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Dec. 26, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:07
THE IRS WORKS ON CHRISTMAS EVE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep734
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Hello, my friends, and your eyes do not deceive you.
If you're watching on the video right now, I am not Dinesh D'Souza, who has gone some sort of experimental skin whitening treatment like Michael Jackson.
No, my name is Kyle Serafin, and I'm a former FBI agent and an FBI whistleblower.
You may have seen me on the movie Police State.
I sat next to Dinesh and we expose some of the criminal malfeasance that has been going on inside our weaponized federal government.
Now, this week I'm going to be taking the reins.
Dinesh and Debbie have taken the time off.
They're getting prepped for a big 2024.
Many of you guys have that instinct too.
2024 is going to be pretty lit.
And in anticipation of that, they're taking a deep breath, stepping away, and they've given me the reign.
So look forward to an excellent week where we're going to be talking to people who've experienced weaponized government and who are exposing weaponized government.
You can look forward to today's show with Matt Taibbi.
He's one of the founding journalists that went in and got after the Twitter files, which was one of the first seams kind of ripped open for us to see what's going on underneath the censorship apparatus, and what does weaponize federal government really mean.
You can follow my podcast on rumble at rumble.com slash Kyle Serafin.
And you can also find us on the audio platforms by just searching my name, Kyle Serafin. You've probably seen me with Dinesh on some of the other shows.
You may have seen me on Dan Bongino's podcast. This one we're going to do all week.
So stick around for all four episodes. And let's take a look at what the police state uses and who the police state targets. This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Now, the more I travel around the country, the more I realize that even though I live and eat and breathe all of the garbage that is weaponized government, it's not necessarily the thing that all of you wake up and think about.
You have other important things to do, like go to work and make a living and maybe make your kids dinner.
Maybe you're still cleaning up after the holidays.
So today we're going to give you a little taste of something that is absolutely terrifying.
There's almost no other way to say it.
The Twitter files were one of the first looks at the mechanized apparatus sitting behind the curtain that the federal government was used to censor and change election outcomes and public opinion.
This kind of goes back to what happened in November of 2022.
So we're now one year away.
We're looking back in retrospective and we're seeing a couple of crazy things happen.
Number one, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, quit billions of his own dollars, over $40 billion to buy a platform that seemed like it was losing money.
That platform he envisioned as being the town hall and the public square for people to come out and have active and reasonable discourse.
But like so many conservatives experienced, and I think Elon Musk saw the Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site, experienced, the throttling and the way that data was being manipulated in real time and the way that it was actually being used to change the opinion of our public Concerned him.
And so he got involved. On November the 28th of 2022, he actually finalized the purchase of this.
He bought Twitter. And then he did something that nobody does.
He said, here's my brand new toy.
Here's my brand new car.
I'm going to throw the keys to a couple of investigative journalists and see if they can ride the tires off this thing.
And they did. He let them in behind the curtain, probably against the advice of many attorneys, which we're going to find out of exactly what that looked like from one of the men who did it.
And they just started digging.
He said, your gumshoes, your blue collar type, you know, original OG investigative journalist, you want to go find the story.
I'm going to give you the biggest story in this country right now.
And I'm going to let you look. Now, nobody else is doing this, by the way.
The reason the Twitter files are so interesting is because they're unique.
You didn't see the Google files and you didn't see the YouTube files or anyone else saying, hey, you know what?
Why don't you just come into our house? We're going to go step outside of the porch and see what kind of things you could do.
That's actually what the federal government does.
That's what my job used to be as a federal agent.
We take you outside and then we go look through all your stuff and we find out what crimes you've committed.
But Elon Musk took this bold step because, number one, he bought all the liabilities of it, but he also wanted to clean his house.
And the second thing is, is that he was trying to live up to the principles.
I think we can agree on that.
Whether you like Elon Musk, whether you think he's the savior of humanity, or whether you think he's sitting out there and ready to put an implant in all of your brains, which obviously is one of the technologies he's working on, regardless of how you feel about the man, the contribution of $44 billion To even the lip service of free speech.
And Twitter has its problems, no doubt about it.
They've been describing it as a layer cake or a tiramisu where the layers kind of bleed between each other and the code is apparently disastrous.
But he was able to clean house, get rid of an incredible amount of people from the staff, and they're slowly making it a bigger and bigger free speech platform.
Now, those of us who have been on the growth end of things, because I actually only joined Twitter just before Elon Musk bought it.
So I've experienced growth that many conservatives never get to see.
It takes them years and years to build a platform.
I've got over 100,000 followers on there and I've only been doing this for a year.
And for what it's worth, I hate social media.
I don't even want to be on social media.
It's one of those necessary evils if you're going to go out there.
I use it literally to keep the FBI from knocking down my door because they know that I'll live stream it and there's a power in this sort of thing.
But the fact that the man went out there and opened his dirty laundry drawer and let people that he didn't know...
You'll hear about this in just a second.
He didn't even know these people.
It's not like he had a long personal relationship with them and they had all these shackles.
They opened it up much to the chagrin of the attorneys.
And what we also found out was that the embedded number of people who we will call deep state operatives or administrative state operatives is shocking.
It's actually quite incredible.
There are so many people that have come out of either the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI to go and take up jobs in all of these data companies.
You think that the product is social media so you could share information.
In reality, how are they making money?
They're making money by selling off your data, your behaviors, and targeting you with ads, which isn't necessarily a bad deal.
Nobody should be scared of that.
But the idea that all of that data is housed somewhere, it is disconcerting that the people that are inside of our federal government, the intelligence services, that spend all of their time dealing in information and data, have found the biggest depositories that actually make the federal government blush with how efficient and capable they are of grabbing it.
It's worth noting that when you hear people talk about the information industrial complex or the censorship industrial complex, we're talking about actors within the administrative state who work in the intelligence community that are used to using data for power.
Every single industrial complex uses something for power, whether it be military might or financial needs, or in this case, data.
When they have this and they're using this kind of thing for power, it should scare the living hell out of you.
And we're going to bring on somebody who was the first man behind the curtain to kind of look into it and have him explain to us not only what he discovered, but where he's seen this type of power and this kind of abuse before.
and I think you guys are really gonna enjoy this.
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So we're joined by Matt Taibbi, a so-called journalist, according to members of Congress, who are not necessarily that friendly, although theoretically would be part of the same party that he grew up in.
I want to talk to him about the Twitter files today.
You guys, we're going to have some of you may not even know the work that he's been doing, which is so important over at Racket, his independent organization.
And I just want to welcome you.
Thanks for joining me, Matt. Thanks for having me, Kyle.
And thanks for all your advice in the last year, too.
Kind of on the sly, kind of keeping that on the DL. Try not to tell people about that, but we'll keep doing it.
Let's talk about who you are as a person.
You were called a so-called journalist, but you're an award-winning journalist, and you've been doing this for quite a long time.
Can you kind of give people just kind of the bullet points of your career and why they might know your name?
Sure. So my father, Mike Taibbi, was a journalist for 50 years.
He worked primarily in Boston, then he moved to New York, was a local TV reporter there.
Then worked for NBC Dateline for many years.
So I grew up in the journalism business.
He started when he was 18.
He had me when I was two.
Just two years later.
So I grew up in newsrooms.
Didn't want to go into journalism, but I had no other skills.
So I ended up there anyway.
Yeah. Spent the first part of my career in the former Soviet Union, was there for almost 12 years, where I had my own newspaper there, then came back, worked for Rolling Stone for 15 years, spent a lot of that time covering finance after the 2008 crash, and now most recently, I think I've been spending most of my last two or three years on this digital censorship issue, which culminates in the Twitter files.
Perfect. Perfect. And so we saw that Elon Musk bought Twitter in late November of last year, and we are now one year out from him giving you some kind of groundbreaking access.
Did you ever imagine when you said, yes, I'll come out to San Francisco and look at whatever he was going to show you, that you'd be sitting in front of Congress and testifying about it?
No, the whole thing has been so completely surreal from the beginning to end.
Someday it's going to make a really funny book, I think.
But the beginning of that story is, you know, I got invited to San Francisco.
Went from not knowing the man to meeting the richest person in the world, like within two days.
And I'm in this completely surreal meeting where he's just saying, yeah, well, you can go in and look at whatever you want.
And there's a lawyer there with this ashen look on their face and saying, you don't mean everything, like not the privileged stuff.
And he's like, ah, you know, whatever.
And that was it. Basically, we ended up...
Having almost no supervision for the better part of a month looking through files.
And that was when we got most of the stuff.
And they didn't know what we were going to find, I don't think.
And we had no idea either.
And it was really bizarre.
You talk about the risk that that is that Elon sort of just assumed by letting you guys free to look through his dirty laundry?
Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why this doesn't happen.
Why people who come in to head major corporations don't just willy-nilly let investigative reporters rummage through their stuff because God knows what they'll find.
I mean, there's stuff about ongoing litigation in there.
There's all kinds of things that if we had decided to pursue it and air out some of this dirty laundry, there was liability that might have been there.
People might have filed all kinds of lawsuits.
And he sort of just trusted that we were going to look in a direction that wasn't that.
And even so, I think they might have ended up in some trouble anyway because of the stuff we published.
So it's a one in a billion thing.
Every journalist I've talked to said this is the kind of thing that just doesn't happen.
There's no analog in American history for this.
The concept of journalistic ethics, I think, has kind of taken a backseat in the last couple of years.
I grew up around newsrooms as well.
My dad was a news guy and used to run newsrooms in San Francisco and things like that, and Dallas as AM radio.
So my question is always this.
It kind of used to be a blue-collar profession to do investigative journalism.
Can you talk about sort of the shift that we've seen in America and maybe why he thought you guys were the right guys to do it?
Sure, you're absolutely right.
When my father got into journalism in the late 60s, journalism was more of a trade than a profession.
You went into journalism, it was much more likely that you were the son or daughter, more typically the son, frankly, but you were more likely to come from a family of plumbers or, you know, Airline pilots, somebody from the military.
There were lots of children of cops who went into journalism.
And it was very much kind of a working class or middle class profession that was instinctively mistrustful of authority and rich people and politicians.
I mean, I just remember every newsroom I was ever in, there were always like posters of politicians that were just instantly defaced.
They were put up on the wall and And most newsrooms were like comedy clubs.
You know, there was just lots of wisecracking going on.
It was a very, you know, sort of a renegade, kind of outlaw vibe to it.
And then I think after All the President's Men is when people like me started appearing in the business.
You saw upper middle class kids who had grown up and thought it was a sexy job.
And... By the time I got into it in the mid-90s, it was almost entirely Ivy League people who were at the top of the profession, and that was totally new.
And that's why there's been this dramatic change, I think, because it's the perspective that's different.
The people who are in journalism now, they're the same people socially as the people they're supposed to be covering, and that was never true before, but it is true now.
You're a pretty secular guy.
Is that accurate? You're not a religious person?
Yeah, not anymore. I grew up Catholic.
Fair enough. When I look at the way that it's done right now, it's almost like the people coming out of journalism school, which they will call J school, which even has its own kind of thing, right?
It's almost like a seminary where people are stepping into a priesthood.
And my father talks about this, having seen that transition, saying, you know, now they're kind of like anointed.
And it's like, oh, ominous, ominous, go out there and practice journalism.
And what you say can be the arbiter of truth.
Do you think there's any kind of weight to that?
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's very much this sort of belief in a credentialing process.
The people who are in the business now, most old school journalists would tell you, you don't need to go to J school.
This job isn't about that.
You can learn the whole thing in three days.
It's just about asking questions.
And you have to have some kind of communication skills.
You have to know how to write.
But it's not that complicated.
J-School is really about the whole credentialing process.
Do you have a degree from Columbia University?
If you do have the degree from Columbia University, do you have professors who are going to recommend you get the right internship at the right organization?
My father always told me, don't bother with journalism school, so I didn't.
I just worked hard.
Demolition, waited tables, saved some money, and went to Russia and just started doing the job and selling articles, which I think is a much easier way to do it.
But now, it's very much like a priesthood, and it's unfortunate because we can get into this too, but I saw the way that behavior manifested itself very specifically on the campaign trail, which is the first big assignment I had in the States when I came back.
Yeah. You know, they believe they have the right to decide for people all kinds of things that are really important.
That seems to be kind of that enforcing and orthodoxy.
And we're seeing it in the intelligence community, too.
So, you know, that's my background.
That's what I got to see is that people who have studied together tend to think the same way.
They tend to kind of move along that route.
And so we've seen journalists do the same thing where not only the arbiters, but they all kind of have lockstep.
How does that compare when you look at what's going on today with the sort of maybe non-state media, but they seem to be very state-supporting?
And what you saw when you were in Russia, how does that, you know, do you see sort of that commonality?
Yeah, and this is really interesting because, you know, I'm old enough, believe it or not, to have studied in the Soviet Union.
So I was there at the very tail end.
I was a student with a Russian language because I loved Russian books.
So I wanted to learn Russian.
When I got there, I noticed this really bizarre phenomenon, which was that Russia as a society, it was a...
A state that had laws, but nobody paid attention to the laws because they were totally meaningless.
They gave you all kinds of rights in the Constitution, but you couldn't exercise them.
So the whole concept of how people lived is they abided by unwritten rules.
And in every conceivable interaction, you were constantly doing these calculations.
Can I say this thing to this person?
Am I allowed to let this person know that I have dollars, which is illegal?
Is this a person who is allowed to wear black market clothes in public, like a party member, or is it a person who's going to get arrested for doing that?
I mean, it was like this two-tiered kind of society.
And in the Soviet era...
Journalists were in that upper tier.
They were allowed to be rule breakers and jerks who had special accommodations.
They had a club that had very nice food that other people couldn't get, but they had to lie constantly.
The job was totally meaningless.
You were writing these idiotic articles all the time.
But they were a club. What's so interesting is that as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia produced unbelievable investigative journalism for about 10 years before Putin locked it down.
But it was all kept behind closed doors in the Soviet period.
And there are a lot of parallels, I think, to the current situation where The Washington Post and the New York Times, their reporters may as well be partners of state agencies, the FBI, the CIA. They act like they're basically on the same team, which is totally opposite to what the mission is.
One would think that. Yeah, I want to get deeper into that right after the break.
We're going to talk about that. We're talking to Matt Taibbi, who is an independent journalist, and he runs Racket, which is an outstanding sub stack you guys should check out.
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So we'll get back to that right after the break here.
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Give them a call. So we're talking to Matt Taibbi, who was one of the original journalists to break open the story of the Twitter files.
And I want to get into that right now because we're talking about the analogs between the Soviet Union.
We're talking about what we're seeing in America.
It's not nearly as formalized a relationship.
Maybe you can kind of talk about what you guys started seeing as you peel back the curtain there.
Yeah, so when we went into the Twitter files, we were thinking maybe we might find a couple of letters about something like the Hunter Biden laptop story from some organization like the FBI. We actually didn't find anything about that story, which was direct. But then we started to see emails that said things like flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS, flagged by HHS, flagged by Treasury.
And there were...
They were all about...
This was all during the period running up to the election.
And we started to find hundreds of these emails.
Sometimes they would be attached to Excel spreadsheets that had hundreds or thousands of account names on them.
And they would come with a sort of form letter...
You know, piece of text on them that would say, we think that these accounts may violate your terms of service.
You may at your own discretion choose to take action.
And we subsequently found out that there was a regular system of meetings between all the biggest tech companies and the FBI, DHS, the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and a formalized system of funneling these flag notices that came from Internally in the States,
it went through the HHS. They had a whole bureaucracy of content flagging that we discovered it took us about three or four weeks to figure it out, but it was all there.
It was mind-blowing. What was that sort of emotional feeling?
Because you go in expecting maybe we'll find something, and you didn't find something.
It's like someone digging into a little piece of dirt and then opening up a hole, and underneath it is a cavern.
You had an entire sort of apparatus that was all available to you.
What was that sensation, that emotion like?
It's amazing.
As a journalist, if you work 30 years or 35 years, you might, once or twice in your career, get a real rush of like, wow, I'm really on to something.
In this case...
There was no question. I mean, the only thing I can compare it to is a scene in a movie, which was, you know, from all the president's men when Bob Woodward was at the arraignment for the Watergate burglars, and he hears the last of the burglars when asked, well, his employment history is a central intelligence agency, and he realizes, like, his brain does all the math in a second, and he realizes, oh my god, like, this is a huge story.
That's kind of what happened to us in the third or fourth day of this.
We started to realize that these were not anomalous communications.
We started to find letters where Twitter employees were joking about how the FBI and DHS were their partners.
At that point, we didn't know what to do because we didn't know how to characterize what we were looking at.
It was There was no analog to this kind of story, but certainly it was an adrenaline rush, and in some ways, we're all still on it, I think.
It makes a lot of sense. The other question I have, because very few people have actually done the thing you did, which was practice journalism behind the Iron Curtain, experience what it looks like to really be in an authoritarian-type state.
Now you're seeing some of that apparatus that nobody else can see.
Was there any fear involved as you guys started to go forward?
A little bit. You know, I knew journalists in Russia.
A couple of the people who I knew during my time there are no longer with us, you know, got murdered after Putin took power.
But there were attacks even during the Yeltsin years.
And so I always had a healthy appreciation of the difference between what American journalists go through and what people go through in the third world.
You're not going to get shot in your doorway or killed by a poison telephone, which is something that happened to a reporter in Russia.
But this stuff was explosive.
We knew that the intelligence agencies and the FBI in particular, they were not going to be happy.
They made statements to that effect, denouncing this reporting as conspiracy theory.
And The one thing that we were sure of is that whatever this was, this project was going to be temporary.
It was going to be shut down one way or the other.
We just didn't know from what angle that would happen.
But I was a little concerned, for sure, for the first time, I would say.
And what sort of backlash did you guys get?
Did anyone have any other, you specifically, but I think others kind of experienced a little bit of a taste of what it looks like when the government is displeased with you, yeah?
Yeah. Well, I had a really odd incident when I testified before Jim Jordan's Weaponization of Government Committee, and while I was testifying, the IRS actually visited my house.
Was that concurrent? I thought it was the day after.
It was the same day that you were doing it?
It was while I was testifying.
Yeah, I'm sure that was an accident, huh?
Yeah. I mean, what are the chances of that?
But I thought it was too ridiculous to be related, and I told the committee only because I thought it would be irresponsible not to.
It's potential witness intimidation.
I had to let them know.
I didn't say anything until we got information back from the Treasury about what that was about and they had opened the case on Christmas Eve of 2022, which was a Saturday and the day that we dropped probably the scariest Twitter file story, which was about the FBI, DHS, even the CIA being involved in this content flogging operation.
So that made me nervous, I mean, for the first time.
Some of the, you know, I think there have been some hints behind the scenes, maybe Elon heard some things that, you know, from people in the government or, you know, connected to government about displeasure that they were having with these reports.
So, yeah, we all were a little bit nervous.
Also, by the way, we discovered that the former general counsel of the FBI vetted the first Twitter files without our knowledge.
So he was still working in Twitter at the time, Jim Baker.
So that was odd.
But, you know, again, none of us had any experience with this kind of situation.
So we don't know really what went on behind the scenes.
Absolutely. Lest anyone think otherwise, feds don't generally work on Saturdays.
They don't open cases on Christmas Eve.
This is a decidedly unfederal thing to do.
So a little bit of concern at least would be, I think, totally relevant in this case.
We're going to take a quick break.
We're going to come back and I want to kind of wrap up the story so you guys understand exactly what that apparatus looked like and how it came into play.
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Alright, we're back with Matt Taibbi.
We're going to be talking a little bit. I want to sew this story up for people to understand it.
I think the job of a journalist oftentimes is taking all the files that you go through.
You got accused of curating a narrative.
That's actually the job is what does all this stuff mean?
Like having a bunch of data is useless.
So maybe you can tell people the story.
What did the Twitter files unveil and what did that mechanism look like?
I think the top-line headline is that the federal government is involved in a massive way in moderating content.
I think that's the gentlest way of putting it.
I would say there's a huge federal censorship operation.
And it involves not only the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but a huge...
Sort of galaxy of other organizations.
The State Department has something called the Global Engagement Center.
There's a number of organizations within the Pentagon that do this kind of work.
And then they contract out to hundreds of other NGOs.
There was a Twitter executive who joked that these were non-governmental organizations that weren't quite non-governmental.
There are hundreds of these operations out there that are getting government money, lots of it.
And so I think that's the big revelation is that the government is involved in suppressing content at a huge level. Do you think it's more dangerous for the government to be out in the open saying this is state-sponsored media and we're only going to tell you what we want you to hear and then you know it? Or is it more dangerous the way that we have it right now where you talk about non-governmental agencies that are government funded, they tend to be pretty governmenty then, is that a more dangerous sort of setup, you think?
I think it's infinitely more dangerous, the situation that we have now.
Again, when I lived in the Soviet Union, nobody read newspapers and believed them.
I mean, they used them to do stuff like, you know, fill their jackets for extra lining when it got really cold, you know, to line the bottoms of bird cages and things like that.
But nobody, like, read the papers.
is leaving the stuff that was in there. The problem with the current situation is that we have this enormously manipulated version of reality that a lot of people don't know has been altered in this enormous way. And it involves not only removing things, but dialing them down. So there are people who think certain ideas are totally unpopular, where the reverse might be true.
Other things might be actually very unpopular, but everybody sees those tweets anyway, or those posts, because they're amplified.
So it's a distortion of reality at a fundamental level.
I think the Soviets would have...
Drop to their knees in gratitude to have tools like this and for the public to not be able to detect it is a key element of the whole thing.
If I'm gathering this correctly, it sounds like people have an impression that the algorithms are basically fundamentally fair and they're just going to serve up information as it is organically interesting to them and to the public.
So if it's a high viewed tweet, that must mean that a lot of people are interested in it.
But being able to curate that on the back end, that's the real, the magic is kind of what you're saying is that they're boosting the people and the signals they want and they're turning down the signals that might otherwise to give people a false view of reality.
Yeah, they use algorithms that are, oddly enough, similar from what I was told to the algorithms that they use to decide which people to drone overseas.
So, you have point scoring systems, you know...
Overseas, if it's a military-age male walking outside, has four telephone numbers with the wrong people in his contact list and is carrying something that looks like it might be a weapon, that might put you over the edge if you count up all those points.
Well, what happens online is...
Person follows the wrong account, once retweeted RT, you know, retweeted a Trump account about this or that, was deemed to have once said something that some organization said was incorrect.
Suddenly they're de-amplified.
But actually, they might have no connection to any foreign government or even be incorrect.
We found scientists from Stanford and Harvard who had published peer-reviewed studies who had been de-amplified just because the government disagreed with their opinions about government policy.
So, yeah, that's exactly as you described, and it's very dangerous, I think.
So we're on Dinesh D'Souza's podcast, and he recently came out with a movie called Police State, which I was a part of.
And I think it's been sort of cast as a right-wing narrative, a right-wing issue.
Do you see government censorship and sort of the apparatus that allows a lot of these sort of weaponized pieces of government to be a left or right issue at all?
It's certainly not a right-wing issue.
This is part of the ongoing mystery for me.
I grew up voting Democratic my whole life.
I gave to the ACLU my whole life.
I was raised to believe that free speech was a fundamental issue for American liberalism.
This was the line you could never cross.
Think about the Parents Music Resource Center, NWA, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerry Falwell, all those things.
This is the line you could never cross, and as recently as the Bush years, it was the animating issue civil liberties was for people on the left, that and being opposed to wars.
Suddenly, after Trump got elected...
This issue codes as a right-wing issue in media.
The Washington Post actually called me conservative journalist Matt Taibbi before signing the editing a few hours later because it's the propaganda mechanism that they're using to dismiss this issue.
It's not a right-wing issue.
It's an American issue.
The First Amendment is first for a reason.
It's the core principle of our society, and they're violating it on a huge scale, and they're trying to get away with it by calling it a fringe right-wing issue.
If you could measure your surprise, finding what you found in the Twitter files versus the way that it was received by the political left and people that have bought that narrative, which one is more surprising as far as categorization?
Wow, it's pretty close.
The shock of finding this stuff was pretty intense, but the ongoing inability of people to register what it is that this story is about, or their refusal to even consider some of the evidence, That actually has been a little bit more surprising.
I mean, we've seen a lot of this in the Trump years, you know, with stories like Russiagate, where even very experienced reporters just had a really hard time grappling with the fact that there was nothing there.
But this is a worse thing.
And, you know, there's nobody left in the Democratic Party who cares about this issue anymore.
So that has been a shock and a disappointment for sure.
It seems like you and some of your partners doing the Twitter files are kind of in this politically homeless space where you're sort of ideologically on the liberal side of things.
You lean center left-ish at the very minimum and that you feel free speech is worth fighting for.
And then you're being shunned by the parties and sort of the political groups that would otherwise be your natural allies, one would think.
It's weird for me. I grew up and I can't believe that we're dealing with this.
Where does this country go from this weird tribal situation?
Do you see any kind of analogs in history that we can look at and say this is how it's going to work out?
No, I mean, in the American context, I can't think of anything.
I mean, it's a little bit like the Red Scare years, I would say, where, you know, they're really using a technique where it's just in-group, out-group.
So there was a famous sort of Nazi jurist named Carl Schmitt, who was actually influential with some of the war on terror neoconservative types.
And his whole idea was this friend-enemy distinction, that it was more important to categorize people in terms of whether they were hostile to the state or not in an emergency, as opposed to left-right or anything else.
And I think that's where we are.
We're in this kind of friend-and-foe place where people like you and me are just sort of thrown together in one group, and people who are still You know, technically allowed to, you know, be part of the mainstream conversation.
They're terrified to take one step out, you know, to dip a toe in the lake of unorthodoxy because they don't want to end up on the outside.
And that's... That's where we are now, I think.
I just don't know how to fix it.
That's the problem. I'm curious to know what you think, because, you know, even stuff like the issues that you've talked about before, you know, with the FBI, this idea of, you know, sort of ongoing investigations without predicate.
This used to be, like, not that long ago, a very serious concern on the left, and we just hear nothing about it.
No. And it does seem like it should still be a concern because if anybody thinks that the left is not targeted to the FBI is not mastered by audiology.
It's mastered by budget, which is what we know about government.
It's about money and it's about power.
And so, yeah, it's very strange.
In fact, they were targeting of BLM activists and people who would be the antithesis of people on the political right. And we just see them, yeah, they've just been swept under the rug and they're like, wow, those are just casualties of it.
So it's very strange to see it.
Also interesting, you mentioned the Red Scare. It doesn't matter whether you go back to Palmer raids or any time, it always turns out that that government weaponized against the citizenship, particularly in the speech realm is super weird. So, well, it's not exactly heartening that neither of us have a good answer of it, but it does seem like self-censorship is the enemy.
That was what you saw in the Soviet Union from what I'm hearing.
And so maybe just the continuing speaking, where can people, because we could do this for probably 10 or 12 hours, you and me, and if we need some beers and we could keep going, but where can people find more of the work?
We talked about the Substack, maybe you plug it for them and let people know where to follow you and sign up.
Sure. I'm at www.racket.news.
The other Twitter files reporters, there's Barry Weiss at thefreepress.com, and Michael Schellenberger is at a site called Public on Substack.
We were the three who were there.
Lee Fong was another one.
He has his own site on Substack as well.
And we're all kind of doing the same stuff, so come check out any of those sites at any time.
Kyle, thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate it. No, I enjoyed it.
People put your toe in the water and, you know, maybe get yourself on a watch list.
It's always fun. That's what I've started calling people that watch whatever I'm doing.
Matt, you're the best. Thanks for joining us.
And I look forward to hearing more what you got coming up in 2024.
Absolutely. See you soon, Kyle.
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I could sit and talk to Matt Taibbi for hours.
And like I said, I probably would need a beer or coffee, one of the two, or maybe both.
And we could just keep doing that.
I want to give you guys a little sense of what's going on in the world and maybe where the light and dark.
we're in a battle right now a lot of times we could see it as a spiritual battle and That spiritual battle has ups and downs like many there are a couple of them that have come out in the last couple days And as we unplugged From the news cycle and spent time with our families and were able to take a deep breath and hopefully understand the meaning for this Christmas season I want to share with you a couple of threats that have been out there that we've been aware of and maybe some points of Light as well. So the light and the dark which is really what the season is about In fact, the reason that we chose this particular time of year to celebrate Christmas
Is the winter solstice it actually fits on a pagan holiday where they talk about the the light starting to win over the dark And so that's a good place to kind of end today on the second day of Christmas for those of you who keep track of It there are 12 of them on purpose. It goes all the way up to the gift of the Magi showing up So let's talk about a few things number one there was a significant terrorist warning that was going out across Europe that Catholic churches and traditional houses of Christian worship were going to be targeted by Islamic fundamentalists and extremists who are going to
destroy or interrupt services.
And the good news is that that didn't happen.
So that's part one. There's a threat that continues to do.
And the way that terrorists actually move the needle is by getting people to act in a certain way based on either threats or actions.
And the threats didn't stop people from going to mass and from going to celebrate the Christmas season the way they're supposed to.
And it also didn't stop people from gathering and having their holidays the way you'd expect.
So that's a good point of light where we look at it.
And there's several of these that are going on.
Now, there's a couple of bad things as well, because what we saw was tremendous amounts of unrest in the city of New York.
This was happening in some other big urban areas where we see continuous pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine type organizations.
People are going out there. They're getting arrested.
They're fighting with police officers.
They are trying to tilt the meaning of it.
This is the other thing we see the progressive left do over and over again is co-op symbols.
They learned it from the best folks.
If you don't know this, if you go back into the history of the Catholic Church and even, broadly, the Christian missionaries, they've always used symbols that made sense to people on the ground, and they've used it to put their missions forward.
It turns out to be a very effective way of sort of lining up the way that people's...
their frameworks for viewing the world.
And so, when we see them walking around through New York, and they've got a Madonna...
The Virgin Mary and a baby.
And they've got a Palestinian flag draped over on it.
It's pretty heavy-handed for those of us who are paying attention that this is what propaganda really looks like.
But there are these things going on.
But it's not all bad news because, like I said, the threat of terrorism didn't materialize itself.
What did come up is a couple of fantastic victories, I think, for both free speech, which should be a non-partisan, non-political thing, the way that I just talked to Matt Taibbi about.
There was a victory in the...
Poor case for three pro-life students who attended the pro-life march in January of this year.
Then they went afterwards to the National Archives Museum.
And as they walked around to the National Archives Museum, they took pictures in front of things like the Constitution.
They were wearing pro-life shirts and pins and hats.
And they were told that they had to either cover them up or take them off by security guards, who are known as police officers.
They're special police jurisdictions in Washington, DC.
They were told to take them off because those were considered offensive by the guards, not by policy.
And the scariest thing is, is that if you're going to censor any type of speech, then all speech is on the docket.
And this is really what we were just talking to Matt about.
It isn't a left or a right issue.
It's an issue of either you can express yourself and the best ideas win, or the government comes in and tries to pick winners and losers.
That's what the Twitter files was about, manipulating the narrative, picking winners and losers.
And so the upside is that the National Archives Museum just settled with these three students for not a lot of money, for $10,000, which is our money, by the way.
That's our taxpayer dollars.
We're paying.
But what it also said was that they had to introduce new training for these otherwise political actors working under the federal government's auspices.
And they have to abide by the standards And that actually is a win.
Because if we don't see these things happening, we don't know where they are.
And so luckily, these individuals decided to push forward with a court case, which is not very much fun and usually costs a lot of money.
And they probably didn't even break even with the $10,000, if we're being honest.
And yet it's a win for free speech because whether you have a pro-abortion or a pro-life shirt on if you walk through Things that we all pay for on the national mall, whether it be the smithsonian or the national archives or anywhere else Even through the halls of congress. There's no government agency that should be coming in and trying to push you on that There's also another victory that happened in a court case against porn hub Now porn hub is has been under fire members of project veritas have stepped forward and they have actually formed a new group
Outside of james o'cafe's purview and they are they are doing investigative journalism showing That a lot of it involves child pornography, which means that these companies are profiting from One of the most evil things that can happen and the good news is is that a judge in Alabama just certified them as a class and said that a class of people which means you can spread the cost And you can spread the the proceeds and you can also spread the pattern of facts to a multitude of victims They've just been certified.
It's the first hurdle in being able to hold people who are doing evil accountable.
And so luckily in this season of light versus dark, we're seeing that there is in fact movement even in our federal court system, which many of us are looking at and saying, you know, is there any justice, whether it be for J sixers, whether it be because of the mechanized apparatus of the police state working from the enforcement end, my old girlfriend, the FBI, um, who I always likened to kind of a psycho ex-girlfriend.
She just kind of burned all my stuff in the front yard and threw me out.
But when we look at these critters that are out there operating, they're not all victorious.
And so there are still people pushing back.
Some of the system still works. That's why we don't advocate abandoning the American principles.
The key is to fight for them and to fight for them in a peaceful and organized way and say, we also have to highlight the good news.
Because if you did nothing but bad news, you could literally just sit and stew and never want to leave your home.
And that's not what this season is about either.
And lastly, and most interestingly enough, I think a sign of at least some of the battle being won is that people who are living in Democrat strolling holes that are pushing some of the most ridiculous and dangerous political rhetoric and ideologies that are so radical and antithetical to American history, which is simply just accepting your neighbors for whatever they want to do as long as they don't infringe on your rights.
That's the basic sort of libertarian mindset. And we're seeing these courts that are banning New York's and California's in droves. They're leaving Newsweek just reported that populations in those big states are decreasing and they are going to red areas, not because they even necessarily agree with what's going on in the red area politics, but they know that they could be left alone to either worship or not worship as they so choose to speak, whether it's favored or not favored speech, because a government that doesn't weigh in on it is preferable to a government that's trying to pick winners and losers.
So we're seeing this trend happening right now in real time.
We're probably halftime in this ugly game, which is why 2024 is going to be such an interesting year to watch, both as a political commentator and as someone who's experiencing it.
So don't pull your head out of the game right now.
We're just about to get started. I look forward to seeing you guys all for the rest of this week as we talk about some of this weaponized government.
If you don't know, you can't be forearmed.
If you're not forewarned, you won't know what's coming your way.
And that's the reason why the movie Police State was so important.
It's the reason why a lot of these voices you're going to be hearing, we're going to be talking to conservative journalist Tracy Beans, who is an independent who's going to cover down on Missouri versus Biden.
So you should look forward to that. We're going to be talking about the government using government apparatus to do sex trafficking.
And we're going to bring in a couple of whistleblowers to talk about that.
We're going to talk about a journalist who was literally targeted a violation of the First Amendment, I would think, but is now being targeted by the DOJ for his coverage of January 6th.
Simply interested in the truth. And he has a very nuanced take that if you think one side or the other was 100% right or wrong, I think you guys are going to want to stick around for that too.
So enjoy us for the rest of this week.
Again, you can follow me at Kyle Serafin on all social medias.
It's very straightforward. On True Social, on Instagram, and on Twitter, X, which I have a hard time calling X. And then lastly, you can find us at rumble.com slash Kyle Serafin.
Folks, I'm looking forward to spending this week with you, and I hope you have a wonderful and blessed day, and a Merry Christmas on the second day.
This is The Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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