Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

someone who's been a guest on the show before is. His name is Mark McGurie. He's a media analyst,

the author of the very important book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New

Millennium. He spent much of his career examining the relationship

between politics and global media as a CIA analyst, and he continues to do so now as a writer

and visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center. We published many of his essays in

City Journal, and his writing has appeared in other outlets as well, including the New York Post,

first things, and he maintains a blog called The Fifth Wave. Today, though, we're going to

discuss his most recent essay for us, which was called The New Censorship. It appears in our summer

issue and details the government's increasing

efforts to control digital speech. So Martin, thanks for joining us. Great to have you on again.

Happy to be here. So this essay, The New Censorship, very important piece, if our readers haven't gotten to it yet, they

should. It opens with the scene from earlier this year, the hearing of the House Select

Subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. Two prominent journalists,

Matt Taibi, and Michael Schellenberger, who's written for us, testified before the

committee on what Schellenberger described as the censorship industrial complex, in which

federal entities were closely with digital platforms to control and police online speech.

Dhabian Schellenberger had been given famously access to internal documents known as the

Twitter files.

What did these documents reveal about federal agency's involvement in Twitter's

pre-Elon Musk content moderation.

...