The first formal hearing of the House Republicans’ new “weaponization” committee was a bit of a dud: GOP members aired grievances for a few hours a couple of weeks ago, but their whining didn’t amount to much.
A Politico report noted that the House panel’s Republican majority amplified “a long list of perceived slights,” but the hearing, spanning more than three hours, “contained little new information.” A New York Times report added, “There was sinister talk of destructive forces on the left that Republicans said held undue influence both in the United States and globally. Yet there were no fresh revelations.”
The select subcommittee, however, is just getting started. As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained, the panel, led by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, issued multiple subpoenas to executives at various tech companies last week, pursuing information about “the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech.”
The GOP lawmaker’s use of the word “reported” was doing quite a bit of work in that sentence.
A Washington Post analysis did a nice job last week, contextualizing social media companies, their efforts to curtail foreign interference in U.S. elections, and a brief overreaction in 2020 to a dubious New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, all of which serves as the foundation for Jordan’s crusade.
An opportunity presented itself. Republicans who’d fostered hostility toward social media (in keeping with a liberal-elites-fighting-humble-American-patriots narrative) could try to argue that Twitter’s response to the laptop story had cost Trump the election. Such ideas have the effect of dropping a crystal into the supersaturated solution that is right-wing media so, in short order, a full conspiracy was built out around it. The right’s skepticism of the FBI (stoked by Trump, coincidentally, in an effort to downplay questions about his campaign’s connections to Russia)…
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