The elite are censoring us. That’s bad. And liberals agree.

From the Left:

a sector of the left has tilted toward the promulgation of censorship. And with some chance of success, given the enormous power of the media outlets that are cooperating for reasons of their own, including the four horsemen of surveillance: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

— David Bromwich, The Nation, which provided the above illustration

From the Right:

The “process” rejected by today's Left are the traditional rules of fair play in our culture: freedom of speech, majority rule paired with minority rights, free exercise of religion, due process of law, checks and balances. Specifically, “open debate” is not valued by the ascendant social democrats who set the rules in our media and at our Big Tech platforms. And in the halls of government, dissent is increasingly seen as dangerous.

— Editorial, Washington Examiner

Matt Taibbi is a well-known leftist writer, author, and contributing editor to Rolling Stone. Taibbi has noticed the Trump conservatives sharing a bed with him and other ACLU-raised liberals are collectively alarmed about the “revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite.” Traditional liberals search for truth, and in Taibbi’s words, that means skepticism and free-flowing debate. Today’s elite, by contrast, believe “knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of ‘experts’”.

Today’s elite are

anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum. Its only defense is shaming and threats. “You’re a MAGA-enabler!” has become the answer to all challenges. [The] #Resistance media deals with unpleasant truths [by blackening] them out, forcing reporters to.   .   . Fox, which in turn triggers instant accusations of .   .   . collaborationism.  [T]here’s nothing more ominous professionally than being accused of aiding .   .   . Trump or the right-wing[, implying] racism, sexism, reactionary meanness, greed, simple wrongness, [charges] that could render a person unemployable

Taibbi believes the Democratic mainstream has used Trump’s election to attack key tenets of democracy, “populism,” and other liberal American traditions. To the elite, any country in which a Trump could be elected has “too much democracy”, its “marketplace of ideas” must be flawed if Trump results, and the “presumption of innocence” was never meant to apply to the likes of Trump.

Taibbi has found an undercover recording of a New York Times town hall documenting that the Times’s “1619 Project” rewriting American history to base everything on race was, following Russiagate’s collapse, the newspaper’s new way “to understand the forces that led to” Trump’s election. Any nation capable of electing Trump must have always been an unredeemable white supremacist monster. So the elite went from Hillary Clinton proclaiming “half” of Trump supporters “deplorable,” to making all of them deplorable racists, and now, with the “1619 Project,” the whole country and all its traditions have become “deplorable.”

With statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt coming down, the elite’s new target is the whole history of American liberalism, ineffectual except for its helping legitimize racial despotism.

Taibbi:

The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically, got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth.

 Instead, the elite now say the truth:

is properly guarded by “experts” and “authorities” or “serious people,” who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public.    .    . a constant subtext that it’s not necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters.   .   . The plebes don’t get a say on speech, their views don’t need to be represented in news coverage, and as for their political choices, they’re still free to vote — [as long as] their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet.

Taibbi and the Nation on our side! We’re on theirs!

In the words of the Indian 4th Century BC proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”