WE'RE CITIZENS, NOT SUBJECTS.

Matt Taibbi concludes a recent speech to "Rescue the Republic" with a ringing explanation of what that means.

To the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored because they're encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or obstructing consensus: I'm not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority. I'm encouraging you to DEFY authority. That is the right word for this time.

To all those Snoops and Nosey Parkers sitting in their Homeland Security-funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation:

Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.

I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem.

You’re the problem.

YOU SUCK.

Thank you.

No. THANK YOU.

The speech is worth reading in full.  Let me offer a few highlights.

WE IGNORE LAWS. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

The problem with attempting to use the Internet as a tool of establishment control is that it's a distributed network, and the old Critique of Pure Tolerance inspired complaint about freedom of the press being only for those who own one now gets turned upside down, with liberating tolerance meaning taking fora away from the heretics.  But the Guardians of Public Morals do a poor job of it.

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.

Moreover, those gatekeepers are engaging in un-American activities. Seriously.

The First Amendment didn’t confer rights or entrust government with guaranteeing them. Instead, the Founders stood to the side and, like an old country recognizing a new country, simply acknowledged an eternal truth: the freedom of the human mind.

This is what censors never understand. Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon… Choose your metaphor, but a fool’s errand. You can apply as many rules as you want, threaten punishment, lock people up. The human mind always sets its own course, often in spite of itself.

And thus, people who might not agree on much else come together at Rescue the Republic.

So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing

In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.

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.

Those "authoritative voices" get a lot wrong, don't they?  That's material for a future post.