Taibbi: I’m Optimistic for Trump Admin. on Speech Issues, Fear They Might Use Same Tactics as Left

On Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Matt Taibbi said that he is optimistic that the Trump administration and FCC Chair nominee Brendan Carr will go after censorship, but he is also concerned that “parties end up in a race to the bottom, they will use the same tactics that were used against them to pursue their own political enemies. And there’s going to be enormous temptation within the Trump government to do things like go after media organizations they don’t like, and they can’t do that.”

Host Chris Cuomo asked, “What is your best sense of optimism in this administration and your biggest concern?”

Taibbi responded, “Well, my best sense of optimism is on the speech issue, which I’ve been working on for two or three years now, beginning with the Twitter Files stuff. And a lot of the issues that we looked at were incredibly complicated and would have taken somebody with a high level of expertise to really even understand these issues. We’ve already seen the nomination of somebody like Brendan Carr to the FCC. It’s pretty clear he knows most of those issues pretty well and is going after exactly the things that we reported on, which is satisfying to me, personally. The thing that I worry about is exactly what you talked about before, which is this idea that, sometimes, parties end up in a race to the bottom, they will use the same tactics that were used against them to pursue their own political enemies. And there’s going to be enormous temptation within the Trump government to do things like go after media organizations they don’t like, and they can’t do that. If they end up doing that, it will be a disaster, because, then, we’ll have both parties using these sort of unconstitutional means to go after each other.”

He added that the best thing Carr could do would be “going after things like federal funding of fact-checking organizations that downgrade companies based on political leanings or whether or not their narratives are pro-government or not. I think that’s a serious issue. But mostly just keeping the intelligence services and the enforcement agencies out of the content moderation business. I think that would be a huge step, and he seems to want to do that.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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