Biden communist apparatus appoints anti-freespeech Timothy Wu to National Council... https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-biden-appointees-troubling-views " wu: the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism right that obliges the government to ensure a pristine speech environment expanding the category of ‘state action’ itself to encompass the conduct of major speech platforms " taibbi: the intelligence services, whose point of view on this issue is clear and absolute: they love the bottleneck power of the tech monopolies and would oppose any effort to dilute it. Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries. The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions. That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees. Going back to a system of stewardship of the information landscape by such types isn’t a 21st-century idea. It’s a proven 20th-century failure, and signing up Silicon Valley for a journey backward in time won’t make it work any better.