WH Press Sec. Karoline Leavitt fires back at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “If outlets in this room push lies, we will hold them accountable.”

Opening statement by Matt Taibbi: "Two years ago when Michael and I first testified before your weaponization of government subcommittee, Democratic members called us so called journalists, suggested we were bought off scribes, and questioned our ethics and our loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take our take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things." "One, there is no digital censorship, and two, if there is digital censorship, it's for our own good. I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. There was no way the party that I gave votes to my whole life was now pro censorship. Then last year, I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talked to the World Economic Forum." "Speaking about this information, he said, quote, our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to, quote, hammer it out of existence. He complained that it's really hard to govern because people self select where they go for their news, which makes it quote, much harder to build consensus." "Now, I defended John Kerry when people said he looks French, but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are self selecting their own sources of media. What's next?" "Letting them make up their own minds? Lastly, building consensus may be a politician's job, but it's not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media's job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem. This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment." "Most of America's closest allies as both, Rupa and Michael have pointed out, have already adopted draconian speech laws. We are surrounded. The EU's new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a Western democratic society. Ranking member Raskin, you don't have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an online safety act, which empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like false communication or causing psychological harm." "Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas. These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Some of our own citizens have been harassed or even arrested in some of these countries, but our government has not stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws." "Take USAID. Many Americans are now in an uproar because they they learned about over $400,000,000 going to an organization called Inner News, whose chief Jeanne Bourgeault boasted to Congress about training hundreds of thousands of people in journalism. But her views are almost identical to Carrie's. She gave a talk once about building trust and combating misinformation in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a really beautifully unified COVID nineteen message, vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%." "But when, quote, mixed information on vaccine efficacy got out, hesitancy ensued. We're paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn't know that the press does not exist to promote unity or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That's propaganda, not journalism. Bourdieu also once said that to fight bad content, we need to work really hard on exclusionless or inclusionless and, quote, really need to focus our ad ad dollars toward what she called the good news." "Again, if you don't know the fastest way to erode trust in media is by having government sponsor exclusion lists, you shouldn't be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone 476,000,000 of it. And USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine Michael and I saw across that long list of agencies." "Collectively, they bought up every part of the news production line, sources, think tanks, research, fact checking, anti disinformation, commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, straight up censorship. It is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into exactly that consensus machine. There is no way to remove this rod surgically. The whole mechanism has to go." "Is there right wing misinformation? Hell, yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don't remember being afraid of it. At the time, we figured we didn't need censorship because we thought we had the better argument." "Obviously, many of you lack the same confidence. You took billions of dollars from taxpayers and you blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they're wrong about things they can see with their own eyes. You sold us out. And until these rather tires tiresome questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you."