Republicans are living in a reality distortion field.
That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill where GOP lawmakers continued to push a factually unsupported narrative about the federal government secretly colluding with Twitter to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
Despite no real evidence to support this weighty and consequential claim, Republicans were unrelenting in peddling it to the American public. At Wednesday’s hearing they showed no regard for misinforming those who turn to them for accurate information or the fact that they were smearing a private business and its former executives in the process.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who seems to want to be taken seriously by the Washington elite while tossing asinine red meat to the Republican base, claimed Twitter happily followed supposed FBI instructions to censor the Hunter Biden story because they were “terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election.”
The unsupported claim is nothing new for him. Comer has long pushed the notion that Elon Musk’s release of the so-called “Twitter Files” showed “evidence that the Biden campaign colluded with Big Tech to suppress a story that we now know is 100 percent true.” That, of course, is not what the selectively released company documents show.
But Comer’s statements get to the heart of the matter: By pushing the narrative that there was “collusion” between Big Tech and the FBI to “censor” the Post’s Hunter Biden story, Republicans are not so subtly feeding their election denying base reason to believe that the 2020 election was effectively rigged against Donald Trump.
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Right-wing media outlets and personalities are happy to amplify these claims and spread them to millions of viewers who turn to them for their news. Fox News, for instance, hyped the GOP claims from the hearing on Wednesday, portraying the nonsense coming out of the hearing as if it were a serious affair uncovering considerable wrongdoing.
The facts — reality — simply do not matter. It didn’t move one Republican when the Twitter executives they had subpoenaed before the committee refuted their claims. And it didn’t matter much to the right-wing media apparatus that blindly repeated them to their audiences.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy counsel, told the committee while under oath.
And Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists Musk handpicked last year to comb through Twitter’s internal messages for evidence of free speech violations, said himself that “there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
Such statements from Baker, former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, and former general counsel Vijaya Gadde saturated Wednesday’s hearing — but they fell on deaf ears. Republicans showed, once again, that they are married to pushing claims that Silicon Valley is intentionally and unjustly censoring conservative views, even when the facts do not contort with their narrative.
Ironically, the hearing appeared to reveal that Twitter had acquiesced to Trump and changed its policies after it concluded that he had violated its rules.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former senior employee on Twitter’s content moderation team, testified that the social media company ended its ban on abusive language against immigrants to “go back to where they came from” so that Trump would not face repercussions for his racist 2019 attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen. “So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied.
And the hearing hinted that the Trump White House attempted to censor the speech of at least one American: Chrissy Teigen. When Teigen called Trump a series of expletives in 2019, Navaroli testified that she was told the Trump White House contacted Twitter and demanded that it be removed.
Strangely enough, Republicans showed no interest in drilling down on this allegation of censorship. It’s no wonder why.
