Mehdi Hassan hosts a weekly show on MSNBC. I hadn’t heard of him or it until Matt Taibbi previewed his appearance on the show in the entertaining post “Eat me, MSNBC,” originally titled “MSNBC sucks.” Hassan invited Taibbi to appear on the show and, in the event, subject himself to attacks that I found to be astounding in their substantive irrelevance, triviality, and error.

In his preview Taibbi explained: “I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion [of Taibbi’s work on the Twitter Files]. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.” Taibbi has posted a follow-up here. Even I could infer that Taibbi found Hassan to be conducting himself in bad faith. Video of the 30-minute interview is posted immediately below in its entirety.

The Twitter Files have established the existence of what Michael Shellenberger has fairly dubbed The Censorship Industrial Complex: U.S. Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation Campaigns, 2016 – 2022 The link goes to Shellenberger’s March 9 testimony before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Shellenberger appeared to testify along with Taibbi. Hassan attacked Taibbi for deeming his appearance an honor.

I think the Twitter Files are the biggest story out there and have noted the media silence regarding their revelations in my numerous posts and notes on them. I was interested to see how Hassan dealt with them in his interview. Hassan dealt with them essentially by misdirection. The terminus was absurdity.

The tweets below take up the issues that Hassan raised in the “interview.” They will make sense if you can bring yourself to watch the interview (and there are more to be found in Taibbi’s Twitter thread). If you can’t bring yourself to watch the interview, they won’t make sense.