The Constitution, Unplugged: Matt Taibbi on DarkHorse
Bret speaks with Matt Taibbi on the subject of the censorship industrial complex. They discuss their views on the recent lack of reaction by traditional liberals to violations of America’s First Amendment. Join Matt Taibbi and Bret in Washington DC for Rescue the Republic on September 29th https://jointheresistance.org. Find Matt Taibbi on Substack at http://racket.news and on X at http://x.com/mtaibbi.*****Sponsors:American Hartford Gold: Get up to $5,000 of free silver on your first qu...
You know, it happens that the NDAA 2012 gave the government the right to haul you off any street on earth, including in the U.S., and not admit that they even have you.
Well, there go your habeas corpus rights, and the only reason that this is not a top-level concern is that presumably it is at the moment being used rarely, if ever.
But having carved out the right, what's standing between us and an absolutely apocalyptic level of totalitarian control Yeah, I mean, I totally agree.
I'm paranoid about all this.
I'm not even paranoid.
in this election. - Yeah, I mean, I totally agree.
I'm paranoid about all those, I'm not even paranoid.
It's not even paranoia anymore. - Yeah, it's not. - Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this afternoon with none other than Matt Taibbi, who is the editor of Racket News.
And if you've been paying any attention to journalism over the last several decades, you know that Matt is one of the last honest to goodness journalists left in the wild.
So Matt, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks for having me on, Brett.
You're too kind.
That's a very, very nice introduction.
Well, you know, I wish it were an exaggeration, but I have watched the absolute destruction of journalism in my lifetime, and I honestly, if I think about it, can count all of the holdovers from the era in which journalism existed who I think still practice something like journalism on one hand.
Yeah, it isn't great.
I'll put it that way.
And a lot of the old timers who were really good at this profession have kind of moved on or have been sidelined.
So it's getting a little lonely.
You're absolutely right.
It's getting thin on the ground.
So, there's lots to talk about.
You, of course, were a major component of what has gone on to be called the Twitter files.
You've been tracking the censorship industrial complex since before anyone called it that.
You've been slandered You have been shadow banned.
You have faced all manner of control from Goliath.
And what I'm hoping you'll do is tell us about the censorship industrial complex.
What do you know about it that you think people have trouble understanding?
What are the pieces of evidence you might bring to bear for people who doubt its existence?
And then we can talk about how it relates to Rescue the Republic.
Sure, so as you know, because we talked about this before the Twitter files, even before that story came up, for years I had been covering the phenomenon of people being deplatformed, deamplified, removed from various internet platforms, whether it was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google.
Yeah, I wasn't exactly sure how coordinated or organized the phenomenon was.
All I noticed is that it was happening a lot more, beginning with the kind of famous incident involving Alex Jones being taken down in coordination by, you know, four major corporations at the same time and what was clearly a coordinated action.
But we didn't really know.
Nobody had any idea what was going on underneath the surface of that.
And then Elon Musk bought Twitter and there began to be these rumors that he was going to open up the internal files of that company.
And I not so subtly kind of raised my hand as a volunteer to help with that project.
And I got a call to come out to Twitter early on.
We were looking at the Hunter Biden laptop story and to be honest, didn't find much.
There was some interesting stuff in there and that became the first Twitter files release.
But within a week we started to see sort of an avalanche of emails that said things like flag by DHS.
flagged by FBI, flagged by FITF, which is the Foreign Influence Task Force of the FBI, flagged by ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence.
Basically, every major federal enforcement agency had some kind of hand in communicating with companies like Twitter.
And from there, once we started seeing that paper trail, We eventually uncovered a very formalized system of communications, meetings, requests that came from the government to remove content, and they would come not one letter at a time, but by the thousand.
They came in gigantic spreadsheets that would essentially often lead to people being removed from the platform subsequently.
That was shocking to me.
I had no idea that it was that big and coordinated a system.
I've basically spent the entire time since trying to track how much money is being committed to this, which different agencies are involved with it, how far back this goes, what the origins of it are, and I have to tell you, Brett, it's been kind of scary because I thought this was a minor story.
Not a minor story.
I thought it was a significant, but more of a cultural phenomenon.
And it's much more of a planned government phenomenon.
Well, that's interesting.
And I must say, I always appreciate your caution.
You have explored some difficult topics, and you don't come in with the expectation that this is as bad as it could be.
You often come in with a kind of skepticism that I see eroded by evidence, which is exactly what you would want from a journalist.
Right.
I mean, I think it's important with any kind of story to go in You know, being willing to be surprised.
In the case of the censorship thing, we knew a few things, right?
Like Mark Zuckerberg had given an interview to Joe Rogan in which he talked about essentially being briefed by the FBI ahead of time about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So we thought maybe there might be one, you know, some communications about that.
And if you remember, I don't know if this incident stands out in your mind, but in the late 80s or early 90s, the FBI sent one letter to the record label of NWA, basically complaining about one song.
And it was a huge national scandal, like, oh my god, the FBI sent a letter.
You know, but what we found in the Twitter files was like that times a gazillion, and it's no longer a story in America.
And that is also part of the story.
The kind of lack of reaction by traditionally liberal civil liberties loving America is part of the mystery, I think.
Well, I think actually the reaction to the letter about NWA was appropriate, and you're pointing to, you know, not because the one instance is going to cause civilization to collapse, but that once you establish the precedent that this is the government's business, what isn't the government's business?
Right, and yeah, I think there were, I mean, at the time, I was a kid at the time when that happened, and I was an intern at one point with The Village Voice.
I worked a few desks over from a very famed Civil libertarian named Nat Hentoff and he was kind of the voice of the watchdog for government interference and speech and that kind of thing.
You know, they raised a fuss over those kinds of things because America cared about them back then.
Think of all the stories that were like canonical Speech tales from the 80s and 90s and even the 70s before, you know, the Parents Music Resource Center, the People vs. Larry Flint, you know, Robert Mapplethorpe, Naughty by Nature, the tape delay for Richard Pryor, all this stuff.
We were up in arms about every one of those things.
And it was great because people protected their rights.
That's the way this is supposed to work.
And now, all of a sudden, this thing has happened where there's been this Evaporation of the will to fight among Americans, and that is a disheartening and strange development that I think needs to be explained.
I mean, it's one of those gaps in the story that has to be understood.
Well, I think there are actually three things contributing to it.
OK.
I'm interested to hear what you think.
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One is the normalization that you pointed to.
Just simply the fact that, yes, egregious violations are happening, but you start to get, you can't, you know, your blood pressure can't leap and your eyes bulge every time if it's happening ten times a week.
So people just get kind of used to the fact it's still happening, but, you know, it even becomes not worthy of comment.
Second thing I think is more important which is that it once upon a time with you know low-tech analog technology for example surveillance and control of information required a kind of overwhelming presence and it was Almost inherently indiscriminate.
In order to stamp out the thing that they wanted to stamp out, they ended up overreaching all over the place.
And the problem is that the ability to surgically interfere allows something that I would call surgical totalitarianism.
And the idea is the reason that speech that is not mainstream has to be protected is because this is how we move forward.
It's how we discover things that we don't know.
Right.
But most people, most of the time they speak, are not involved in it.
And so if you wanted to prevent meaningful change, you don't need to interfere with everybody's speech.
You just need to interfere with the speech of the tiny fraction of the population that is actually in a position to make a difference about what people think or about, you know, pointing out hazards or whatever it might be.
So the problem is, you know, a Matt Taibbi might be very hazardous to those with ill-gotten power, and he might be worth interfering with.
Or Brett Weinstein.
For example.
But somebody with the same perspective, but a much smaller platform could be left alone.
And what that does is it means that people have
an inaccurate sense of how much interference there is and more importantly they don't know that it's having a very profound effect on the our trajectory through time right so that that surgical aspect causes people to have an uh skewed yeah a tamped down reaction but the other thing And I know you'll resonate with this.
I guess this is the third thing, is that once upon a time, there were things like newspapers and news programs, and they had a journalistic obligation to report on stories that were story worthy, whether it worked in the direction that their editorial page liked or not.
Right?
So it didn't matter that you were a right-leaning newspaper and a right-of-center president was in trouble.
You still had to report the story.
Right.
And what we have now is a system where actually most of the press just simply doesn't report anything that goes in the other direction.
And so it's like vampire news that doesn't reflect in the mirror.
That's an interesting way of putting it.
Yeah, that's true.
Yep.
Go ahead.
Well, no, I totally agree with that.
In terms of the surgical totalitarianism, that's an interesting concept because In the first week of the Twitter files, one of the first things we were introduced to was the whole toolbox that they had for every person's page, right?
We looked at the page, for instance, of the Stanford academic Jay Bhattacharya, who was, you know, suppressed for, you know, his views for research.
That's that fringe epidemiologist, right?
Fringe epidemiologist, exactly.
And what we saw is that they have these incredible tools.
They can dial your presence all the way down to nothing, including people who follow you, won't be able to see you.
Or they can amp your presence all the way up to everybody sees you, which they did for some, let's just say, very select folks, including spouses of ex-presidents who were putting books out and that sort of thing.
They can basically surgically control reality.
And as you say, it's like people are like frogs in boiling water.
They don't really know that these changes are happening and that their perspective on things is being constantly adjusted in these weird, minute directions.
And so that's one thing, is that they're just not seeing the issue or it's happening in such a gradual way that they're not able to recognize it.
As for the news agencies not covering things, it's funny.
I grew up in journalism.
My father was a reporter, so I was around newsrooms my entire life from when I was a little kid.
And the idea of maybe like an FBI official calling up a news director or an editor and saying, hey, we would really like it if you didn't do that story or if you turned this thing It would have to be an extraordinary situation for anybody even to take that call.
In fact, it would be scandalous, almost irrespective of the situation.
And we saw, you know, even as recently as the 70s, The New York Times battled with real heart over that issue, over the Pentagon Papers.
They fought like tigers over that thing.
They fought the President of the United States.
What happens now is you see there is absolutely no collegial loyalty whatsoever.
Julian Assange is not everybody's idea of a journalist.
I know that there are some really good journalists who don't approve of the way he put out information.
I don't really agree with them, but...
I understand it.
At the same time, though, when the government decides to go after him and try to put him in jail for 107 years for doing basically what we do every single day, using laws that anybody can be guilty of, really at any time.
I mean, obtaining national defense information?
What does that even mean?
That's working.
That's reporting.
And nobody Nobody even lifted a finger, even out of self-interest, to help him in the business.
And that was a shocking development.
You know, the Alex Jones thing, I understood why there was silence, but the failure of vision to see that this was going to lead in other directions was stunning.
And now, yeah, as you say, it's basically they've built this sort of coral machine that just puts out kind of an arranged version of reality where there is no, you know, alarm being sounded about anything that's off narrative, which reminds me a little bit, you know, I'm old enough to have gone to school in the Soviet Union, so I remember what that looks like, and it's pretty so I remember what that looks like, and it's pretty scary.
All right, two points.
One, to your point about the algorithmic modulation of the public's mood and its beliefs and all that.
First of all, I recall Facebook did a study about how powerful its capacity to shape opinion was.
Oh my god, did they?
Yeah.
I don't remember the details of it.
Do you?
No, I don't, but I'm gonna look it up.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
So, The other thing, though, just, you know, as my viewers and listeners will know, I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I'm struck by the fact that part of why we don't understand the import of this, it's not even just censorship, but the shaping of the information environment, is that evolutionarily, there's almost no analog for it.
The idea that if you were a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer or even somebody in a farming culture 400 years ago, the idea that you would walk into a room of people who seemed to be peers
Who you didn't know, and that you could walk by and listen to conversation after conversation, and what conversations you were hearing and which direction they pointed would be like the Truman Show, constructed so that you would lead to a conclusion that actually was completely unrepresentative to what the actual population believed?
Right.
That's impossible.
Yes, to the degree that we're doing it, for sure.
I think people who lived in totalitarian societies, probably in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, would say they experienced something a little bit like that.
But the difference With the internet age and what we were able to do in America, and just to your point about the algorithmic specificity of it all, like, think about this detail from the Murphy v. Missouri lawsuit, you know, the big Supreme Court case, where they introduced evidence that basically the White House wanted a Tucker Carlson interview dialed down 50%.
Like, exactly 50%.
They know they were able to make that request, which tells you that the ability to do this is extraordinarily precise.
It reminds me a little bit of the capabilities they have now as opposed to what the Soviets could do.
There's a famous Kafka story called, I think it's called Before the Law, where a traveler comes and he's looking for access to the law, and he meets a guard who won't let him get access to the truth.
And he ends up staying there his whole life.
He gets old and gray, and finally he's about to expire.
And he says to the guardsman, he says, how come all this time that I've been at this door, nobody else has come and knocked and tried to get through and gain access to the truth?
And he said, oh, this door is only for you.
Everybody else has their own individual.
obstacles.
And so that's what people have to understand about the digital world is that every person has their own individualized consumer reality that is highly tailored to your particular personality, your behavior.
And it's incredible the technology that they have, what they're able to do in terms of stimulating you to different types of reactions.
But that's what people don't understand.
They think they're reading the news.
What they're actually reading is something that's really more like a reflection in the mirror.
Well, I've been playing with this concept, actually.
And I was actually thinking that the Black Mirror, the television program, is misnamed.
Because, I mean, it's not that I don't understand the reference.
It is like a mirror.
But it's not like a mirror.
It's like your own personalized Plato's cave.
That's right.
It's shadows on the wall that are constructed specifically to play to your prejudices, your biases, to take advantage of your blind spots and your ignorance, so that you will reach a conclusion that we have ever greater power, or whoever is wielding these tools has ever greater power to shape with ever greater precision.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
And I think the really scary part about that is that the thing that they're most effective at doing is calculating what you're afraid of and what will make you angry.
And they give you heavy doses of both, but the ultimate consequence of it Is that and I and again, I saw this as a student in the Soviet Union when you're surrounded all the time by this these images of threat and fear and this idea that sort of beyond the walls.
There's just dangerous horrible world where everything's out to get you and they they really make you think that they're very convincing and getting people to think that the there's a whole world of Very, very dire threats that's just outside their door.
And, you know, living in their fellow citizen who might be living next door.
That produces a very particular kind of timorousness in a person.
We were relatively a pretty healthy, strong, aggressive population with lots of self-respect and our ability to stand up for ourselves once upon a time.
But this particular machine, it saps our will to stand up for ourselves in a way that I think is, among other things, deeply un-American.
And maybe that's a segue to the Rescue the Republic.
That's one of the things that's most concerning about this whole thing, is the effect that it has on users is just so deleterious.
It's the opposite of what being informed should be.
Yeah, it's absolutely inhumane, frankly, the gaslighting.
And, you know, to your point about dial Tucker Carlson down 50%, The effect of that is that you don't even have the benefit of being able to establish to yourself that it's being suppressed.
Right.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
It's like, well, it's there.
Or you say, you know, look, he's got a huge reach.
Look how many views.
But it's like, no, do you understand that you just took his point and you turned the amplitude down on it?
And we can't, it's impossible to track.
So, you know, Yeah, there's so many dimensions at which it is actually evolutionarily troubling.
Because, you know, in the Soviet Union, I'm certain, It wasn't updated every day, right?
It wasn't somebody, you know, there was not the feedback to the modulation.
So the point is you could at least grumble to yourself and a few other people about what was being done and what its impact was, which gives you the basic tools.
To just at least tread water.
But we're constantly drowning, and I just don't disagree with you in the slightest about the effect on the human being.
You know, it's like you just become... Actually, this is the next thing I want to talk to you about.
I've started to think about what I call traps, which are stories that immediately cause a person with a particular bent to see them in confirmatory ways.
The person says, see, here it is.
They point to it and then it blows up on them.
And the result of this is that both for people who are looking for evidence and then they see evidence and then it explodes on them, they're trained to keep their mouth shut, right?
Because it's just not worth it.
And people who were too timid to look for evidence, but were hearing it, suddenly get the sense that every such story is just thin and it's not real and there's just some sort of, you know, conspiratorial mindset that causes you to see phantoms and really, yeah, things are not great, but they're not bad.
They're going to be fine.
So anyway, the point is it trains everybody that being tuned in is bad for you.
Right, yes, and it is bad for you.
But it wouldn't be if the product wasn't so deadly.
But yeah, that phenomenon you described, I did a video about it once.
where I was working with the filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse and we called it bomb-holing where it's basically everybody's presented with a bombshell story and it spins up everybody's emotions for a few days and then just at the moment when you know the evidentiary check has to be cashed they introduce a new bombshell because they can't substantiate the thing
But what they can do is they can eradicate the sensation and the expectations and all those things with a new set of concerns that they've introduced for some other story.
And what that does to the consumer, to the person who's sitting there scrolling endlessly is that they end up being just passive consumers of sensation all the time.
And people used to talk about this with newspapers and like tabloid headlines, like, please, at least that was once a day, you know, you had a whole life in between.
Now people sit there all day long.
And it's even worse on sites like TikTok, frankly, where you don't even have any agency in it, you just sit there.
And all it does is it measures how long your brain takes to go next, next, next.
But mostly that's what we're doing.
We're just sitting there in a constant state of excitation.
And the process that we were trained in as liberal arts students, where stories had a beginning, middle and an end, they had logic to them.
And our brains were trained in this idea that we Whatever happened in the beginning, we have to somehow substantiate it by the end.
There has to be some kind of conclusion or proving out of things.
That's just been eliminated from our entire psychological profile.
We don't live there anymore.
We just live in the early stage of stories, which Oh yeah, it's very unhealthy.
will tell you that that was the part that always made money was the you know the the first rush of a story in the first few hours they want us to be there forever and that it's totally artificial and and i think insane all i mean among other things oh yeah it's it's very unhealthy
i don't know if you have this experience but i absolutely know that it is unhealthy to pay this much attention to the you know explosion of stories and would-be stories and perspectives and all of that but But because part of what I'm trying to do is to understand what this is doing to us, I can't not look at it.
Right.
So I know that I personally am suffering from my level of engagement with it.
And frankly, if the only thing I was worried about was my personal well-being, the obvious thing to do is to walk away and find some way to tune in only when necessary and only very occasionally.
But I think my obligation as a citizen living in a I don't know, some sort of a mental health avalanche to try to figure out how to get us out of it, which I wish I wish it didn't.
I'd be happier if I could, you know, go do a little carpentry, a little bicycling, whatever it is, but something else.
You almost certainly would be happier if you'd be reading, reading more books, you'd be exercising more, eating better, right?
All those things.
Everything.
Everything.
Yeah.
It's a tragedy.
Now here, I'm going to ask a question.
You know, they say that lawyers should never ask a question they don't know the answer to.
I'm not a lawyer, so part of my business is to ask questions I don't know the answer to.
But I'm afraid of the answer to this one.
Seems to me that the unanticipated technological capacity to manipulate people in a surgical way, in a constantly updated manner, in a personalized way, that all of that is not forbidden by any rule I know of.
And The rule that we obviously need, which I'm thankful I'm not charged with writing it because I wouldn't know how to write it correctly, but we need a rule that says you can't do that because it's morally wrong to.
Right?
Yes.
I actually thought about this with the, the first time I had that thought was with the Russiagate story.
And I thought, is there a law against just telling people a fake story repeatedly over and over again and keeping people in a state of excitation over something that's completely fake?
And the answer is probably not, right?
There's probably a way to do it legally.
Now, with the situation with the platforms, there is an angle to this.
There's actually a couple where there are major legal issues.
There are First Amendment issues with any kind of government interference with the platforms.
And there are also issues with the intelligence agencies violating their charters by operating domestically in the same way that they do overseas.
And that is a less explored phenomenon, but I think it's actually a more serious angle to this whole thing.
If you were to take the FBI slash DHS slash ODNI angle out of all this, and you just had a bunch of platforms sort of acting in concert as a hive mind, I don't think it would be illegal, and that's kind of a problem.
But I also think Not to segue again to the Rescue the Republic, the problem with all this, the only solution to this is not a legalistic solution.
The only solution is to build up in people again.
The ability to resist all of this mentally.
And we've forgotten what that means in terms of trying to maintain our mental health.
We're otherwise pretty health conscious.
We know what kind of food we're putting in our bodies.
We know that smoking is not good for us and leads to all sorts of things.
But this thing is so poorly understood by people that I don't know that awareness would do all the trick, But I think people, that's where you have to start.
You have to get people to stand up for themselves and recognize that they have to show some kind of mental resistance to what they're seeing every day.
So I agree with you.
I mean, I don't think there is a legal solution for a couple reasons.
One, the First Amendment protects things like Lying to people a thousand times on the same topic, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia.
Governmental interference is forbidden by the First Amendment.
And if we had a robust court system, which we don't, you could rely on the courts to keep the government from doing this.
But the problem with that is, as there are two kinds of partnerships, that seem to abrogate the things that might otherwise protect us.
One of them is the fascist partnership between government and corporate power.
And so the problem is that they haven't figured out how to communicate.
They haven't figured out, you know, in the case of gain of function research, Ralph Baric coined the term no see them edits, right?
Those were edits to the genome that could not be detected.
You didn't leave a trace that you had modified a creature.
The government has not figured out how to signal to its corporate partners what they are to censor without crossing that line yet.
But it will.
It will evolve to do this in a way that leaves no mark that a court can enforce against.
That's one partnership.
And the other kind of partnership is the Five Eyes Alliance.
Here we have five nations that appear to be involved in a collaborative effort where each country is capable of violating the rights of the citizens of the other countries and they are not forbidden to exchange the information.
So if the US government can't spy on me, it doesn't mean that the British government can't spy on me on behalf of the American government and then hand over the product.
Right.
Voluntarily.
Yeah.
Right.
Um, yeah, no, I mean just today, um, I was on a call with some people from the Washington Examiner.
One of the things that came out of the Twitter files, and that they also reported on kind of separately, was the State Department funded a UK-based organization called the Global Disinformation Index.
It's essentially a company that scores media firms according to their likelihood to disinform.
And they create something they call the dynamic exclusion list.
How's that for an Orwellian term?
It's a little bit like the disposition matrix.
It's a blacklist for media, basically.
So, the US taxpayer is actually funding a mechanism that will negatively impact the advertising revenue of American businesses.
And they're able to do this because they launder it.
Through England, right?
It would be absolutely outrageous for an American company to take money from the American taxpayer and use it to damage their business.
Now, there actually are many big companies that actually do something very similar.
But this particular example, I think, is onerous because it's the State Department which pretends that it's not involved in our domestic affairs.
You know, giving money to a ostensibly foreign outlet to do what it just wants to do here at home.
And because of that, there are so many examples of that, but that's just the reality of the internet world is that it's so easy to skirt all of these different laws if they want to.
Now, if they want to make a law that's super powerful and actually affects countries outside of their borders, like Europe's Digital Security Act, which is basically a gigantic global censorship law, That has ramifications outside their own borders, and that can't be stopped either.
We're helpless, really, to do anything about it here in the States, even though it hugely affects our own businesses and our own communications platforms.
It's horrible.
It affects everything.
Unable to look away from the story that we are apparently supplying weapons to Ukraine, authorizing the launch of these, I guess, medium range missiles that the Ukrainians can't launch without our help in the face of Russia saying that a such a launch will be taken as an attack on Russia by the US.
And that story is absolutely horrifying and insane, just as far as I've described it already.
But the really amazing part is that this is happening at a moment when the president is not plausibly in charge of the affairs of the nation.
And so somebody is acting in a belligerent manner towards the largest, the owner of the largest nuclear arsenal on earth.
I think it's even larger than the U.S.
Might be, yeah.
In all of our name.
I mean, that story couldn't possibly be more off, right?
We should be absolutely apoplectic any night during the most peaceful era that the Earth has ever seen, any night in which the ability to launch nuclear weapons is in the hands of an incompetent president is a dangerous night.
This isn't that case.
This is a case in which we are in a proxy war with our Cold War adversary, and we are acting in a belligerent fashion with the commander-in-chief who is known by everyone to be compromised.
Like, what dumb movie are we in?
Well, we don't even know, which is another crazy aspect of the whole thing.
A, that story An equivalent story, for instance, might have been the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we were very close to a nuclear exchange.
Maybe this isn't quite that bad, but it's in the ballpark of that.
If we're going to launch missiles inside of Russia, how would we take that?
I have a pretty fair idea of how that would work, and having lived there, I know how they feel about it.
Uh, why is that not front page news?
Why is that not at the top of every broadcast?
Why is it not what they call a crash, you know, around the clock every show?
Very strange, right?
But simultaneous to that, there is the total lack of investigation into the basic question of, who's the president right now?
We have like 10,000 reporters in this country, and none of them are working on that story.
The entire Washington Press Corps is, for some reason, they've adopted a collective Bout of in curiosity about the biggest mystery that's hit the presidency since, I don't know, the Kennedy assassination.
I can't think of anything that's even equivalent.
So so bizarre on both on many fronts.
Yeah.
You know, one one grasps for words that even describe it in the world in which you and I were kids.
Even if like, let's imagine that Biden's incapacity had been a surprise that he had won election in full possession of his mental faculties and something had overtaken them suddenly.
And they, of course, in violation of every reasonable norm, kept him in office.
And they were trying to cover for that fact until he was replaced in the next election cycle.
Doing that would have been the biggest scandal of all time.
Oh yeah.
Right?
Yeah, without question.
Without question.
And in this case, You've got that story, except that he was incompetent at the point he was elected and has only become more so.
That he was forced out of the race, but not the office, with the threat of the 25th Amendment, apparently with at least the help of Kamala Harris, the VP and contender for the presidency.
This scandal just got 10 times bigger, right?
OK, so now you've got the biggest scandal that you could have, pretending that you have a president and scrambling to cover the fact that he can't do the job.
And then you've got another scandal in which the party is now trying to swap in somebody else using the 25th Amendment, not to protect the country, but to protect the party from an incompetent candidate.
And then add to that whatever is president is acting in a belligerent way in a Potentially nuclear conflict?
Like, the whole thing is so inconceivable, and to have the press not interested in it just says there isn't a press.
There's no press.
Right.
Right.
Not even...
There isn't even like an ideologically poor press, right?
Like, because one of the basic qualifications of this job, once upon a time, I wouldn't say that journalists ever had to be mental giants.
There were a couple of qualities they needed to have.
curiosity was one, I would say.
And another one is a willingness to kind of take some guff, right?
Like you had to be, have a little bit of guts, but mostly you just wanted to know what was going on.
Like that's the classic kind of personality who ended up in journalism is that was sort of the nosy person who just wanted to get to the bottom of things.
How they just suddenly removed that entire tendency from the business in the space of a couple of years is really astonishing.
I mean, it's almost like, you know, getting everybody who was good at biology out of, you know, the medical world all of a sudden.
I don't know what to compare it to, but this is an amazing story.
Just forget about what it means for a second.
Like, if I were a White House reporter, I would be loving this story just in terms of the juice of trying to find out who did what and why and who's really running things.
Is it Jake Sullivan calling the shots?
are they getting high at night and doing these crazy things?
Like, what's going on?
You'd want to know.
And there's not even that.
So that tells you that something very weird is going on, that they're intentionally putting people who can't do the job in these roles.
Your point about biologically interested and competent people in medicine is well taken, but I would just say the general principle, if you as a journalist look at journalism and you say, The thing that used to cause people to do the job, which was wanting to get the story, right?
When nobody else had it, it was a competition.
And if you got the story and other people didn't have it, they read your stuff and not theirs, right?
That's a competition that works in the interest of the public that wants to know what the hell's going on.
Right.
And crucially, we didn't care what it was.
All we cared about was that it was a good story.
Right.
Now we have journalists that will actually refuse to chase down a spectacular story.
And I think we know something about why, right?
If you go after the story that the president isn't the president and somebody is being belligerent in a nuclear, potentially nuclear conflict, maybe you won't have a job.
It used to be that you could get ahead By unearthing the story better than your competitors.
Now, you might be out of a job if you did it.
Right.
Right?
I mean, yes, for sure.
And I guess my point about science would be, isn't it odd that the very same thing has happened?
Right?
It used to be that a scientist didn't need to be
you know popular on the faculty of their university the real question was did they have greater predictive power than anybody else and if you did didn't matter what else was true that was success now we have scientists who will actually pretend that things they know are false are true in order to get ahead to continue publishing to get grants and it's just you know there's no science left as there's no journalism left
And, you know, across how many different zones of activity do we have to see people deliberately failing to do the thing that was supposed to be their job before we say, hey, what exactly is destroying our system from inside?
Yeah, I think it's equivalent to being in an airplane and, you know, sort of playing with how many things you can turn off before it crashes to the ground, you know?
Wow.
You know, I mean, probably we can exist without...
Uh, a really good press, um, for a little while, uh, science, I'm not so sure about that.
Uh, especially if you're getting, you know, not just no science, but bad science.
Uh, but yeah, there, there are so many different disciplines that, you know, I'm less schooled in what's going on in academia, but you know, I think you were the first person, one of the first people to warn about what was going on there.
And a lot of us should have listened earlier.
I think that's now clear.
Uh, but you know, once it's spread to our business, um, now I think a lot of people are seeing kind of equivalent things going on in their own discipline.
Almost every professional discipline has these same problems now.
Uh, and.
It can't go on for much longer before it results in some kind of catastrophic failure.
I would say nuclear war is obviously one of those outcomes where this could happen because of the total dysfunctionality.
It's a little bit like Doctor Strangelove.
That was originally a serious movie.
One of the great stories of cinema is that that was supposed to not be a comedy.
It was supposed to be a serious film about how a couple of people going crazy in the right way at the right time could destroy the world in that environment.
And now I think we're in the same situation.
If you turn off the entire news media, all the checks and balances of government, and everybody agrees to overlook, for instance, the totally illegal transfer of power from one person to another, or worse, leaving an incompetent president as the titular head of the government,
While you're conducting wars overseas, that's the kind of thing where you could see the plane crash to the ground, I think.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, I did a pretty good job back in that era of saying things that sounded crazy and turned out to be on target.
One of them was, you know, the bridges aren't going to fall down right away, right?
DEI can take over the engineering schools, but the bridges were well enough built that it's going to be a while before you see them collapse, but it's coming.
And I think now we're in that era where the bridges are beginning to collapse.
Scary.
Yeah, which it does bring me to the confluence between all of these observations and what the hell there might be to do about it.
So you have graciously agreed to join us in Washington DC September 29th for Rescue the Republic.
You are going to be speaking on the censorship industrial complex and the control of information propaganda, which I'm thrilled about.
Thank you for doing it.
No, thank you.
I'm looking forward to it.
But I want to ask you a delicate question.
Are you aware that I have used you as an example periodically?
Um, no.
Of what?
No.
Okay.
Well, I'm hoping that I will not, um, damage our friendship.
Oh, it's okay.
But what I have said is that Matt Taibbi has taken up not voting.
And that my feeling is I understand exactly why he's doing that.
And mind you, you know, I voted for Tulsi Gabbard in 2020.
Right?
She wasn't likely to take the office.
So you might argue that I threw away my vote.
I can make the argument that I didn't throw away my vote and that making my presence felt as a vote that is out there to be captured if anybody speaks to my interests is useful and the ability to say I did vote, but I didn't vote for this was useful.
I'm, of course, not doing that this time.
But anyway, my what I have.
Argued is that there is a vast there are two kinds of people who are eligible to vote in the US and don't.
One of them are people who are not paying attention.
There's nothing to do, I think, about those people, at least not in the short term.
And then there are people like you who are paying more attention than almost anyone and are disgusted with the process, are sick and tired of being suckered, whatever your reasons might be, and have stopped voting because it seems pointless.
And let me just finish my point here.
My point is there are enough people like you, Matt Taibbi, That if you wanted to come back off the bench, you can swing any election you choose to.
Don't know about that, but there are enough to take your meeting.
Yeah.
Um, it's a difficult question, what you're asking.
Um, you know, part of it is as journalists, you know, I try never to talk about who I vote for.
I'm pretty clear about my point of view, but.
You have to be a little bit coy, uh, about certain things.
And, uh, it's a tough line to, to tow because it can be kind of an annoying quality.
Um, but you also, you know, you can't, you can't go too far sometimes.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not asking you to say who you're going for.
I'm really just saying.
Look, first of all, you know, I'm an annoying person in this regard, in that I say things like, well, if you don't have a candidate running in this election, you know, i.e.
if they've eliminated a candidate you would have liked in the primaries, as they always do, then vote in the next election, right?
In other words, that's why I cast my vote for Tulsi.
I'm specifically telling people don't listen to that advice this year because I believe the First Amendment is actually on the line and that there will be no tools with which to rescue the Republic in 2028 if we don't rescue it now.
Yeah, so I'm gonna deal with that question by kind of framing it in a certain way.
People I've gotten in trouble with people, even in my own family, about this issue.
I'm constantly presented as a pro-Trump voice, even though I really never talk about Donald Trump.
And that's reflective of how I view the situation.
I don't really view this as Trump versus Kamala Harris.
I think Donald Trump is almost irrelevant.
It's a strange thing to say, but I've been watching this progression of accumulating secrecy, surveillance, state power since 9-11 with increasing alarm, and I just think there's that and kind of everybody else, right?
There's really only voting for that and voting against that to me.
And we've reached a point where Voting for it, I think, is suicide.
I think it's going to be pretty clear what I'm saying, but I'm going to try to make the point that what I'm going to try to do is argue to people that it's not something that you can put off anymore.
Good.
You know this I again I was in Russia in 99 and 2000 where I basically watched the kind of newly hatched freedom of speech disappear and it does not come back.
This is how these things work and you know there has to be a major upheaval for anyone to even consider it and we're in this place right now that Americans that We just don't have a lot of experience as a country.
We just haven't been through these kinds of things.
And so we don't recognize what we're looking at.
People don't realize that, you know, around the corner of this is a world that they're just never going to understand.
They haven't seen it before.
They don't know what it is.
So I'm going to try to frame it in terms of You know, all the things that made this country great and remind everybody how powerful and beautiful and vital the First Amendment is.
And because incidentally, Brett, this is something that Orwell talked about in 1984, there's a great passage where there's a character named Syme, who's like the expert in news speak, and he loves all the little machinations of that horrible language.
And he talks about the slogan, freedom is slavery, in the book, and he says, it's a great slogan, but in the future, We won't need it, because people will forget what freedom is, and that will be progress.
We're going to be eliminating words.
And amazingly, this is happening already with the freedom of speech.
If you go to look for stories about Speech controversies, you won't find them.
But if you search for misinformation or disinformation, you will find this avalanche of stories because they're reprogramming our brains to forget about the freedom of speech and to replace it with this new concept of threat, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda.
Uh, and that is already happening.
So the psychological damage and the legal damage will be basically complete once they get over the hump with a few other things.
And I don't think we're going to be able to go back.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to be able to go back either, and I just want to take one little detour here.
When the first time I read the term malinformation, I remember there was a DHS memo.
This was during sort of the height of the COVID battles.
And the Department of Homeland Security put out a memo in which it declared three kinds of terrorism.
M.D.M.
Mis-trust and mal-information.
Mis-information are errors.
Dis-information are intentional errors.
Mal-information being things that were based in truth but caused you to distrust authority.
Now, there are two things about this that I think are top-level alarming.
One of them is the idea that you would ever declare truth a problem, irrespective of its consequence.
That is so antithetical to who we are.
It's again, it's Orwellian and it's inhumane.
But the other thing which got very little play was by defining these things as terrorism, They unhooked the Constitution.
People do not understand that terrorism is a magic term.
It's not an intuitive term.
It is a magic term that actually causes the Patriot Act and the onerous provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 to remove all of your constitutional rights.
And so they were effectively defining A game that if you run afoul of this standard in which you can't even tell the truth and use that as a defense, you don't know what they're going to do behind the scenes.
You don't know what havoc they're going to wreak in your life.
They can literally detain you indefinitely until the end of hostilities, whatever that might mean.
So we just had an incident where they raided Scott Ritter and Dimitri Symes without even a crime really being alleged.
I mean, they, they did have something that ostensibly was the reason for their visit, but they didn't, there was no arrest.
They just kind of went there and took stuff and froze assets.
Right.
They, I mean, and you know, it can just be shot across the bow.
The point is we're paying attention to you.
We have arbitrary standards and we can declare you across the line at will, at which point you belong to us.
And you're right.
Americans, because they have enjoyed the fruits of a very robust constitution, have no appreciation for what actually makes them safe.
Most Americans probably couldn't tell you what habeas corpus is.
- Yeah, that's true. - They're depending on it, right?
It has to be true that you can't be hauled off, right?
Somebody has a right to say, uh, bring my client forth.
I need to see them.
Produce the body.
Yep.
Right.
Where's the body?
You know, it happens that the NDAA 2012 gave the government the right to haul you off any street on earth, including in the U S and not admit that they even have you.
Well, there go your habeas corpus rights.
And the only reason that this is not a top level concern is that presumably it is at the moment being used rarely if ever, but Having carved out the right, what's standing between us and an absolutely apocalyptic level of totalitarian control is our ability to notice things and discuss them, which is hanging in the balance in this election.
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree.
I'm paranoid about all those.
I'm not even paranoid.
It's not even paranoia anymore.
Yeah, it's not paranoia.
But yeah, the same thing with the Fifth Amendment, right?
Your right to due process.
So when they droned Anwar al-Awlaki, nobody really paid any attention to it.
This is an American citizen we just decided to murder.
And basically, the Obama administration wrote a memo to itself saying, Yeah, we can do that because due process doesn't actually have to involve the person.
As long as there is a process that we do, you know, sort of internally, that satisfies the requirement, which I remember reading that and thinking that I mean, that's kind of impressively crazy, right?
Like, Right.
It takes some brains to think of something that nutty, and they did it.
But they're doing this sort of across the board with every one of the amendments.
They're chipping away at all of them, you know, right against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The First Amendment, obviously, is sort of riddled with problems now, right?
your right to an attorney.
They're openly flirting with ways around that.
Equal protection under the law.
Trump is obviously facing malicious prosecution.
Right.
Even if he's being prosecuted for things that you could argue he should be prosecuted for, the standard is being applied differently to him.
Right.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I get in arguments again with people who were, I was once close to about this and Because it's Trump, he's such a blinding figure for people.
They're just not able to see past the trees of Donald Trump, to see the forest that lay behind it.
It's a shame because we're on this continuum of disappearing rights, and he is a plot point on that continuum, but he's not really the story.
It's very difficult to get people to see that, but unfortunately they will eventually.
That's kind of the I think the alarm that a lot of us who are in this event probably share is that we've all kind of seen it from one or the other angle and and it's you know and it's I forget which wide receiver it was in the NFL, but he was talking about a quarterback who had a great arm, and he said, it's a tight spiral and it's coming.
And that's what this thing is.
It's going to be here any minute, this sort of ball of destruction, and we have to prepare for it.
Yep.
It sounds like you agree with me that this is the moment that the large number of disaffected voters who are paying attention and are disgusted with the system should come off the bench and make their presence known.
I think you have to.
I didn't vote last time really out of just disgust.
Yep.
But this time around, I'm scared.
I've been through some stuff in the last few years.
I had the IRS come to my house while I was testifying, and there's something new that worries even me from a self-interested point of view every month now.
You and I have both dealt with internet censorship, and that's like A minor concern at this point.
It's like the weather.
So yeah, I think the whole ball of wax is now finally here.
And this is the moment to make that case, I think.
Great.
Well, I'm thrilled that you see that as I do.
And you know, it's not like I have thought there was very much distinction in our perspectives.
You participated.
In unity 2020.
So, you know, I know that there's no part of you that's disengaged.
And I understand the frustration at a system that keeps, you know, keeps us limited to choices that are unacceptable.
But I would, I would make the following case for both coming off the bench and voting, no matter who you are at this moment, because I don't think we get another bite at the apple.
But also if people can come to the event, It's become clear to me as I've thought about why I'm doing it and why such a great effort has gone into it, why others should view it as worth their effort as well.
And it has to do with a couple things.
One, I believe what I'm seeing in the organizing of this, and as you and I will both have seen over the last, you know, seven or eight years, is that people are recognizing that what threatens us is so profound that our ideological differences really don't matter.
Right.
And so it's very, it warms the heart to gather with people who once upon a time you might have found, you know, so different.
Alien.
Right, alien in some way.
But in fact, you find brotherhood because this is the moment at which we have to partner to, you know, to save the ship from sinking.
So I think there's something to just physically meeting in one place and seeing how many of us there are and feeling that incredible feeling of brother and sisterhood that I'm certain will accompany the meeting.
But the other thing is There's a question about what we do going forward.
If the worst happens and the deep state wins this election, we've got a whole host of problems.
I'm not sure what we do then.
If the deep state does not win this election, There's a question about what happens on the other side.
And I guess my point is that vast group of people across the entire political spectrum that is finding the unity movement that is forming needs to make its size and presence felt because if it does that, then let's say Donald Trump wins this election.
His reason to cater to the will of that vast, non-ideological, post-partisan gathering is that much greater.
In other words, and his incentive to do that before the election, to recognize that actually, you know what?
The man needs voters.
The voters are there.
And what he needs to do is say, hey, this is what I'm planning on the far side of this election.
Here's what it's going to look like.
And he's already got a great start on this.
You know, what could be better than Bobby Kennedy going after the chronic health crisis?
Right.
That's a marvelous thing.
Anyway, I believe that by coming together and having an event that is about the things that really bring all Americans together, it makes that case very strongly, right?
It's not MAGA.
It contains MAGA, but it's much bigger than that.
I think that's right.
Frustratingly, everybody who's in that situation is called MAGA.
It's been a very effective public relations campaign.
As soon as you don't believe in any point of the, you know, sort of official narrative about anything.
They just dump you in that sort of gravy boat.
You know, I think about somebody like Nate Silver, the data journalist, right?
The guy who does 538.com.
I don't even remember what it was that he disagreed with somebody about, but he just sort of stepped out of line for 10 seconds and all of a sudden he's getting, you know, blasted by everybody, all of his former colleagues.
And, you know, psychologically, that's hard for people to take, but I think you're right.
The internet, people are kind of by themselves.
They don't really know how many other people there are.
People like me and you have some insight because we have subscriber bases and followings, and we know how many people are living around the country who think differently and how diverse their points of view are.
But the illusion in the media is that there are only a couple of insoluble blocks, and that's clearly not the case.
It's never been the case in this country.
So, yeah, I think it has the potential to be a situation where there's a discovery of an enormous amount of energy and a sense of relief.
One of the things I know about my readers is that they don't really always even come to read my articles themselves.
They come there for kind of an escape from the relentlessness of the messaging and just to even be able to see that there are other people who are You know, reading something that's off script makes them feel safe and, you know, affirmed, right?
And people do need that because it's an incredibly stressful situation.
Last thing I'll say is, as for what happens after the election and the need to make a show of, you know, force a little bit, I think in multiple directions, I couldn't agree more.
I mean, This weekend, Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and NSA, he retweeted some crazy thing talking about how it was basically, after this moron dies, and it's a picture of Donald Trump, all these people, and it lists all the Republicans who didn't stop him or something like that, they'll be remembered as traitors.
And Hayden writes, he writes above that, he writes, I have all the names.
Whoa!
It's like a breathtaking kind of flex slash threat to the entire population.
And if you listen closely, you will hear more than one person of his type talking like that.
They're awfully frosty about things that they are thinking or planning after this election, if things go right or if they don't.
And that should scare people into a kind of sobriety about what's coming to, I think.
Well, let me add one more piece to that, which is the COVID debacle involved the mandating of the mRNA vaccines on the entire military.
People either complied or they left.
Mm-hmm.
Which created a force that in the end accepted that immoral requirement.
Whenever you think of the shots requiring an experimental treatment, I forgot to say this earlier, among the things that we have lost is the right to informed consent.
The Nuremberg Accords, right?
Yeah, and what people don't realize about informed consent is that that principle is understood to be so important that the Allies literally hanged seven doctors to death at the end of World War II for violating it, even though it had not yet been codified.
And we lost it in COVID.
So we are now the pillars of Western civilization are coming down.
And I don't want to find out what these people will do if they win the election and feel empowered to go after those who They regard as traitors.
And to be honest with you, I think we have to be clear about this.
Speech is the alternative to violence.
That is not a threat.
That is me observing this fact that we were given this right to speak by the founders for this reason so that we would not have to resort to violence.
Our going to Washington and putting on Rescue the Republic is our attempt To save society from what will come if these people get their way.
And I wish it weren't so stark.
I wish that was me seeing things more darkly than they actually are.
But I really don't think so.
And hearing you say that you're frightened of it too suggests it's real.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
And I don't even want to think about what the worst thing these people can come up with, because that's all they do.
That's their profession, is thinking of ways to control and suppress and terrorize the population and lie to them.
And if they haven't unleashed all of those things yet, I don't want to meet the rest of their arsenal.
But yeah, I think you're right.
There's a reason why the founders put it first in our list of guarantees, but there's probably also a reason why they made the Second Amendment so close to it.
I don't know what that means exactly, but I do think I'm such a strong advocate that the freedom of speech is something that When people feel it, when they embrace it, it comes with this unwillingness to be bullied that prevents a lot of violence, I think.
I saw this very graphically when I lived overseas, that if you behave a certain way, it invites people to mess with you.
Americans got left alone an awful lot I saw overseas, not just because they had nice shoes.
There's something else about them.
And we're in danger of losing that thing.
And I just hope we don't give it up.
Great.
Well, Matt Taibbi, it's been a real pleasure as it always is.
I'm looking forward to seeing you in person in Washington, September 29th.
And to the audience, let me just say, this is Matt Taibbi telling you it's time to come off the bench and come to Washington and stand in person with this vast collection of people gathered around the idea of unity.
It's precious and it's time to celebrate it.
Yeah, it should be fun.
I mean, among other things, it should be fun.
It should be a great experience.
So looking forward to it.
And a necessary one.
I think it will be.
Now, Matt, uh, people can find you on Substack at Racket.news.
Yep.
Racket.news.
Um, where else should they find you?
I'm on Twitter at, uh, at M Taibbi.
So that's T-A-I-B-B-I.
Uh, that's really it.
I'm on, on, on Substack.
We have a Walter Kern and I have a podcast, um, that comes out every Friday, but you can find that, um, at the site on Substack.
Yeah, terrific.
I'm a big fan of Walter's also.
Walter's great.
Yeah, he is great.
One of a kind.
All right.
Thank you, Matt.
And to everybody who watched or listened, thanks for doing so.
