Mehdi Hassan hosts a weekly show on MSNBC. I hadn’t heard of him or it until Matt Taibbi previewed his appearance on the show in the entertaining post “Eat me, MSNBC,” originally titled “MSNBC sucks.” Hassan invited Taibbi to appear on the show and, in the event, subject himself to attacks that I found to be astounding in their substantive irrelevance, triviality, and error.
In his preview Taibbi explained: “I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion [of Taibbi’s work on the Twitter Files]. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.” Taibbi has posted a follow-up here. Even I could infer that Taibbi found Hassan to be conducting himself in bad faith. Video of the 30-minute interview is posted immediately below in its entirety.
The Twitter Files have established the existence of what Michael Shellenberger has fairly dubbed The Censorship Industrial Complex: U.S. Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation Campaigns, 2016 – 2022 The link goes to Shellenberger’s March 9 testimony before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Shellenberger appeared to testify along with Taibbi. Hassan attacked Taibbi for deeming his appearance an honor.
I think the Twitter Files are the biggest story out there and have noted the media silence regarding their revelations in my numerous posts and notes on them. I was interested to see how Hassan dealt with them in his interview. Hassan dealt with them essentially by misdirection. The terminus was absurdity.
The tweets below take up the issues that Hassan raised in the “interview.” They will make sense if you can bring yourself to watch the interview (and there are more to be found in Taibbi’s Twitter thread). If you can’t bring yourself to watch the interview, they won’t make sense.
No, I will not take the L.
A misplaced acronym and a wrong date don’t invalidate the months of important work nearly a dozen journalists, including @ShellenbergerMD, @bariweiss and myself, put in so that the public could see the breadth of a state censorship program. (1/2) https://t.co/J2xRLZkdD5
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
The decision by @mehdirhasan to pull a pure ad hominem interview, with no purpose but to attack me personally to deflect attention from what we’ve found, reveals him to be the latest in a long line of security-state attack dogs at @MSNBC whose job is to obscure damaging truths.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
The entire point of @mehdirhasan was that ethics required that I criticize Elon Musk on Modi, as if it were a given that I should, if I’m writing about U.S. speech. Meanwhile, he didn’t address MSNBC errors uncovered in the #TwitterFiles, as he grilled me about the TwitterFiles. https://t.co/WuAsNQQkrG
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
“I never wrote about Hunter Biden, so maybe you should apologize to me.” @mehdirhasan https://t.co/SbipbwwMMs pic.twitter.com/MLJjrbqJso
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the gov contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach https://t.co/fOSC01JJPq
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) April 7, 2023
In response to @mehdirhasan's attempted scolding, @mtaibbi says:
"The hilarity of this coming from MSNBC which did nothing but vomit up fake Russiagate stories… that you guys still haven't apologized for."
Mehdi's defense: "I wasn't there in that period." pic.twitter.com/49R56TUCfK
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 7, 2023
Regarding the 22 million tweets, here is an explanation from former State Department official and cybersecurity analyst Mike Benz: https://t.co/LGAiyr4Ueu
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
Restoring report that, per the Election Integrity Partnership's own report, their work resulted in flagging of 22 million tweets.
They're playing games with terms like "unique original URL," where more than 1000 tweets can be "collpased" into one "incident":@mehdirhasan pic.twitter.com/YSC13oSXUA
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 6, 2023
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