Matt Taibbi, independent journalist and Twitter Files author, revealed the origins of the expansive government censorship enterprise working with social media to censor Americans.

Taibbi recounted his findings from the Twitter Files in a new interview with Tucker Carlson released Thursday. During the 2-hour long interview, Taibbi revealed the origins of the Global Engagement Center, a State Department initiative first implemented overseas to combat jihadist terrorists that is now being used to target US citizens. Taibbi described the scope of his findings revealing that the US government was working hand in glove with social media companies to violate the Bill of Rights.

“There was a group of us and for about three months, we got to look through the internal correspondence of one of the world’s biggest communications companies, and the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the internet platforms,” Taibbi said. “And they had a very sophisticated and organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways.”

Taibbi’s team was shocked at what they uncovered and were very curious as to how such a sophisticated apparatus could be implemented at home seemingly under the nose of the American public. 

“First of all, this was shocking to us seeing all these documents that said, ‘Flagged by FBI,’ ‘Flagged by DHS’ … But we had to figure out, ‘Where did this come from? Like, ‘How did this start’” Taibbi told Carlson. “And when we started asking questions, it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas, counter-terrorism sort of messaging programs, right?”

Eventually, Taibbi discovered that this vast censorship enterprise had been originally started as an effort by the State Department and other agencies to combat international Islamic terrorism.

“So, the State Department, for instance, has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now very much interested in speech both abroad and at home. But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS platform.”

Taibbi concluded by talking to industry insiders that after the surge of global populism around the world culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the foreign policy elite decided that populism was a grave danger to the established world order and must be dealt with.

“One phrase really stuck out,” said Taibbi of his discussions with industry insiders. “It was ‘CT to CP,’ so that’s ‘counter terrorism to counter populism.’ And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or countering AL-Qaeda, contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up, right? Because those threats had been somewhat neutralized.” 

The foreign policy establishment needed fresh prey, and populism was the perfect target.

“But populism was now… was viewed as a very serious threat after Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party…then there was Brexit and then I think Trump was the last, you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks. ”

Taibbi’s comments come in the wake of dramatic developments that could determine the future of free speech in the United States. 

This Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Murthy v Missouri that the federal government could continue to collude with social media companies to censor online content. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito described the Court’s decision as setting a precedent allowing the federal government to circumvent the First Amendment.

“Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message,” Alito wrote. “If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not the message this Court should send.” 

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