Matt Taibbi Squares Off w/ House Dems Over #TwitterFiles. Plus, Daily Wire Reporter Leaves Over Anti-Trans Rhetoric
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Good evening. | |
It's March 9th. | |
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
Tonight, new reporting from the journalist Matt Taibbi, using the still-rich Twitter files, sheds all new light on the scam disinformation industry, a nefarious network of government-funded groups with benign-sounding names that claim to protect you from disinformation All while working hand-in-hand with the U.S. | |
Security State and Big Tech to disseminate their own disinformation campaigns and to censor dissent from the Internet. | |
We'll review the key revelations from today's reporting and we'll also show you the key events from today's hearing on the weaponization of the federal government on the Twitter files from the House Judiciary Committee. | |
Most of the day was consumed by Democratic members of that committee hurling invective and vitriol at the two journalists who broke most of those stories, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, in large part because this reporting has exposed the corruption of Big Tech and the U.S. | |
security state, the two entities the Democratic Party most passionately and aggressively serves. | |
They're enraged That this reporting shed a light on how these agencies, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI are working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to censor dissent from the internet because Democrats rely on this censorship regime for their own interests. | |
We'll show you the key aspects of this hearing that really got quite rambunctious and ugly today. | |
We'll also talk to the investigative journalist, Christina Buttons, who Has spent the last six months working at the Daily Caller where she has used very impressive and intrepid skills as an investigative journalist to expose key abuses of the exploding for-profit industry that provides so-called gender-affirming care to teenagers and increasingly prepubescent children. | |
Just on Tuesday, Buttons resigned from the Daily Wire, citing what she says is a growing breach between what she understood was the editorial position of the Daily Wire when it came to concerns about the trans debate, namely things being done to children. | |
And what it has become for some of the leading and most prominent voices, namely a way to smuggle in an attempt to actually control the lives of adults and infringe their autonomy and agency. | |
Her letter, whatever you think of this issue, was really thought-provoking and thoughtful. | |
And so we believe that having her on to talk about her letter and the reason she resigned will shed a lot of light on this obviously inflammatory topic. | |
As we always do on Tuesday and Thursday, soon as we're done here with our show on Rebel, we move to Locals for our interactive live after show on Locals, where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. | |
To have access to that show, to have access to all the things we do on Locals, simply join our Locals community by clicking the red join button right below the video, and you'll become a part of that community and have access to the after shows we do twice a week. | |
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
System Update, starting starting right now. | |
System Update, starting right now. | |
System Update, starting right now. | |
So, earlier today, there was a, as I said, rambunctious and often quite ugly hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in which the two journalists who have led much of the story and reporting, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, were invited to appear before this committee to share with not just the Congress but were invited to appear before this committee to share with not just the Congress but the American people the reporting that they've been able to do on what is the censorship regime that has been | |
And how this censorship regime has been constructed to allow the U.S. | |
security state, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, to have a direct channel into the control room, as it were, of our big tech platforms to instruct them on what views should and should not be permitted. | |
And we're going to show you many of the key highlights from that hearing, really better described as lowlights, as Democratic members of Congress spent the day assaulting The integrity and character of those two journalists, because those Democrats are enraged that their allies in the U.S. | |
security state and big tech have been exposed. | |
Remember when, for four years during the presidency of Donald Trump, we heard that any time a mean thing was said about Jim Acosta or Wolf Blitzer, there was some kind of grave crisis where our free press was under assault? | |
Jim Acosta actually wrote a best-selling book depicting him as being in grave danger for telling the truth. | |
This grave danger meaning that occasionally Donald Trump and other Republican politicians said critical things of him. | |
What happened today in the House, before the House Judiciary Committee, is in a different universe, as Democratic members of Congress didn't just criticize these two journalists, but tried to invade their relationship with sources, tried to impugn the motives why this journalism was done, to claim that these journalists were directly threatening | |
People who are citizens with different views really trying to gin up hatred and even violence against these journalists. | |
If even one-tenth of this were done to Jim Acosta or Taylor Renz or anyone on MSNBC, there would be weeping and all sorts of segments about the trauma these journalists are suffering. | |
And yet none of the Democratic aligned part of the corporate media had a peep of protest as Democratic Party members of Congress threw rocks figuratively at these two journalists for the crime of exposing the FBI, the CIA, and Big Tech. | |
It's really incredible some of these passages and we're really looking forward to showing those to you because they shed a lot of light on what the Democratic Party, what their true agenda is, and what their real values are. | |
But before we do that, by design or otherwise, Taibbi this morning posted to Twitter a new installment of the Twitter files that contain some of the most important revelations yet. | |
In particular, The object of his reporting is the thing that I have spent a great deal of time on reporting on as part of my own written journalism, as part of this show, which is the scam disinformation industry. | |
This network of groups that are funded either by the US and Western intelligence agencies or by the same two liberal billionaires, namely George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. | |
They all bear very benign-sounding names, like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, or the Atlantic Council, or the Center for Combating Extremism. | |
And what they claim they're intending to do is to identify disinformation and combat it. | |
When in reality all they're really doing is trying to disguise a very politicized agenda, a politicized censorship agenda, as some sort of science. | |
That these are experts who have somehow become experts in identifying disinformation and therefore these are the people who big tech should rely upon when deciding what views are and are not permitted on the internet. | |
Taibbi's revelations that come right from the files of Twitter shine a great deal of light on how this network functions, and specifically on how to identify them. | |
So let's take a look before we get to the hearing at what he was able to show today. | |
Here we see on the screen the first tweet, which he entitled, "Twitter Files: Statement to Congress," and he calls it the censorship industrial complex, which is really what it is. | |
It's an industry that 10 years ago did not exist. | |
After the 2016 election, when the Democrats were humiliated by losing to essentially a host of a game show on television because they ran the most unpopular presidential candidate in two generations, Hillary Clinton, Instead of accepting responsibility for their defeat, they sought out villains and culprits to explain why they lost. | |
And among the long list of villains, the Russians, James Comey, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein, the media, they really concluded that free speech on the internet was something they could no longer tolerate. | |
And they needed to find a way to pretty up and beautify and disguise What their real intention and their agenda became, not an ancillary agenda, but central to their tactics, which was to start censoring and policing the internet. | |
And they knew, given the values of free speech with which, as Americans, we're all inculcated from childhood, that they couldn't just be blunt about it. | |
They couldn't just say, we're censoring the internet because we want to exclude people who are challenging our agenda from being heard. | |
So what they instead set out to do was to finance and concoct a brand new expertise that is a complete fraud. | |
People who suddenly proclaim themselves disinformation experts. | |
And then they got their allied billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, or sometimes just the US security state itself or MI6, to finance, directly or indirectly, through the National Endowment of Democracy and quasi-government agencies like those, a whole variety of groups. | |
That purported to employ disinformation experts whose goal was to identify disinformation and in all cases the disinformation they identify is always views or ideas or stories that undermine Global neoliberal institutions of power, the Democratic Party, narratives propagated by the large media, the corporate media in the United States and throughout the West. | |
It's a political movement that pretends to be based on science. | |
It's funded by the same people, by the government, and their goal is basically explicit. | |
To encourage and pressure and coerce Big Tech to censor from the Internet any dissent to the Democratic Party, to the U.S. | |
Security State, and to neoliberal institutions, international neoliberal institutions, not by admitting that they're censoring dissent, but by claiming that they're only censoring what they have identified as disinformation. | |
And so often what they claim as disinformation is actually completely true. | |
And what they claim is true is actually disinformation. | |
These are the same people who told you that the reporting of Joe Biden's business activities in Ukraine and China right before the election should be ignored because it was Russian disinformation. | |
They're the people who told you that it was disinformation to wonder whether the coronavirus came from a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. | |
They're the same people who claimed it was disinformation to question the U.S. | |
and NATO proxy war in Ukraine. | |
Whatever subverts or undermines their agenda and the agenda of those that finance them gets labeled disinformation, mostly so that they can censor the internet and propagate their own disinformation without being challenged. | |
So this is what Taibbi calls it after having spent a lot of time looking through the files. | |
And he gives an example here in which they are acknowledging that some of what they want censored is not even information they consider disinformation. | |
It's information they acknowledge is true. | |
But that has bad consequences, in their view. | |
So one example here, and you can see it on the screen, it's called, quote, true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy. | |
This is part of what they wanted censored. | |
Information that was true, but that could make people more hesitant to take the COVID vaccine. | |
And examples were, quote, viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects, true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines. | |
These were all things they wanted censored, things they admitted were true, but that undermine their agenda. | |
That's a major revelation. | |
That these groups were acknowledging that they were trying to get things censored, that not even they were pretending was disinformation. | |
Here in the next tweet... | |
He writes, quote, Twitter was more like a partner to the government. | |
With other tech firms, Twitter held a regular, quote, industry meeting with FBI and Homeland Security and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government, HHS, Treasury, NSA, even the local police. | |
And here you see a variety of emails where those, not just US security state agencies like Homeland Security and the NSA, but the Treasury Department and the Health and Human Services Department were sending requests/demands to Twitter saying, here are all the posts we want removed. here are all the posts we want removed. | |
They had an open channel to do that. | |
It was disguised as a Twitter censorship program that in reality was being directed by government agencies. | |
These are all things we've known before. | |
These are all things that have been reported before. | |
It's the reason so many Democrats hate Matt Taibbi and the other journalists who worked on these files for the crime of exposing a censorship regime they support and the role of these agencies that they revere in this censorship regime. | |
But what he today focused on and expanded the lens to include is this industry of disinformation experts, which I use scare quotes for. | |
I'm at the point where I genuinely believe, it's not hyperbole, that any individual identifying themselves as a disinformation expert or an anti-misinformation activist or any groups that label themselves as having among their mission the combating of disinformation, those groups should be held with extreme amounts of suspicion. | |
In almost every case, those groups are the groups that want to disseminate disinformation, not combat it. | |
And their attempt to censor is an attempt to shield their disinformation campaigns from being questioned and challenged in a meaningful way. | |
I personally, when I see somebody identifying as a disinformation expert or a journalist claiming they work on the disinformation beat, I automatically assume that they're frauds, in large part because there is no such thing as a disinformation expertise. | |
That is a fake expertise. | |
Where did that come from? | |
You can study cardiology. | |
You can study how to be a pilot. | |
You can study to be an aeronautical engineer. | |
These are all real expertise. | |
These are things that are actually things that you can go and learn and have a greater capability than people who haven't studied it on how to do it. | |
But there is no such thing as a person trained in an apolitical way to recognize disinformation. | |
These groups aren't financed by the U.S. | |
government and liberal billionaires because these liberal billionaires and the U.S. | |
government just want a world filled with greater truth. | |
You're going to see a Democratic Congressman who defended at this House hearing this censorship regime by claiming what I just mockingly said with a straight face. | |
That our friends in the U.S. | |
security state just want to protect us from disinformation. | |
That's why they're participating in censorship. | |
And he told Matt Taibbi that he should have a tinfoil hat on if he believes otherwise. | |
So here you see the evidence of how this disinformation industry works. | |
Here are more emails that Tybee included in his tweet that are just email after email after email from government agencies with a long list of Twitter users or tweets they want banned or removed. | |
Here, for example, is one of the FBI agents whose name is Elvis Chan, who was apparently responsible for being the go-between between the FBI and Twitter, because he was almost on a daily basis sending to Yoel Roth and to other Twitter executives things that he wanted. | |
Censored, and here's his list of issues on which he wanted censorship to take place. | |
He said, please forward to whomever you deem appropriate. | |
It's about an FBI meeting with Twitter. | |
It stated, this is, the date is today's date when Tayibi published it. | |
But the email date you see here is July 30th, 2020. | |
So just a few months before the 2020 election, they were very active in trying to get information censored off Twitter. | |
The U.S. | |
government The security state was interfering in our political discourse very directly and actively. | |
Here you see they had issues of censorship they wanted with regard to the Russia, China, global status including Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, and planning for the election. | |
So they were explicitly meeting, the FBI was, with Twitter to direct them on how to censor in anticipation of the coming 2020 election. | |
Now here is where Taibbi expands the scope to include these private disinformation groups. | |
He says, quote, we came to think of this grouping, state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center, along with, quote, NGOs that are an academic and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, namely the commercial news media, as the censorship industrial complex. | |
That's something I omitted to note, which is that a critical part Of this network, of this axis, of set power centers that are devoted in secret, or previously in secret, until the Twitter files exposed it, to censoring the internet is the corporate media. | |
They constantly are writing to Twitter and Facebook and Google, pressuring them to censor information that they think violates the terms of service of these platforms. | |
Imagine Being a journalist, someone who goes into journalism, and then having as your function being a leading agitator for demanding that political content be removed from the internet. | |
And yet that's what so many of these journalists, these corporate journalists, have as their primary function. | |
Here in the next tweet, Tayibi writes, this is basically a who's who in the censorship industrial complex. | |
Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. | |
It included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, and Hamilton's 68 creators, the Alliance for Security and Democracy. | |
And here you see the list where Twitter essentially was debating which group should be included in these meetings, which group should be allowed to have a megaphone to tell Twitter what's a censor. | |
And on this group, you see things like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is the group of neocons and Democrats that had former members of the FBI on it and CIA on it, led by Bill Kristol, a former aide to Marco Rubio. | |
A former aide to Hillary Clinton, leading this group. | |
They were the inventor of that scam Hamilton 68 dashboard that purported to identify who was influenced by the Kremlin and who wasn't. | |
Here you see the Atlantic Council, which gets a great deal of funding from Western security agencies. | |
And if you go and look at the online profiles of any of these groups, every one of them, there's, go look at one in particular, Jared Holt, J-A-R-E-D Holt. | |
He works for the Atlantic Council. | |
He's become very popular online, has a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers. | |
He's exactly what I'm talking about. | |
He claims to be an expert in disinformation. | |
His only purpose is on behalf of the Atlantic Council, which is in bed with Big Tech and security state, getting funding from them, is to censor the Internet. | |
And that's why his fan base are liberals. | |
Because liberals, more than anybody else in the United States, by which I mean the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Not only tolerate this censorship regime, but cheer it, approve of it, crave it, want it strengthened because they know how crucial it is for their political interests. | |
So if you go and look at Jared Holt's profile, who works for the Atlantic Council, you will see exactly the kind of person I'm describing when I say a person who should be ignored or held in a great deal of suspicion for proclaiming himself to be a disinformation agent while he dedicates himself to this censorship industrial complex. you will see exactly the kind of person I'm describing | |
Taipi goes on, the same agencies, FBI, DHS, GEC, invite the same experts, Thomas Ridd, Alex Stamos, funded by the same foundations, Newmark, Omidyar, Knight, trailed by the same reporters, Margaret Sullivan, Molly McHugh, Brandy trailed by the same reporters, Margaret Sullivan, Molly McHugh, Brandy Zadrovni, seemingly to every conference, every panel, It's exactly right. | |
If you see a panel Anywhere in the West, on disinformation, on how to keep misinformation off the internet, it's the same exact people, funded by the same exact entities, who appear at every one of these conferences. | |
And every journalist, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post and Brandi Zadravny, who works at Ben Collins at NBC News, have anointed themselves Disinformation activists, people who are journalists, whose only goal in life is to censor your views from the internet if your views deviate from theirs. | |
That's the only purpose and function that this has. | |
Taibbi goes on. | |
The Twitter files repeatedly show media acting as proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don't nix accounts. | |
Here the Financial Times gives Twitter until the end of the day to provide a, quote, steer on whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | |
and other Vax offenders will be zapped. | |
This is the main way that the New York Times The tech reporters of the New York Times, like Mike Isaac, and the entire tech team, as well as NBC News and the Washington Post, this is how they coerce big tech to censor. | |
They write to them and they say, here's an account we dislike that's endorsing views that we regard as disinformation, and we are going to write a story on your refusal To remove this content, unless by the end of the day, you tell us that you're gonna remove it. | |
And so often, that's how these media outlets pressure these organizations, these big tech companies to remove the content that they want. | |
By basically writing stories, accusing these executives of having blood on their hands for their refusal to censor. | |
So, we have been following this industry for a long time. | |
Digging into who finances it, who these people are, and how they function is something to which we've devoted a lot of our journalistic attention and will continue to. | |
Taibbi's reporting today is yet another important step in unmasking all of this. | |
Now, that sets the perfect stage for today's hearing, at which, as I told you, they treated Matt Taibbi and Michael Stellenberger basically like as traitors. | |
It's extraordinary. | |
They treated them as criminals. | |
And to Democratic members of Congress, they are criminals. | |
And the reason they're criminals is because they exposed the crimes of the most important allies of the Democratic Party, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, and Big Tech, in the mission that the Democratic Party considers central to their future viability, namely, the power to censor the internet. | |
And it is the U.S. | |
government that is acting as the key agent in coercing this. | |
And they know this is unconstitutional. | |
They know that the U.S. | |
government cannot, indirectly through pressure, censor in a way the Constitution would forbid them from censoring directly under the First Amendment. | |
They know that Americans would find all of this objectionable and dangerous, that the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security, which we're told are here to protect us from foreign threats, instead are directly involved in our politics by deciding what we as American citizens, which viewpoints we can and can't hear, or who will and will not be permitted to have a platform online. | |
So they wanted this all in secret. | |
It's the same reason why Julian Assange is in a prison, why Edward Snowden's in exile, why Daniel Osborne almost spent his life in prison. | |
Anyone who exposes the secret crimes of the U.S. | |
security state becomes the enemy of politicians because politicians support these agencies and want this hidden and not exposed. | |
And what Taibbi did was expose it, and that's why this rage that we're about to show you that got directed him all day, only from Democrats, that's where it comes from. | |
That's what accounts for it, is that they want all of this hidden. | |
Now, let's take a look at this first video here. | |
This is from Stacy Plaskett. | |
She, for some reason, is the ranking member of this committee, even though she's not even really a member of Congress. | |
She's a delegate from the Virgin Islands. | |
She's not even officially a member of Congress. | |
She can't vote on any bills. | |
There's barely anything she can do, except sit in committees like this and Pontificate. | |
And she spent the day lecturing Caibi, accusing him of all sorts of things, while barely letting him speak. | |
All while liberal idiots in the media, like Aaron Rupert and others, cheered as though she had done something courageous and brave. | |
Imagine sitting up at a podium, where the only power you have as a delegate from the Virgin Islands is that you get to use the seven minutes you get, however you want, And you use it to basically accuse journalists of being liars and threats and fraudsters. | |
And then when they go and try and defend themselves, you interrupt them and say, you do not speak. | |
You just sit there while I berate you and hector you and try and ruin your reputation. | |
Imagine applauding Something this abusive, this pathetic and cowardly. | |
But that's what happened all day. | |
So let's listen to why they're so enraged with these journalists. | |
Mr. Chairman, I'm not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them. | |
She said that Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger are, quote, direct threats to people who oppose them. | |
Do you remember, for four years, when we would hear that anyone criticizing Jim Acosta or Terry Lorenz were putting these people in danger? | |
What is this doing to Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger? | |
Having this delegate, who looks and tries to act as if she's a member of Congress, labeling these journalists a direct threat to those people who oppose them. | |
And in what conceivable way are they direct threats? | |
What did they do other than expose The US security state and big tech, the most powerful actors in the country. | |
But this was the tenor of the entire hearing. | |
Let's look at another clip from this delegate from the Virgin Islands. | |
To praise him for his work. | |
This isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us now. | |
There are many legitimate questions about where Musk got the financing to buy Twitter. | |
We know for a fact that foreign countries like Qatar, Okay, so first of all, she's trying to imply that Elon Musk did something nefarious because he got funding from foreign sources. | |
She obviously doesn't know. | |
I really would be shocked if she knew. | |
Sometimes when people lie, you wonder if they actually know and are lying on purpose, or if they're just too ignorant to have known. | |
I'd bet any amount of money in her case, it's the latter. | |
She has no idea that long before Elon Musk bought Twitter, some of the biggest shareholders in Twitter were Saudis and other foreign investors and foreign financiers. | |
The second largest shareholder of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, after Dak Dorsey, was a Saudi billionaire. | |
No one pretended to be concerned about that then. | |
Now that Elon Musk is allowing free speech and refusing to censor on behalf of the Democratic Party, she wants to impute Elon Musk too. | |
But do you notice how she called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger so-called journalists? | |
Not real journalists, so-called journalists. | |
Now I'm about to show you Tayibi's answer, which was actually quite humble about why he should not be called a so-called journalist, but in fact a journalist. | |
But the ironic part about all of this is that she is a so-called member of Congress. | |
She's not a member of Congress, actually. | |
She has no constitutional standing to do anything. | |
The Congress decided to give them fake representation. | |
The District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, a couple other places. | |
And now she sits up there, lecturing journalists, trying to incite violence against journalists, even though she is not even a real member of Congress. | |
She's the so-called member of Congress. | |
Here was Taibbi's response. | |
That time was spent at Rolling Stone Magazine. | |
Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a so-called journalist. | |
I've won the National Magazine Award, the IF Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. | |
So, in other words, Matt Taibbi spent years as the star investigative reporter at Rolling Stone. | |
He uncovered some of the worst abuses of the derivative fraud that led to the 2008 financial crisis. | |
He has won all of the most prestigious awards in magazine writing, including the National Magazine Award. | |
And he's written 10 books on news and politics. | |
In other words, he has So many more accomplishments than she has votes to even sit there. | |
And yet she spent the day trying to impugn his integrity, having no interest in what he reported. | |
And you see as well how after she got done deriding him, when he was finally given a chance to respond, not by her but by Jim Jordan, the chair of the committee, she just ignored him. | |
How infantile is that? | |
You throw insults at somebody in public and then when they train in a very civil manner, substantive and civil manner, far better than she deserved, explain to you why the insult that you hurled is inaccurate. | |
You turn away and you look at your phone and you chatter with the lawyer who's telling you what to say. | |
But that's how this hearing was conducted. | |
Now let's look at some of the substantive attacks on these journalists from Democrats to the extent you can call any of them that. | |
Here again is Delegate Plaskett talking to Taibbi. | |
Who was the individual that gave you permission? | |
Oh, actually, just to set this up, what's important about this is many Democrats, not just Delegate Poskitt, spent the day demanding to know Matt Taibbi's sources. | |
And whenever he tried to say, I'm a journalist, I don't reveal my sources, they continued to berate him and demand that he reveal the source of the Twitter files, the specific individuals who gave him access and provided these documents. | |
Again, calling Jim Acosta an idiot or a liar, grave First Amendment crisis, merits a book about how Jim Acosta is in grave danger. | |
But Democratic members of Congress or fake members of Congress demanding a journalist give up their source for no reason than the fun of it? | |
None of these fake free press advocates have a word to utter about it because they were never interested in a free press. | |
They were interested in protecting their friends in the media for purely political reasons. | |
So let's watch this. | |
It's emails. | |
Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the emails? | |
Well, the attribution for my story is sources at Twitter, and that's what I'm going to refer to. | |
Okay. | |
Did Mr. Musk contact you, Mr. Tayibi? | |
Again, the attribution for my story is sources at Twitter. | |
Mr. Schellenberger, did Mr. Musk contact you? | |
Uh, actually, no. | |
I was brought in by my friend Barry Weiss, and so this story has been a lot of misinformation. | |
So Mr. Weiss brought you in. | |
Mr. Taibbi, Ms. | |
Weiss, thank you. | |
Mr. Taibbi, have you had conversations with Elon Musk? | |
I have. | |
Okay. | |
Uh, Mr. Taibbi, did Mr. Musk place any conditions on the use of the email? | |
Would the gentlelady yield for a second? | |
Uh, as long as my time is not used to it. | |
Are you trying to get journalists to disclose their sources? | |
No, I'm not trying to get... No, I'm not. | |
I am asking... Well, it sure sounds like it. | |
She just spent the last 45 seconds demanding to know the identity of Matt Taibbi's source, and then when asked, are you trying to get a journalist's source, she said, no I'm not. | |
In this case, is she lying? | |
Is she too dumb to understand what she's saying? | |
Honestly, in this case, I don't know. | |
I can't actually imagine that anyone's too dumb to realize that after spending a full minute demanding to know the identity of someone's source, that when they then turn around and deny that they're doing exactly that which they've just spent the last minute doing. | |
I don't believe there's any human brain incapable of understanding the lie there. | |
But let's look at the next exchange. | |
This is from one of the newest members of Congress, Dan Goldman. | |
He was elected from Manhattan, the richest borough in New York City. | |
He ran against a long group of people of color, of leftist activists, of leftist office holders in New York, and he crushed all of them. | |
He received the endorsement of the New York Times. | |
And to me, Dan Goldman is the perfect avatar and expression of what the Democratic Party is. | |
I'm glad he won! | |
He should win, because it's a very clear expression of what the Democratic Party is. | |
Dan Goldman is one of the richest members of Congress. | |
He has a net worth of $250 million, but not because he earned any of it. | |
He was born into the billionaire family that created Levi Strauss. | |
His great-grandfather was the founder of Levi Strauss, and therefore he is the heir to that fortune. | |
So he's worth a quarter of a billion dollars, despite having not earned any of it. | |
He was educated at one of the most expensive private schools in the United States, Sidwell Friends in Washington. | |
I believe that's where Matt Ulacius went to, where most of the D.C. | |
elite are educated. | |
It's something like $60,000 or $70,000 a year to go there. | |
$80,000 a year to go there. | |
Imagine spending $60,000 or $70,000 a year to educate your child in the third grade. | |
But that's where he was educated. | |
He then went to Harvard and then Stanford, Stanford Law School. | |
And then the reason he was so popular among the wealthy white liberals who vote for the member of Congress of Manhattan is because he spent the last three years as a lead lawyer in the Mueller investigation. | |
That ended up concluding that there was no evidence for the central Democratic Party claim that the Trump campaign had criminally colluded with the Kremlin to hack the emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign. | |
So that's Dan Goldman. | |
And here he is defending the censorship regime and essentially denying that there was any censorship at all that came from the US government, even though we have reported Example after example after example from the Twitter files that show exactly that and you'll see an example shoved in his face while he insists that there is none. | |
Twitter! | |
And even with Twitter, you cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship of any lawful speech. | |
And when I say lawful, I mean non-criminal speech, because plenty of speech is non-criminal. | |
I'll give you one. | |
The gentleman's time has expired. | |
I'd ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the following email from Clark Humphrey, Executive Office of the Presidency, White House Office, January 23rd, 2021. | |
That's the Biden administration. | |
4.39 a.m. | |
Hey, folks. | |
This goes to Twitter. | |
Hey, folks. | |
Wanted to use the term Mr. They use the term Mr. Mr. Goldman just used. | |
Wanted to flag the below tweet. | |
And I'm wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it Okay, so that's three days into the Biden administration. | |
It's somebody from the Biden White House directly demanding that Twitter remove a specific tweet that the Biden administration wanted three days into the Biden presidency. | |
They're wasting no time controlling what can and can't be heard on the internet. | |
The very thing that Daniel Goldman, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, just ended up denying ever happened. | |
He said there was no example of that ever happening. | |
There's hundreds, if not thousands, that have been revealed through this reporting. | |
But Jim Jordan gave him one. | |
So then the only little wiggle room that he has, he being a lawyer, looked for the wiggle room, was to say, well, no, I said there's no examples of the government demanding the censorship of legal speech. | |
Maybe they wanted removed criminal or illegal speech. | |
But not legal speech. | |
So the only space that he has left is to demand to know the content of the email, of the tweet rather, that the Biden White House was demanding be censored. | |
So watch what happens. | |
And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre, that would be great. | |
This is a tweet on the very issue that Thomas... Can you just, for the fullness of the record, can you read the, because I've not seen this, can you read the tweet that it's referencing? | |
I don't have the tweet here with me, but the gentleman's point was, you said no time did government try to tell Twitter to explicitly remove something and No, I said explicitly remove lawful speech. | |
Lawful speech. | |
We're going to conflate. | |
The First Amendment is not absolute. | |
This is something from Robert Kennedy Jr. | |
But, for the record, it's a point of order, Mr. Chair. | |
Because Robert Kennedy Jr. | |
said it, that's why it's lawful speech. | |
Just a minute, Mr. Goldman. | |
All I'm saying is, you said, in no time did the government explicitly say to take a tweet down. | |
Here we have it, right here, in the White House. | |
They couldn't even wait. | |
Two days! | |
Two days into this administration they were asked Twitter to take something down and we will get you the underlying tweet. | |
With that I recognize the gentlelady from New York. | |
Will you place it into the record as well sir? | |
The underlying tweet? | |
Robert Kennedy Jr. | |
uh is talking about uh he's talking about Hank Aaron's death after he received the vaccine. | |
So that was the tweet that the Biden White House wanted removed. | |
It was a tweet from Robert Kennedy Jr., the son of RFK, who is not a criminal, at least he's never been charged with crimes, and the tweet was suggesting or implying that there may have been a relationship between the premature death of Hank Aaron, the baseball star, and the fact that he got the COVID vaccine. | |
Maybe you agree with that. | |
Maybe you don't. | |
Maybe you think that's an interesting topic. | |
Maybe you think it's absurd. | |
One thing it's not, even conceivably, is illegal, to suggest that there's a relationship between Hank Aaron's death and the COVID vaccine. | |
And then, three days into the Biden White House, there was an explicit email coming from a senior Biden official, right to Twitter, saying, we want this tweet removed. | |
Exactly what Dan Goldman denied had happened. | |
That's how it went all day. | |
And that is exactly what has been happening, is that we have a First Amendment that bars the U.S. | |
government from censoring speech. | |
So instead of going and taking it down themselves through laws or through executive action, they write to their friends at Twitter and they say, take this down for us. | |
There's no question that's unconstitutional. | |
At some point that will be tested in court. | |
But whatever else is true, the only reason we know about it is because Elon Musk opened up the files of Twitter and allowed real journalists to come in and look through it all and tell us what's in there. | |
While imposing no conditions of any kind on what can and can't be reported. | |
I had Taibbi on my show. | |
I had Schellenberger on my show. | |
I've had Lee Fong on my show and David Zweig on my show. | |
All of whom did the reporting on the Twitter files and all of whom stated emphatically that there was no limitations or conditions of any kind on what they could report. | |
The only reason we know about this is because Taibbi and his colleagues journalistically reported it. | |
And that is what makes Democrats so angry. | |
They wanted all of this hidden. | |
And if you don't believe me, let's listen to Colin Alred, who's a Texas Democrat. | |
Look at Matt Taibbi, refuse to allow him to speak, and give a very eloquent and moving and passionate defense of the censorship regime that we know about only because the Twitter files exposed it. | |
We live in an information age where malign actors do want to use social media to influence our elections, both big, the ones that you've spent a lot of time talking about, and small. | |
Like mine. | |
And it should be a bipartisan goal. | |
No, you don't get to ask questions here. | |
It should be a bipartisan goal to ensure that Americans and only Americans determine the outcome of our elections, not fear-mongering. | |
And I think, I hope that you can actually take this with you, because I honestly hope that you will grapple with this. | |
That it may be possible that if we can take off the tinfoil hat, that there's not a vast conspiracy So that's the Democratic Party for you, right there, summed up perfectly. | |
agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy undermined and the very rights that you think they're trying to undermine they may be trying to protect. | |
So that's the Democratic Party for you right there summed up perfectly there is not a single member of the Democratic Party in Congress not Chuck Schumer Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries not Not AOC, or Ilhan Omar, or Bernie Sanders, who would disagree with a word of what was said. | |
That is the perfect expression of the core view of the Democratic Party. | |
Namely that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, are not malevolent actors at all, but instead are benevolent actors. | |
And that not only should we trust Those U.S. | |
security state agencies to censor for us, we should be grateful to them for it. | |
Because they're just trying to help. | |
They're not censoring for any nefarious purposes. | |
Since when does the CIA or the FBI or the NSA or Homeland Security, when are they nefarious? | |
Since when do we just trust them? | |
They're the good guys. | |
We want them censoring information, because as he said, all they're trying to do is to protect us from speech that harms you, or that undermines the democracy. | |
Everyone knows that's what the CIA and the FBI are for. | |
And the only way that you could possibly believe that it might be dangerous to allow these agencies to do that is if you're a kooky conspiracy theorist. | |
Exactly what they said, You'll recall from yesterday's show about people who believed or wanted to hear more about whether the COVID virus came from a leak in the Wuhan lab. | |
You were a crazy conspiracy theorist. | |
You wore a tinfoil hat. | |
The people who say that stuff are always lying and are always trying to discredit and malign those who are onto them. | |
It's not a conspiracy theory when you hold the evidence in your hands of what's happening. | |
And the reason we have this evidence in our hands is because these journalists did what journalists are supposed to do, which is not agitate for censorship, not disseminate the propaganda from the FBI and the CIA and Wall Street. | |
Not defend the Democratic Party, but instead, reveal the secrets of these most secretive agencies that the U.S. | |
public has the right to know. | |
And that is the reason these Democrats heaped hatred and invective and vitriol on Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger all day, because this was the last thing they wanted, was for this censorship regime to be out in the public. | |
And now that it is, they're forced to defend it. | |
And I think we should be very grateful for Colin Ellred for offering that one minute passionate defense while he told Matt Taibbi to sit in the corner and shut up and just listen. | |
Because that really is how the Democratic Party thinks about the FBI, the CIA, big tech, values of free speech, and the virtues of censoring the internet and keeping the truth from you. | |
That is the core goal of the Democratic Party. | |
So on Tuesday, the investigative journalist Christina Buttons resigned from the Daily Wire, where she had spent the last six months doing a lot of really heavily reporting, hard-hitting where she had spent the last six months doing a lot of really heavily reporting, hard-hitting investigations of the rapidly growing for-profit medical industry that is making a | |
All sorts of children and teenagers to seek what is called gender-affirming care, whether it be psychological counseling on how to socially transition, puberty blockers, hormones, and then ultimately surgeries. | |
When we have a for-profit industry that is exploding in growth, Based on all kinds of medicine and science that is dubious at best, using medications that have not been very well tested, it is the job of a journalist to investigate that industry, to determine whether or not the claims they are making about the product they're hawking are actually true or not. | |
And that's exactly what Christina Buttons has been doing at The Daily Wire, and I would really encourage you to look at her work. | |
It goes out of its way not to be polemical or inflammatory. | |
It is the best kind of science journalism that simply looks at research and studies and follows the money trail in exactly the way that you would when investigating any other industry. | |
And yet, despite having been able to have a place where she has been able to do this great reporting, she announced on Tuesday in a public way, she published an open letter explaining why she was resigning from the Daly Wire. | |
And it was, in my view, a very thought-provoking and nuanced and reflective letter about a topic that a lot of people feel very strongly about. | |
And I wanted to have her on my show and to talk to her in part because I think she's an excellent person to lay out some of the nuances of this debate, but also because I do share some of her concerns about the direction in which some of the most prominent right-wing spokespeople on this issue but also because I do share some of her concerns about the direction | |
And whether they're really concerned about what they claim they're concerned about, which is the welfare of children, or instead whether they're trying to smuggle into what their real agenda is those concerns, namely a desire to control the private lives of consenting adults. | |
So we're really excited to have Christina on the show, and I really look forward to speaking with her. | |
Christina, good evening. | |
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. | |
Thank you for having me. | |
Sure. | |
So let's begin for people who aren't familiar with you or maybe who haven't read your letter. | |
I found one thing particularly interesting about the resignation is that I don't think you're the kind of person one would expect to find at The Daily Wire. | |
So talk a little bit about what your background is, what your kind of worldview is, and how it is that you ended up at The Daily Wire to do this reporting. | |
Well, um, I'm from California. | |
I grew up as a pretty moderate liberal and, uh, voted Democrat in every election. | |
And, um, I even was a social justice warrior for eight months. | |
During the, uh, 2020 election, I, uh, I sort of dabbled, I guess. | |
And then I realized I had made a mistake and, uh, I decided Can you hear me? | |
Oh, I feel like the volume might have gone out. | |
Oh, no, we can hear you fine. | |
Go ahead. | |
Oh, sorry. | |
I ran into the problem of, of course, gender ideology, and there wasn't any good reporting on it from the left. | |
So I decided to consider Yeah, go ahead. | |
Let me just ask you, you talk about how you have this liberal background, you even looked at things through a lens of social justice warrior, and yet you ended up, as you describe in your letter, being not just interested in but almost fixated on | |
The debate that arose over providing pediatric gender-affirming care, namely psychological counseling and especially medical treatments to teenagers and even prepubescent children increasingly identifying as trans or non-binary. | |
Why did that become an issue that grabbed your attention so much? | |
It was because of detransitioners. | |
When I read their stories, I felt Like I could relate to them a lot. | |
A lot of these girls who are detransitioning now are discovering they're on the autism spectrum. | |
And I am also, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum later in life. | |
It explained everything, all of the problems I had growing up. | |
And I feel very strongly that I would have been transgender too, had I been introduced to this ideology when I was a teenager. | |
So I just missed it, but I feel quite certain I would have also been trans. | |
And I think that the problem that we're dealing with now is this affirmative model of care that just automatically affirms anybody who says that they might be transgender. | |
We don't have the right kind of diagnostic criteria to detect autism in girls. | |
So we have all these girls who, you know, they feel different from everybody else. | |
And they don't know why, and they're not fitting in, and they're hurting inside, and they find this community and trans ideology, and they fixate on it, and they self-diagnose as transgender, and then they're just immediately medically affirmed. | |
And I think that's what's created a lot of problems. | |
Yeah, so just, I know for, I've had this experience before where people who do a lot of written journalism who aren't accustomed to speaking about it in front of a camera can be a little nervous sometimes, so I just want to assure you we hear you great, you sound great, you know, I'm really interested in hearing what you have to say and I think the audience is too, so I hope you can just kind of enjoy yourself and let's think about it as kind of just a conversation between the two of us, forget the cameras are there, and it'll be great. | |
Let me just ask you about the fact that you ended up at the Daily Wire, because you did say, you know, you have a political worldview that in most issues wouldn't necessarily lead you to a conservative news outlet. | |
You voted Democrat, you had a kind of liberal perspective on a lot of different issues, except for your concerns that you just expressed so clearly about what this industry was doing, particularly to teenage girls. | |
Did you try and do this kind of reporting at other outlets that had a more liberal ideology? | |
And how is it that you ended up at the Daily Wire? - I did not see any objective or accurate reporting on the left. | |
Um, and I'm actually, I, I just started journalism. | |
Um, I was always a good writer and, uh, I was asked to work for the Postmillennial. | |
Um, and I did a lot of really great work there, I think. | |
And then, um, I was sought after by a few different outlets, the Daily Wire, And so when you went to work at the Daily Wire, did you have discussions with them originally about the fact that you had a different political outlook than them? | |
And what is it that they told you about what you'd be able to do in your work and kind of what their posture was when it came to trans issues? | |
Yeah, that is basically why my beat was the transgender issue. | |
I just didn't report on barely anything else. | |
And my focus really was on pediatric medical transition for the most part. | |
I tried to steer clear of some of the culture war stuff that made me uncomfortable. | |
What was the other part of the question? | |
Yeah, I mean, like, did you have conversations with them about what their view was on gender ideology and trans care and the like? | |
Yeah, they said, you know, that their company stance was, you know, adults can live the lives that they want, just keep kids out of it, and I felt like, alright, I think this can work out. | |
I feel the same. | |
And so talk about a couple of the reporting, just maybe a couple stories that you did in the last six months while you were there that kind of took the most work that you think were some of the most important stories you've been able to do on the industry of pediatric gender affirming care. - I do a lot of sort of fact checking and coverage of stories like | |
That I want to bring more attention to about some of the activist myths that need to be debunked. | |
And I try to bring more attention to organizations that I think are doing incredible work like the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine and GenSpect and all of Lior Sapir's amazing policy work over at City Journal. | |
And anytime there's, you know, GEDA is another great organization that is offering gender exploratory therapy, anything like that, anything going on with detransitioners, I try to bring more attention to. | |
So you made a couple claims earlier that I hear a lot from critics of this industry, one of which is that there are a lot of teenagers who have emotional problems, which I think is very common for teenagers to have, and instead of being treated for the actual pathology or pathologies they have, they're encouraged instead to believe that they're transgender, even though they don't really suffer from | |
Dysphoria and you also kind of I think suggested that oftentimes they are quickly steered into getting treatments without the proper amount of evaluative care or the kind of time that probably should be necessary before people are diagnosed that way. | |
Often what will be said about people like you who make those claims is that You're just kind of repeating myths from the internet. | |
You haven't really done the kind of work to understand what takes place inside of these clinics. | |
What is it that you did to learn about these clinics and about this industry that lets you say those things with confidence? | |
We know from detransitioners, they've told us they can go into Plain Paradise and walk out with a prescription for testosterone under 30 minutes. | |
And now we've had several whistleblowers in Tavistock, and then again in St. | |
Louis, and several other types of People like Dr. Erica Anderson who have shown us that the affirmative care process, it's flawed and it's not helping anybody. | |
So, one of the points you raised, I think the principal point you raised, and I said that, you know, in the intro that I kind of shared this concern was, I've also noticed this escalation in rhetoric, not just in terms of the intensity of it, but kind of a shift from focusing on the work that you've been doing, which is the question of whether children are being adequately protected, something that we talk about all the time in all sorts of different contexts. | |
Into a kind of generalized effort to stimulate hatred toward trans people and even to start trying to agitate against allowing trans adults to seek out the medical treatment. | |
They won, and I just want to read from you, for you and for the audience, one of the paragraphs of your letter where you say, quote, there are transsexuals who are not ideologues, who know that they cannot literally identify out of their sex, and who believe that medical transition is a choice for adults, not children, to make. | |
I count some of them as my friends. | |
They are trying to educate the public, use their unique position as transsexuals to deflected hominem criticism that they are motivated by prejudice or perversion. | |
Some have also participated in helping to pass legislation to protect women's sports and safeguard children. | |
Matt Walsh's rhetoric coincided with a sudden deluge of animus towards transsexuals like my friend Blair White simply for being transsexual. | |
What is the distinction or the distinctions that you're drawing here that led you to kind of be uncomfortable with where Matt Walsh's advocacy and a few other prominent Daily Wire commentators advocacy is leading? | |
I just think that we can't lump everyone together. | |
Like, we have to be specific about where our criticism is directed. | |
Not all transgender people are activists. | |
Some are just trying to live their lives in peace. | |
And, um, I just don't think the inflammatory rhetoric helps anybody. | |
but the talking heads to invigorate their bases and drive traffic to their platforms. | |
I talked to a lot of parents and health professionals in blue states who are dealing with this in their communities, who are trying to help people see reason. | |
I know a lot of other people and organizations that are doing amazing work and they're trying to change things with policy and legislation. | |
They're trying to appeal to the medical organizations. | |
All I really want is for people to just be more considerate of others when we're talking about this extremely contentious issue. | |
One of the things that I noticed and that has caught my attention a lot with this debate, I don't spend a lot of time on these issues, but I think that there had merged this kind of consensus on the culture war. | |
Obviously, it's not a consensus that everybody brought into. | |
But the reason, for example, that the country kind of stopped warring over issues like, say, same-sex marriage Was that you started to see among young conservatives and even older conservatives the acceptance of this view that kind of comes from the Republican idea of limited government, that when it comes to adults, it's live and let live. | |
You have no reason to be concerning yourself with what other adults are doing. | |
It's not the role of the state to control the choices of other adults to the extent that it's consenting and that it doesn't have victims. | |
That basically, it's none of your business who your neighbor wants to marry. | |
It's none of your business what the person down the street wants to do to their body or to their life. | |
That it's legitimate to ask what's being done to children, but we should just stay out of the private lives of other adults. | |
I definitely started noticing a kind of abandonment of that consensus on both the left and the right and sort of the extremes of each side are kind of feeding each other. | |
And I'm wondering what you think of that. | |
Are you seeing on the right this abandonment on the part of at least some leading anti-trans activists of this view that adults should have autonomy in their own lives? | |
Is that one of the things concerning you? | |
Yeah, I see that a lot and it's just only gotten worse. | |
People have become very very intolerant even of trans people who are trying to help us and trying to help other people see reason on specific issues like women's sports and prisons and pediatric medical transition. | |
These are all things that I feel like are attainable and then when there's just so much hate directed at trans people of any kind and of any political leaning like it's It's just going to hurt all of these winnable... I mean, they're reasonable positions. | |
We can get people to see reason on them, and I think that thwarts all of the progress that we were going to make. | |
So I know it's hard to quit your job under any circumstances. | |
It's even harder to do it in the public way that you did, especially over an issue that generates so many emotions like this. | |
So I just want to congratulate you for, even if people don't agree with you, for kind of Making a choice based on what your conscience dictated, even knowing that it was likely to provoke a lot of hostility, which I think the internet has shown that it has. | |
So I just want to tell you that I think what you did was really noble, that when you get to the point when your conscience doesn't allow you to continue, you did what should be done. | |
What is your intention in terms of Continuing the journalism that you've been doing that I think has such great value. | |
Do you know yet where, if you're going to join another media outlet, do you plan to do that independently? | |
What are your plans and where can people continue to find your work? | |
I'm going to help my boyfriend Colin write with his Substack Realities Last Stand. | |
I want to publish a book for parents and create a website that has all of the activist myths debunked and all of the latest data. | |
What has been good about this is actually there are some people who would never otherwise have reached out to me, some prominent transgender activists, and I'm actually going to have some conversations with them to see if we can find some common ground. | |
Yeah, well, I want to just encourage everybody to read your letter. | |
It's the thing that moved me to kind of want to reach out to you. | |
I thought it was just an incredibly thoughtful letter. | |
You avoided manufactured drama or turning yourself into the victim. | |
You didn't accuse The Daily Wire of mistreating you in any way. | |
You really focused on the substance of the issue. | |
You haven't retreated in any way. | |
from your concerns that led you to focus on this, but you nonetheless laid out a case about how you thought that agenda could be best achieved. | |
And I just want to encourage people to go read that it was a really thoughtful piece of writing. | |
So if you have anything else you want to say, feel free to. | |
Otherwise, we can, and you can just tell people where to find you. | |
I am on the Twitter handle ButtonsLives. | |
And thank you so much for having me on. | |
Absolutely. | |
Have a great night. | |
I appreciate your talking to us. | |
Thank you. | |
Okay, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
As I said, every Tuesday and Thursday we have our live after show on Locals where we take your questions, answer your feedback, talk about ideas that you might have for guests or things that You think we ought to cover to become a member of our locals community, just click the join button and you'll have access to all of those shows every Tuesday and Thursday. | |
For everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in. | |
We hope to see you back here tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. | |
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