Matt Taibbi on censorship

Matt Taibii writes:

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.

This is a good insight into the self-appointed censors.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues, and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set—what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “utopia of scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the nosy parker, the snoop. 

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.”

A great column.