"Breaking news: Joe Biden lost the election."

Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen summarized Democrats' objections at a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on the "censorship-industrial complex," citing new and bigger threats to free speech and checks on government power: Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and President Trump's lawsuits against the media.

But Republicans and their witnesses, including two Twitter Files reporters long aligned with the political left, saw past as prologue and defended the Trump administration's work to gut agencies that jawboned social media to censor Biden White House-disapproved narratives and funded censorship tools, including the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Michael Shellenberger testified on reporting by his news organization Public that the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, whose goals include shaping elections worldwide, "effectively" served as an arm of USAID, whose official admitted USAID approves OCCRP's "key personnel" and "annual work plan" in a German documentary last year.

The CIA analyst whose whistleblower report served as the basis for President Trump's first-term impeachment also repeatedly cited OCCRP's reporting, reminiscent of U.S. "regime change" operations abroad, Public reported.

After OCCRP dismissed the USAID claim as a "conspiracy theory," Public reported that OCCRP also played a "significant role" in the Trump-Russia hoax.

Committee member Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said he would reintroduce his bill to get rid of "Track F" grants by the National Science Foundation that fund censorship, which Shellenberger described as "middleware" that allows "centralized authorities to decide what the truth was and filter it" and started as "recycle[d]" Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency projects.

Massie called on DOGE to eliminate any program targeting mis-, dis- and mal-information. 

"I'm scared to death we're going to refund all these things" in the pending omnibus bill and "feed the lice," he said, referring to lice outbreaks via shared helmets on the T-ball team he coached.

Censorship is "essentially baked into the system right now" regardless of agencies, such as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, claiming they stopped working with private censorship groups, Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya told committee member Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican. 

She warned Congress in 2023 that the U.S. risked a "new authoritarianism" by copying Canada's speech policing, including debanking government critics. Censorship projects are always "shapeshifting" and being "recast into different tools," she said Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, celebrated Trump's reelection, his reinstatement to social media and removal of security clearances for 51 former intelligence officials who "lied" about the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop expose as anti-censorship wins, but Shellenberger cautioned the censorship complex "remains almost entirely intact."

Censorship is a "must-have" for NATO, allied think tanks, Democratic stalwarts Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and other global institutions, he said. "Deep state agencies" spent two decades shaping news worldwide, then turned the tools against Americans, using "pass-through" funding and "shell organizations."

He and fellow journalist Matt Taibbi, whom Jordan uncovered became an IRS target the day Taibbi released his "most consequential" Twitter Files report, keep discovering "whole new institutions" involved in censorship, most recently USAID's funding of Brazilian censorship and a "disinformation primer" that called for advertiser boycotts, Shellenberger said.

"USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine ... collectively they've bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think tanks, research, fact-checking, anti-disinformation, commercial media scoring," Taibbi said. 

Congress cannot fix the problem "surgically" by making small changes, he said, prompting Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen to retort that "a gorilla can do it with a sledgehammer" but a "genius" like Musk "has to be surgical." Shellenberger went even further, calling for the "death penalty" for government entities that flout the First Amendment.

"I am nervous about what's happening in Europe" with the Digital Services Act because it aims to censor "globally," Jordan conceded, citing Subramanya's testimony and her becoming personally targeted for reporting on Canada's trucker protests.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee's top Democrat, more than doubled his allotted speaking time, contrasting Republicans' bugaboo about "faceless bureaucrats" who seek to correct election disinformation – ignoring senior White House aides giving platforms marching orders – with "the wrecking ball of right-wing authoritarianism" against press freedom.

He called Musk "an aspiring techno-dictator" and "de facto president" who even "de-amplified" Taibbi on his platform X because the journalist uses rival Substack, and his "nocturnal DOGE Musk-ovite youth brigade" is steamrolling Congress. 

Raskin denounced FCC Chair Brendan Carr as a Trump "sycophant" for threatening broadcast licenses based on news editorial decisions and the Department of Defense for reportedly pulling books with diversity, equity and inclusion and gender ideology from its schools.

But he flattered Jordan by citing their shared First Amendment commitment and agreed Congress should "seriously examine" the tech liability shield in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which he called a "subsidy" to sustain the early Internet.

Musk has "shocking conflicts of interests," a social media "megaphone" and controls "hackers" against government systems, Free Press Co-CEO Craig Aaron told the committee. "This is a free speech emergency."

Broadcast networks "appear to be paying off the president to shield themselves from reprisal or to gain regulatory favors," Aaron said, referring to settlement offers in Trump suits and the FCC threatening to block a CBS merger while he's suing the network.

"If you were concerned about low-level officials sending emails to social media staffers five years ago, then you should actually be worried" by billionaires who own the platforms giving Trump huge checks at his inauguration, Aaron said.

"This sudden adopting of the free speech religion [by Democrats] is a little jarring," given they trashed Taibbi and Shellenberger as fake journalists when they first testified and didn't defend journalist Alex Berenson or the New York Post against pre-Musk Twitter, Taibbi said.

"I defended John Kerry when people said he looks French, but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed" by the former secretary of state's World Economic Forum speech complaining that the public makes consensus harder by choosing their own news. "Making it hard to govern is actually the media's job," Taibbi said.

The head of Internews, a nongovernmental organization that received nearly half a billion dollars from USAID – exposed by Wikileaks last week – shares Kerry's view of journalists as tools of public policy, denouncing accurate reporting on vaccine efficacy for increasing hesitancy and promoting "exclusion lists" for global advertising, Taibbi said.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., defended Musk's qualifications to lead DOGE based on his success in cost-cutting projects such as the U.S. space program. "We have spent billions of dollars inefficiently looking for government efficiency for decades," the committee member said.

"Every bureaucrat is unelected!" Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., exclaimed in response to Democrats repeatedly emphasizing Musk wasn't elected. He said it's worse when bureaucrats flout the president, who is elected.

Removing books is a far cry from the Biden administration censoring social media and debanking disfavored groups, which is "harder to detect," Subramanya responded to Raskin. She sees Trump-friendly tech billionaires as a bulwark against a "creeping illiberal tide."

Scotland and Australia are criminalizing supposed hateful speech and symbols, Germany shut down an Irish immigrant protest for being in Gaelic and the U.K. is jailing people for offensive videos and censoring silent prayer, she said. 

"The ongoing political turmoil in Canada is the only reason" some illiberal policies haven't yet been implemented, the Canadian claimed, including lame-duck Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's plan for fines for "saying good things about fossil fuels."