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) blended with cherry-picked documents released after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter to create a narrative about the FBI intentionally encouraging social media companies to silence Americans — or even paying them to do so, which they didn’t.
It was against this backdrop that Jordan, who also serves as the far-right chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sat down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity and insisted that he and his GOP colleagues believe “big tech companies were working with big government to suppress free speech.” The congressman added in the same interview, “It wasn’t just the FBI. It was several government agencies.”
That is, of course, quite a conspiracy theory, describing events that only appear to have happened in overactive Republican imaginations.
In fact, during his chat with Hannity, Jordan was offered a friendly platform to make his case in a persuasive way. But when it came time to go beyond weird conjecture, the Ohio Republican told Fox viewers, “That’s what we believe happened. We’re looking for the, uh, looking for the evidence.” Oh. In other words, Jordan and his cohorts have spent months pushing quite a few provocative ideas about “several government agencies,” including the FBI, targeting conservatives and stifling their speech. But the chair of the “weaponization” panel is still “uh, looking for the evidence.” What they believe is currently based on assumptions and partisan guesswork. It reinforces concerns that the latest GOP subpoenas are part of a fishing expedition, sent by desperate partisans who sold their base a story they aren’t able to back up. If the evidence Jordan hopes to find doesn’t emerge, how likely is it that he and his far-right colleagues will collectively declare, “Oh well, never mind then”?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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