It’s appropriate that on April 1, the national day of jokes, Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove decided to launch a battle of wits with journalist Matt Taibbi.
She was so brave to go in unarmed.
Kamlager-Dove is the top Democrat on a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that was holding a hearing on government censorship of Americans’ constitutionally protected free speech on social media. Taibbi was one of the witnesses. Reading her opening statement, Kamlager-Dove smeared Taibbi by repeating and introducing into the record false and discredited news stories which had asserted – before the stories were corrected by the publications – that Taibbi had been a “serial sexual harasser” years ago.
Members of Congress can’t be sued for libel for what they say on the House floor or in a hearing room. But Kamlager-Dove was so anxious to distribute her performance widely that she posted the clip on her official account on X, formerly Twitter, and on BlueSky, a liberal refuge for leftists who can’t stand being around uncensored speech. She even added a snide remark that it was “telling” that Taibbi didn’t “defend himself.”
Taibbi immediately filed a $10 million lawsuit against Kamlager-Dove “for libel arising from false statement made during a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., which became actionable defamatory statements as they were republished by Defendant on April 1, 2025, and republished by Defendant on the social media sites X and BlueSky, and on her official congressional website on the same date.”
Matt Taibbi is an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of four New York Times bestsellers who helped to rip the cover off the U.S. government’s secretive actions to coerce social media platforms into acting as speech police.
Kamlager-Dove is a lifelong politician. She began by working for a nonprofit run by Holly Mitchell, and when Mitchell was elected to the California Assembly in 2010 and later the state Senate, Kamlager-Dove was her district director. In 2015, Kamlager-Dove began her rapid climb up the political ladder by winning a seat on the L.A. Community College board of trustees. She quickly jumped to the Assembly in 2018, running in and winning a special election when Sebastian Ridley-Thomas resigned.
She was up the ladder again in 2021 when Mitchell resigned from the Senate because she had won a seat on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. Kamlager-Dove ran for and won the Senate seat in a special election but didn’t stay long. In 2022, she rushed into a race for Congress to fill the seat Karen Bass had vacated to run for mayor of Los Angeles.
Kamlager-Dove’s career has been richly funded by special interests. For example, her state Senate campaign in 2021 was assisted by more than $200,000 from an independent expenditure committee sponsored by the California Federation of Labor and the AFL-CIO, and $335,000 from another IE committee backed by the healthcare, insurance, energy and housing industries.
It’s almost as if California Democratic politics was made up of political machines that push forward people whose main skill is reading what’s put in front of them.
One characteristic of political machines is a ruthless, nasty vindictiveness that seeks the absolute destruction of anyone who threatens the enterprise, even minimally. It’s routine. So it’s not surprising that Kamlager-Dove would read a statement making certifiably false accusations against Taibbi. That’s what was on the paper in front of her. Mindlessly reading statements on the paper in front of her has gotten her this far. In an unrelated story, Kamlager-Dove has a 100% lifetime score of voting with the AFL-CIO.
Who knows how many political machines and their bureaucratic variants Taibbi threatened with his reporting of the government’s secret coercion of Twitter and other social media companies. He revealed the scale of the effort to deplatform and disparage anyone who said the “wrong” thing about the origin of COVID-19, the 2020 election, Hunter Biden’s laptop and whatever else the FBI, State Department and other government agencies wanted to suppress.
By the way, at least two people who sued the Biden administration for censoring them personally are now high-ranking officials in the Trump administration: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Karma is slow, but it gets there.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
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