In any case, readers, I screwed up. In recent weeks, while preparing to testify for this hearing, Shellenberger and I had come to a conclusion. Not only was it important to publish at least some of Michael’s explosive new #CTIFiles documents ahead of the hearing, we had to try to find a way to reach Democratic voters. With Missouri v. Biden on the horizon, and multiple other lawsuits and legislative battles about digital speech control looming, I thought it was important to try to dent the years-long PR campaign coding speech as a “right wing only” issue. Just as the Occupy movement successfully appealed to “the 99%,” I thought the “anti-disinformation” complex needed to be framed as what it is, a tool that will be used by a very few to subdue pretty much everyone, not just in America but everywhere.

As a result, I wasted at least 36 hours tinkering with a Hail Mary speech designed to try to reach any Americans left in the ranks of old-school Ira Glasser/Russ Feingold liberalism. The effort was so desperate, I even sank to framing the issue in Marxist terms, explaining in my opening remarks that the “trusted flaggers” in laws like the Digital Services Act and programs like the Election Integrity Partnership will always, in 100% of cases, be administered by affluent, professional-class Americans insisting on advanced degrees from favored institutions as prerequisites for entry. Stripped of all the tearful rhetoric about “countering hate” and “reducing harm,” anti-disinformation was, I said, just another “bluntly elitist gatekeeping” scam.

Then the hearing broke out, and I realized I was at least 20 years out of date. The current Democrats are no longer milquetoast militarists salivating for Lockheed and Carlyle Group donations who’ll tolerate the occasional Kucinich or Paul Wellstone to attract civil libertarians like me. That iteration is gone.