, thanked me for listening, and we went our separate ways. (Needless to say, he didn’t buy a book.)
I wasn’t planning on writing about this interaction — it was mostly just annoying, literally everyone else I met on campus was great, and there are so many other things to write about. (Top of my mind: the war in Ukraine and the regulatory capture of government by Norfolk Southern and other rail companies.) But that’s gonna have to wait for next week. Because the very day after this run-in, I found myself confronted with what I can only assume are some of the main sources that are fueling that young man’s inchoate rage: Elon Musk, Twitter, and the journalist he has co-opted into running his latest propaganda machine.
The journalist I’m referring to is Matt Taibbi — who, when he isn’t stealing newsletter names, is the lead “reporter” on Musk’s so-called Twitter Files. The Twitter Files, for those of you have been mercifully unaware, are tranches of emails, screenshots, and other internal documents that Musk made available to a hand-picked group of journalists and public-relations specialists sometime after he bought the social media platform last October.
Musk has sold the Twitter Files as an exercise in radical transparency — a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” as he reportedly put it, exposing the alleged misdeeds of Twitter’s former owners. Specifically, Musk and his underlings promised the Files would expose an “Old Twitter” censorship regime aimed at conservatives and the reactionary right, done with or at the behest of the federal government — the exact supposed pattern of anti-right-wing silencing that my interlocutor at JMU was talking about.
Putting the irony of a literal scion of South African apartheid claiming to run a Truth and Reconciliation Commission aside
, the Twitter Files have failed on their own terms. Even prominent right-wingers have noted that the Muskovites aren't digging up much of value. Seb Gorka said after the first rounds he was “deeply underwhelmed.” Far-right New York Post columnist Miranda Devine resorted to a conspiracy theory — fantasizing that sinister forces in government or tech were forcing Musk to hold back incriminating material.But experienced propagandists know the secret: it isn’t what’s in the store but the window dressing that counts. So, yesterday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) invited Taibbi and fellow Twitter Filer Michael Shellenberger to join his newest sideshow, the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Like the Benghazi show committee on which Jordan made his name, this was not going to even pretend to be an exercise in fact-finding. Rather it was an opportunity for narrative — or, more accurately, meme-making: Jordan preening and shouting in his shirt-sleeves, Taibbi and Shellenberger parrying questions from both friendly and hostile lawmakers.
And, indeed, no new information came out of the hearing. What did come out were a bunch of right-wing set-pieces and talking points, aimed at portraying themselves as guardians of free speech and free inquiry — thus distracting from the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The right feigned horror right off the bat when the ranking member, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, referred to Taibbi and Shellenberger as “so-called journalists” in her opening statement. Taibbi responded by noting his awards for column writing. But those offended on the witnesses’ behalf have neglected to note that Shellenberger has never worked as a journalist in his life. His usual bio is “author and former public relations professional.” Shellenberger is best known for a failed 2018 gubernatorial bid in California and his work as a corporate apologist for climate change.
Maximum outrage, meanwhile, has been reserved for Taibbi’s most inspired piece of play acting at the hearing. This came when Democrat Sylvia Garcia of Texas opened her questions by asking the former eXile editor, “When was the first time that Mr. Musk approached you about writing the Twitter Files?”
Taibbi scrunched his brow. “This is a question of sourcing,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I don’t reveal my sources.” A brief back and forth ensued before Garcia moved on.
This was a ridiculous piece of theater, of course. Musk routinely and publicly indicated to his (allegedly) 130 million followers that he was collaborating with Taibbi & Co. on the Twitter Files. If anything, was more than a source — given that he required them to publish their “findings” on the site he owns, he is effectively their publisher. Musk has also frequently stated, in public, that he was in charge of handing information to his hand-picked “researchers,” and referred to the Twitter Files team as “we”:
OK, so maybe Musk can say he was the source (and publisher), but the “reporters” can’t? Well, no one told Taibbi and Shellenberger’s colleague, Bari Weiss, who wrote on her Substack in December exactly how — and when — Musk recruited the team and volunteered to be its conduit of information:
At dinner time on December 2, I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter.
Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?
Two hours later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my wife, Free Press writer Nellie Bowles, and our three-month-old baby. In the days that followed, we—the journalist Matt Taibbi; investigative reporters connected to The Free Press, including Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse; plus Free Press reporters Suzy Weiss, Peter Savodnik, Olivia Reingold, and Isaac Grafstein—camped out in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room at Twitter headquarters and began looking through the company’s vast archive of internal communications.
The only condition Musk imposed was that we first publish our findings on Twitter itself.
Pretending like Musk is some kind of anonymous source (and that naming him would be “a journalistic Rubicon [Taibbi] rightfully refused to cross,” as Fox News columnist David Marcus put it this morning) is absolutely, batshit insane. Fox News itself has run multiple stories, this year and last, referring to the campaign as “Elon Musk’s Twitter Files.” There are no fewer than 65,500 results for that search query on Google! No one has been confused for a single minute as to the principal source of the Twitter Files.
Which, of course, didn’t stop Musk — seeing the traction that this bullshit talking point was getting — from just out and out lying about all that as the new narrative got going:
Look, Musk gets it. He knows he’s been up-front about his role in the project. And he knows Taibbi was just pretending to protect a source in order to grind the farcical hearing to a halt. It doesn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that the incoherent Twitter Files tweetstorms never land on their intended targets; that they muster a bunch of hard-to-follow screenshots and internal conversations that overwhelm the reader but do nothing to prove their intended thesis. Or that they have been revealed, over and over, to assiduously leave out anything that contradicts their preferred narrative — such as the reported Twitter “database” of requests by Republican officials to censor posts during the pre-Musk era. Nor does it matter that Taibbi, perhaps trying to retain what is left of his trashed reputation as a former leftist gadly, further blew up the primary talking point that Twitter had only enforced its terms of service against the right.
The truth isn’t their goal. (Nor, for that matter, is reconciliation.) Their aim is the aim of intellectual grifters everywhere — to tire out their opponents and exhaust everyone listening into submission. Whether you’re selling the endlessly goal-shifting “lab leak” or the easily disprovable lie that “masks don’t work,” the key is to just keep inundating your audience with bullshit until you have crowded out everything else. And then, while everyone is duly distracted and confused, you keep repeating your message (“January 6th was a false flag!” “Antarctica is gaining ice!” “Norfolk Southern is the safest, most customer-focused, and successful transportation company in the world!”) until there is no one with energy left to argue.
You won’t fool everyone. You probably won’t even fool most people. But you’ll dominate the conversation, and monopolize the time of others — including yours truly — who would rather be thinking about literally anything else.
Pretty sure that’s a Jordan Peterson line. Certainly incoherent enough.
I’m putting reporter in quotes not to cast judgment on Taibbi’s former journalism career, but because nothing that the Twitter Filers have done can even remotely be considered reporting in the sense of independently gathering, fact-checking, and compiling information.
Though perhaps irony isn’t the word — maybe he sees all of this as some kind of revenge or “anti-woke” corrective of the original TRC.
My one brief run-in with Taibbi was almost 20 years ago, and trying to explain the totality of all that would, I hope, not interest anyone (it involved the 2004 Green Party nominating convention), but a lot of what I have seen out of quasi-journalists over time fits in with what I understood to be happening then: weird narratives, either impossible to refute (because they're not coherent arguments) or eminently refutable (because they're patently false), where the truth isn't the point, the distraction of the weird narrative is.
Curious what your take is on leaving Twitter at this point. It feels much too entrenched as a primary source of information. Same with Facebook, albeit for different information. It's difficult to understand how to navigate as a citizen-consumer trying to confront these awful owners.
I'm one of those "moronic" Democrats that actually enjoyed the Democratic Representatives on Mr. Jordan's execrable committee and their questions to the "so-called journalists." I read the Twitter Files nonsense through the 4th tranche. I subsequently got bored and decided that they weren't going to show us anything that even remotely resembled a supposed government plot to suppress free speech. And they didn't.
Contrary to the opinion of at least one of your readers, the Twitter Files showed us that government agencies worked to prevent or remove things that the general public had no right to be seeing in the first place, like Hunter Biden's private parts. On the other hand, though, the Trump Administration worked to try to remove speech it didn't like, like Chrissy Tiegan's criticisms. THAT is where the "government" tried to suppress free speech. The idea that the former Twitter overlords were biased against conservative speech is a red herring, designed to keep anyone from seeing that it actually worked the other way around.
Thank you for a concise look at both how the information contained in the Twitter Files was weaponized, and how incredibly effective it was in inciting the clueless to anger, vis-à-vis your interlocutor. That is what this is all about, in the end. The team that manages to incite the greatest amount of rage & fear is the team that will - most likely - come out on top. That is, unless saner, cooler heads can blunt the disinformation and continue to disseminate the truth.