Once a man of the Left, Matt Taibbi has escaped the dessiccated, haunted catacombs of Marxism and Totalitarianism. Taibbi is a man of considerable courage.
Warning: There is some profanity at the conclusion and I left it in because this is a transcription of one man’s passionate defense of Liberty and it all deserves to be there.
True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.
Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.
Now disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former Presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices.
In the open he said this! Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.”
What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment, yes, but more importantly: us. Complainers. That’s our shared experience. We are obstacles to consensus.
My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for 35 years, covering everything from Pentagon accounting to securities fraud to drone warfare. My little son a few years ago asked what I do. I said, “Daddy writes about things that are so horrible they’re interesting.”
and,
Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. 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.
America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.
In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.
plus this great story of why Americans are both admired and disliked around the world,
Over time I realized: I liked being an American. For the first time I was seeing the American experience through the eyes of foreigners. I did an interview once at a restaurant in Moscow called Scandanavia. A group of European diplomats was having a conference and complained about a table of loud American businessmen. A young Swedish waiter was sent to deal with them.
He leaned over to the biggest and loudest of these finance bros and said, “If you could keep your voice down, sir…”
The American turned and said:
“Is that a question?”
The kid froze. The American said: “You mean ‘Be quiet,’ right?”
“Yes.”
The American got up. “Look, you’re over here because a bunch of Belgians are too afraid to come over here themselves. You’re carrying that like the weight of the world. I can see it your shoulders. Let it go, man.”
Now those diplomats grew spines. “Hey,” they said. “We are not Belgians. We’re—”
“You’re Belgians,” the American snapped. Then he gave the floor to the kid who said, “Please be quiet.” The American took out a $100 bill and stuck it in the kid’s vest pocket. He walked around the rest of the night like he owned the place. He might have gone on to do just that.
RTWDT.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.