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April 13, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:02:39
Elon/BBC Conflict Shows Fraud of "Disinformation," Lee Fang Exposes MSNBC

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Good evening.
It's Wednesday, April 12th.
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, a very contentious interview of Elon Musk conducted in Twitter's headquarters by a BBC News tech correspondent named James Clayton Reveals a great deal about a topic we cover extensively on this show, the utter fraud of the quote, disinformation industry and the self-proclaimed disinformation expert to populate it.
Far from any real or cognizable expertise, all of the groups claiming to fight disinformation and all of these people demanding to be recognized and honored as disinformation experts have only one real purpose, to weaponize the term disinformation.
Along with its sleazy older cousin, hate speech, to malign any platforms that refuse to censor on command, or which, relatedly, allow dissent to establishment orthodoxies to be freely expressed.
That was a tactic which this BBC reporter attempted to use against Musk today, arguing that Twitter is to blame because by allowing more free speech, Musk has fostered an increase in, quote, hate speech and disinformation.
The exchange between Musk and this BBC apparatchik, aside from being entertainingly combative, shines a vivid light on how this disinformation scam really works, and we'll examine this video, the interview, and what it shows.
Then, for our interview segment, we'll interview the great investigative journalist Li Feng, who has joyously left The Intercept and is now doing his journalism independently at Substack.
For Lee's first article, he fact-checked the attacks on the Twitter files reporting and on journalist Matt Taibbi by MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan.
Lee documented in this article that Hassan's claims that Taibbi's reporting were rife with errors was itself false, and that the only mistakes that were actually made were the ones by Mehdi Hassan in his attempt to defend the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security from the revelations showing that they have implemented a regime to censor the Internet.
In response to Lee's reporting, MSNBC's Hassan did not respond to the substantive critique showing those errors, but instead he accused Fang of Islamophobia.
We'll talk to Lee about his new reporting, Hassan's ugly but very typical response to Lee, and why Lee is no longer at the Intercept but instead is now at Substack.
And then finally, a New York Times op-ed today, or a few days ago actually, examines, in the context of climate activists, Those who insist that the climate crisis is the gravest existential threat humanity faces and yet, in their personal lives, refuse to make even small sacrifices in defense of the cause to which they profess such devotion.
That article prompted me to focus on an issue I have been long thinking about, namely, the very paradoxical aspect of left liberal political culture that essentially insists that the way that one judges another person's worth or values is by the slogans they chant, or the hashtags they post, or the party for whom they vote.
Essentially everything except the actions they take in their lives and the value those choices reflect, the way they live their lives.
We'll examine that question as well.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form.
You can follow our show on Spotify, Apple, and all the other major podcasting platforms.
The show in podcast version appears 12 hours after the program airs here live on Rumble.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Earlier today, Elon Musk, the founder, the owner of Twitter, was interviewed by a BBC tech correspondent in Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.
The context for the interview was twofold.
One, Elon Musk and Twitter have recently been appending to Western news outlets that have an affiliation with their governments, such as NPR or BBC.
Tags that indicate that they have this relationship to the states similar to the ones that non-Western media outlets often bear and are given by Google or Facebook or in the past by Twitter.
And the argument is that there's no reason why we should tweet non-Western outlets separate, why they should get those kinds of tags, while Western outlets that also serve their government's agenda or in some way funded by their government and thus are subject to their government's control through that funding should be free while Western outlets that also serve their government's agenda or in some way
BBC and NPR both vehemently objected and NPR is saying they refuse to use Twitter until that tag is removed, while BBC has been angrily protesting in every format they can find.
And so one of the things that we've been doing is that we've been doing.
The causes that led to this interview was the BBC's reporter attempt to speak to Musk about Twitter's decision to append this label to the BBC.
But the second and more important contextual reason why this interview took place is that there has been a claim brewing for months, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised to allow more free speech on the platform, That as a result of having allowed more free speech on the platform, Musk is guilty of fostering and provoking greater and greater amounts of both disinformation and hate speech.
This is the theme that is always used against any platform now that announces to the world that we intend to resist The censorship pressures from corporate media or the censorship demands from various governments because we instead want to allow our users the right of free speech to express their viewpoints freely, to hear other people's viewpoints, and to allow adults to engage in free inquiry and decide for themselves what they think.
Instead of having a centralized parent, a centralized corporate actor or government residing above them, telling them, these are not things you're permitted to say and these are not things that you can safely hear.
They have essentially succeeded in snapping into line most big tech platforms like Google and Facebook in particular through a relentless campaign accusing the executives of those companies of being guilty for massacres or genocide or the election of Donald Trump, which they see as even worse.
As a result of allowing too much free speech online.
So wherever a platform is allowing free speech, you will have these apparatchiks from corporate media and think tanks going and saying, the fact that you're allowing free speech is dangerous.
Free speech on the internet is unsafe.
We demand that you censor in accordance with our framework.
We demand that you label dissent from our views as disinformation.
We insist that you censor as hate speech any criticisms of us and our leaders.
And if platforms refuse to, the punishment that they get Is that these media outlets will run stories claiming that they're responsible for the spread of hate speech, that they're inspiring violence, and that they become a vector for disinformation.
There is an entire new industry that has been created and now is being funded that supposedly employs experts, and that is what they do.
They go around labeling any of these platforms that allow free speech as dangerous.
So that was the context for the BBC interview with Elon Musk, is that the BBC has been among the platforms that have been promoting this idea that Elon Musk is endangering the world by allowing too much free speech.
We are going to show you the segment of the interview where that claim is discussed.
The interviewer poses these questions to Elon Musk about that accusation and you'll see what this exchange was because I find this incredibly revealing.
You don't like or hateful?
What do you mean to describe a hateful thing?
Yeah, I mean, you know, just content that will solicit a reaction to something that may include something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist, those kinds of things.
So you think if something is slightly sexist, it should be banned?
No, I'm not saying anything.
I'm just curious.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by hateful content.
I'm asking for specific examples.
And you just said that if something is slightly sexist, that's hateful content.
Does that mean that it should be banned?
Well, you've asked me whether my feed, whether it's got less or more.
I'd say it's got slightly more.
That's what I'm asking for examples.
Can you name one example?
I honestly don't.
You can't name a single example?
I'll tell you why.
Because I don't actually use that feed anymore because I just don't particularly like it.
A lot of people are quite similar.
I only look at my followers.
Well, hang on a second.
You've said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example.
Not even one.
I'm not sure I've used that feed for the last...
Well, then how did you see the hateful content?
Because I've been using Twitter since you've taken it over for the last six months.
Okay, so then you must have at some point seen for you hateful content.
I'm asking for one example.
Right.
And you can't give a single one.
And I'm saying... Then I say so that you don't know what you're talking about.
Really?
Yes, because you can't give a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet.
And yet you claimed that the hateful content was high.
That's a false.
You just lied.
What I claim was there are many organizations that say that that kind of information is on the rise.
Now, whether it has on my feed or not.
Give me one example.
Right.
And if you look at something like the Strategic Dialogue Institute in the UK, They will say that.
Look, people will say all sorts of nonsense.
I'm literally asking for a single example and you can't name one.
Right, and as I've already said, I don't use that feed.
Well then how would you know?
I don't think this is getting anywhere.
You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn't name a single example.
Right, and as I said, I haven't actually looked at that feed.
Then how would you know that this is hateful content?
Because I'm saying that's what I saw a few weeks ago.
I can't give you an exact example.
Let's move on.
We only have a certain amount of time.
Well, there are just so many things to say about that.
I'm going to try to minimize the part that's just the entertainment value, which is very high, and instead focus on the main point I want to make.
But first of all, I think it is really worth noting that the way this interview was conducted, I believe, was it was conducted over Twitter spaces, and it was also recorded by Twitter.
And so this is the kind of exchange that I can guarantee you you would not have seen If it had been up to the BBC to take the footage and edit it together, they would have simply edited out that part because it made them and their journalist and their news organization look so preposterous, so humiliated.
They looked like liars.
Secondly, if you notice what he did, it's so customary, it's so common for how journalists think.
He obviously has a view that he's pushing, and he pushed it from the start.
He said, I believe that Twitter now has far greater hate speech than before you took over because of the free speech you're allowing.
And then when Elon Musk started pressing him to offer examples or to prove that, he then tried to pretend that it wasn't his claim at all.
He was saying, no, no, I don't, I never say what I think, I'm just a journalist, I'm a neutral journalist.
This is just what other people are saying.
But it was so obvious, he explicitly said, I have seen greater amounts of hate speech Online.
And because I think this is one of the most important parts is that this is what happens in journalism all the time.
These kinds of liberal corporate journalists, they speak only to and for one another.
If you're somebody who dissents from their core orthodoxy, they almost never hear from you.
They don't invite people who dissent onto BBC.
They don't pay attention to what they say.
They convince themselves that whoever dissents from their core foundational worldview is somebody not hearing, worth hearing.
Even other journalists who have infinitely greater journalistic accomplishments than people like this who have never broken a single story in their life.
So the only people they ever pay attention to or place value in are people who say the same things that they think.
And so in this world, the fact that free speech on Twitter has produced more hate speech is something that everyone else is saying, everyone else who matters, meaning everyone else who agrees with the worldview of liberals at BBC.
And so there's no need to question it.
There's no need to provide evidence for it or to substantiate it because in their incivil world, it's assumed to be true.
And so when you actually try and force them to provide evidence for it or to defend it, they cannot.
They have no idea.
All they're doing is repeating, mindlessly, What everybody else in their world, who they have vested with credibility, repeats over and over.
These are the people who are responsible for disseminating news and information, and the minute you put them under a microscope, they crumble.
They crumble.
They are as inept as they are dishonest.
He, as Elon said, and he was absolutely right, he said, you just lied.
You just got done saying that you've been personally experiencing an increase in hate speech, but now you're trying to say that you don't look at the feed.
And you can't name even one example, let alone substantiate the claim.
So I think it was very revealing about the behavioral components of these kinds of journalists as well.
The more you look at them, the more obvious it is why they're so universally reviled and despised and distrusted.
How would you possibly trust somebody like that to inform you about the news as opposed to trying to deceive you and propagandize you into ideological convictions that align with him and the BBC?
I mean, it's very obvious what he is after having only listened to him for two minutes.
The other really important aspect, I think, before I get to the primary point that I want to say here, is that the reason he felt so comfortable essentially accusing Elon Musk of this, despite having no evidence for it, is because in his world, Elon Musk is an enemy.
He's been deemed a conservative.
He's now on the right.
He's somebody who refuses and rejects censorship demands, which they regard as sacred.
And so once somebody is deemed an enemy on the other side, you slap a right-wing label on their head, it doesn't matter any longer what you say about them.
You're completely free to slander them.
You're completely free to hurl accusations at them.
Even if you get caught lying, as they so often have, about things they're saying about people on the other side.
They never have to recant it.
They never have to retract it.
They never have to grapple with it or acknowledge it because they know that their audience wants them to do that.
They know their readership is happy when they hurl accusations at the bad people, the people with bad ideologies, and they don't care whether it's true or not.
So, here you just see how casual they are, how willing they are to hurl accusations without having the slightest idea whether it's true or not.
They don't care if it's true or not.
And neither do their readers, and they know that.
There's no professional price to pay for falsely accusing other people of things for which you have no evidence, or for disseminating false storylines or narratives that are steeped in absolutely nothing.
Now, the one time that he offered anything of substance was when he tried to say, look, I can't prove this happened, but there's a group called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and they are the ones who will say, if you ask them, and they are the ones who have said, that ever since you've taken over Twitter, Elon Musk, there has been a rise in hate speech.
And also they claim a rise in disinformation.
They're very similar phrases, hate speech and disinformation.
They're both completely vacuous terms, devoid of any real fixed meaning.
There's no substance to them.
They're just labels and accusations.
They're interchangeable.
And their only real role is to accuse people of them, disinformation or hate speech, as a justification for censoring them.
These are pro-censorship terms.
These are the terms that have been concocted over the last, in the case of hate speech, couple of decades, in the case of disinformation, five or six years, as an argument for why censorship online by centralized state and corporate authorities is not only justified, but necessary.
They have all these new groups that you've never heard of that have popped up with all these benign-sounding names, neutral-sounding names, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and they supposedly employ a whole litany of anti-disinformation experts and anti-radicalism experts, and they're somehow qualified, is the claim, to identify in a way that you're not able to what is disinformation.
Or what is hate speech?
These are experts.
They're trained.
They have credentials.
But these credentials are fake.
There is no credential that qualifies somebody to be a disinformation expert or to recognize hate speech.
So what is this Institute for Strategic Dialogue that this BBC journalist cited as proof that Twitter was experiencing a rise in hate speech?
Let's first look at who their funders are.
Because what you're going to find is that they have the same exact funders as almost every other group that purports to be authorized to fight disinformation.
So here are their funders.
This is from their own site.
It's a page that they disclose their funding.
It's called ISD Funding.
This is the organization that this BBC analyst cited as proof that Twitter had a surge in hate speech.
Their first three foundations here, and they have others, but these are the foundations that you see on your screen, are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Omidyar Group, and the Open Society Foundations, which is George Soros's foundation that he uses to funnel, according to CNBC, $32 billion over the last several years to various causes.
And the amazing thing is, if you look at any of these groups that have sprung up in the wake of Trump and in the wake of Brexit, that have these benign sounding names, there's one at the Atlantic Council, they're all over the place, that purport to combat disinformation.
These are the ones that media outlets, when they want to accuse platforms of trafficking disinformation, always cite.
There's the same group of five or six of these groups.
And they're all funded by the same entities.
So three neoliberal billionaires, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill Gates.
And then if we go back, incredibly, they're also funded by Governments, by Western governments, by the intelligence agencies of these governments.
These are who's funding them.
So you have the CIA or British intelligence agencies or EU or NATO intelligence agency funding these groups.
These are the groups that purport to be the authorities to say what is and what is not disinformation.
So here you see right under the foundations who funds this group, Government and Multilateral Organizations.
There you see the Foreign Affairs and Trade and Home Affairs Agency of the Government of Australia.
Then you see the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Denmark and their Immigration Service as well.
Then you see the Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior for the Netherlands, the European Commission, The Interior Ministry of Finland, several different entities of the German government.
There's Global Affairs Canada.
Then you move on to the next page, the Ministry of Justice and Security for the Netherlands.
These are who funds this organization that purports to be able to say, this is hate speech, this is disinformation.
The Internal Affairs Department of New Zealand, the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Norway, the Ministry of Justice of Sweden, the British Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and the British Home Office, the UK Home Office, several different agencies of the UN, and then the U.S.
Department for Homeland Security and the U.S.
State Department.
These are funded by intelligence agencies to control the internet.
That was the whole point of the Twitter files, which we're about to get to.
There's all different tentacles that they have and different tactics they use in order to regulate and control the flow of information on the internet.
And one of the most pernicious ways, because it's designed to be invisible and is therefore deceitful, is they fund this fake industry, this new industry called disinformation experts.
Who traffic in this kind of analysis all the time.
And what they're really designed to do is to slap these labels on whatever platforms disobey their censorship orders.
So Elon Musk has made a big showing that he is going to allow more free speech on Twitter since he bought it.
That was his reason, one of the main reasons he cited for buying it.
Has he been perfect about that?
Absolutely not.
He would be the first to say so.
And we've criticized several of his censorship decisions.
Because they don't really have a consistent or principled ground, but he certainly has opened the spigot where a lot of people who were views that were previously banned have been able to return and are now being able to be heard.
And so you have this group funded by Western governments, including Homeland Security, That the BBC and every other major media outlet now cites as the organization designed to, who's authorized to proclaim what is disinformation and what is hate speech.
Of course they're going to target Any views that dissent from their agenda, that's the whole porpoise of this scam industry.
Now, the other amazing part of this is that they're not only funded by neoliberal billionaires, Bill Gates, George Soros, Pierre Mediar, who fund every one of these groups, and they're not just funded by Western intelligence agencies, they're also funded by big tech.
There you see under the, let's put that back up there, the column private sector, You have Audible, which is a division of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and YouTube.
Now, I want you to remember that, because I'm about to move to the next part of this story, that it is Twitter's competitors who are funding this group that then goes and attacks Twitter as being a vector for hate speech and disinformation, including Google and Facebook and YouTube.
Now, the first time I ever heard of this group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the one cited today by the BBC reporter, was when I first moved to Rumble.
It wasn't when I launched this particular show.
It was when I was still at Substack and had entered into an agreement with Rumble to produce two or three versions of episodes of System Update each month.
And I had been putting them on YouTube.
Rumble asked me if I would be interested in helping build their site.
They explained to me that they had free speech commitment in their DNA.
And being somebody who believes that a free internet and free speech on the internet is of the utmost importance, I was very interested in that proposal.
We reached an agreement and I moved to Rumble and made an agreement with Rumble to produce three or four Episodes of System Update back in 2021, mid-2021, and I moved there along with people like Tulsi Gabbard, and it was a group of about six or seven other people.
And the Washington Post published a story on our move to Rumble.
There you see Rumble, a YouTube rival popular with conservatives.
Remember, I was moving with Tulsi Gabbard, and yet they had no qualms about saying, A YouTube rival popular with conservatives will pay creators who challenge the status quo.
That was the headline of the Washington Post article.
They had a big picture of me and my husband at the top of this article.
It says, the video site has exploded during the pandemic as a home for anti-vaccine misinformation and conservative complaints about big tech censorship.
So here you already see the Washington Post attempting to signal to you, or to the readers, that Rumble is a place you should hate.
It's a place that only is for conservatives, even though the article is about how Tulsi Gabbard, the long-standing Democratic Congresswoman and former vice chairwoman of the DNC until she quit to support Bernie Sanders' candidacy, the left-wing socialist for president in 2016.
It was a story about how she and I and several other people long associated with the left previously were moving to Rumble, but they needed to tell their readers, this is a platform you should hate.
Why?
It's a conservative site, and it also is a vector for misinformation and conservative complaints about big tech censorship.
Because why would liberals complain about big tech censorship?
They wouldn't, and they don't, because they support that censorship.
So that's how the article was framed.
It was an attack on Rumble.
And then to justify the attack, the Washington Post reporter, Drew Harwell, of course cannot admit that he himself is expressing his own views about Rumble, just like that BBC reporter was trying to say, oh, I don't have any This isn't me saying it even though he had just said it.
So this is what they do when they want to promote their own views.
They go and they find somebody who they can claim is an expert, who they know in advance is going to Defend those views or state those views.
And then that's the only expert they include in the article to say what is in fact, of course, the views of the newspaper and the reporter.
And they get to pretend that they're just quoting experts.
There's not a single other expert cited in this article that dissents in any way from the idea that Rumble is this horrible sewer of disinformation.
So here is what the Washington Post said about Rumble when reporting that Tulsi Gabbard and I were moving there.
This is back in 2021.
Closed.
Syrian O'Connor, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London, that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech, said that during the pandemic, Rumble has, quote, become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the US and around the world.
He said he had seen videos removed from mainstream sites that reappear and multiply across Google.
And he worries that the site's growing prominence will give people a bigger megaphone to spread misinformation about the effectiveness or risks of vaccines.
Do you see what Rumble is guilty of?
Certain videos and views that are removed from quote mainstream sites, meaning Google and Facebook, are allowed to be heard on Rumble.
That is a crime.
Once Google and Facebook, that are under the control of Big Tech and the corporate media, they've gotten them in line, once they censor something, once they decide that there's a certain view that you should not hear because it's, in their view, false or constitutes hate speech, that should be the end of it.
There should be no other platforms that allow that view to be heard.
The powers to be have spoken.
And what they're so angry about with Rumble, as they just got done admitting implicitly, is that the things they get successfully banned over here end up appearing on Rumble.
And that's why Rumble now needs to be maligned and degraded for the same reason that Twitter needs to be accused of fostering hate speech and disinformation.
Precisely because They are a place where the views that these people want banned, that establishment institutions want banned, are instead allowed to appear.
And what is particularly remarkable about this is that
They cited this Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and the only thing they told you about what this entity was, while allowing this person, Sirian O'Connor, an analyst, to malign Rumble as a vector of disinformation, is that this was an organization that has, quote, in the past, worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.
That's the only thing that you were to know about this group.
Don't you think it's kind of relevant for a reader who's reading this article and is being told that Rumble is a vector of hate speech and misinformation to know that the agency or the entity that is proclaiming that to be true is in fact funded by the U.S.
government, by the Department of Homeland Security?
By the Department of State, by the Ministries of the Interior and the Justice Ministries and the Foreign Affairs Divisions of multiple Western governments.
Isn't that pretty relevant to know that that's in reality who's declaring these views on Rumble to be false or hateful and therefore worthy of censorship?
And isn't it further rather relevant when There's an entity that is trying to get Rumble in your mind to be viewed as this untrustworthy place, this place that should be avoided, that this group is actually funded by YouTube, the primary competitor of Rumble, or that it's an organization funded by Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar and George Soros.
But none of that is in here.
The only thing that is mentioned is that it's a think tank that has, quote, worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.
All of that information is simply omitted.
And this, I think, is the fundamental point.
There is now a very well-funded and pervasive disinformation industry.
Almost every one of these groups is funded by these exact same sources.
And the reason these sources are funding these groups is because these sources, these governments, big tech, cannot overtly or directly censor the internet.
They can't come out, these governments, and say, we are censoring the internet.
In Europe, they sometimes do.
The EU, remember, made it illegal For any platforms to allow you to go to those platforms and hear Russian state media like RT or Sputnik.
They made it illegal.
Even if Facebook wants to in Europe, let you hear RT.
So you hear what the Russian government is saying.
It's essentially illegal.
And Rumble's refusal to take off RT and to de-platform RT is why they're not available in France.
So this entire industry here is basically a government structure funded by their allies in neoliberalism, the same set of small handful of billionaires who fund all these groups, and by big tech.
And what they do is go around and they just append this label, disinformation and hate speech, to anything they want censored.
That is the scam.
And it's remarkable how overnight this industry appeared.
It is based on a completely fraudulent credential.
There's no such thing as a disinformation expert.
And all it is is a very thinly disguised attempt to censor the internet.
And that exchange that Elon Musk had with the BBC reporter was so telling because they just make these claims with no evidence at all.
And if you looked at the report, I have no doubt there'd be all kinds of charts and data, but that's accomplished simply by taking views that they dislike, such as questioning whether COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan as opposed to naturally occurring, and they label that disinformation.
Or if somebody questions the new gender ideology that gets labeled hate speech.
These are just ways of controlling discourse and debate using the invisible hand with a front that makes it seem like these are neutral, benign groups with all kinds of scholars, when in reality it's just a way to justify, through this relentless propaganda campaign, What their main overarching goal is, which is destroying a free internet and converting the internet instead into a tool of propaganda.
When you dismantle it in a very facile way, it's not that hard.
It doesn't require that much research to do.
You really see how the grinds are churning.
And the fact that that BBC interviewer finally, when pressed and put into a corner, grabbed hold of this group, a group that is funded by Western governments, big tech, and neoliberal billionaires, is one of the most illustrative exchanges on this topic I've seen in a while.
Li Feng is one of the most scrupulous and diligent investigative journalists in the country.
He's been on our show once before to talk about his Twitter files reporting.
From 2015 until last month, he was an investigative reporter at The Intercept and for many years at The Intercept was my colleague.
He has just moved to Substack.
And for his first article, documented a significant error made by MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan when Hassan was interviewing and attempting to malign the reporter Matt Taibbi and his reporting on the Twitter files.
You recall that the Twitter files revealed a broad censorship regime imposed by various security state agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security.
In response to Lee's article, Hassan chose not to address the substantive critiques raised, but instead, in the most unsurprising move imaginable for a liberal corporate journalist, chose instead to publicly brand Lee a bigot, accusing him of Islamophobia.
For our interview segment, we have Lee with us tonight.
We'll talk to him about his new article and all of these related issues as well.
Good evening Lee, welcome to your debut appearance on our show in your post-Intercept era.
We're delighted to talk to you.
Hey, Glenn, thanks for having me.
Good to be with you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's dig into this.
I'm excited to do this.
So the interview that Mehdi Hassan conducted on his MSNBC show with Matt Taibbi became very viral.
Liberals insisted that it was essentially a comprehensive debunking of the Twitter files reporting all of it, the entire thing.
If you ask now a liberal what they think of the Twitter files, they'll say, oh, that was already debunked.
And in reality, even if you believe everything that Matty said, at most he was accusing Matt of having made a couple of trivial errors that Matt promptly corrected.
But even about one of the main error, you wrote the following in your new Substack article.
You said, quote, Hassan is wrong and presents a deeply distorted view.
Can we move up on that quote?
And here's what you wrote, "Hasan is wrong and presents a deeply distorted view of the mechanics of this process.
Taibbi's testimony, especially the video excerpted by Hassan, is accurate." And then you added, "Worse, after being presented with evidence of CISA working directly with EIP, Hassan doubled down, repeating his false allegations that Taibbi lied under oath." So this involves a couple of acronyms, some agencies that have kind of an uncertain status about whether they're a non-profit or a government.
Just in the clearest terms possible, explain what it is that Mehdi Hassan got wrong when accusing Matt Taibbi of having made errors in his Twitter files reporting.
The most egregious part of this back and forth between Taibbi and Hassan was this charge by Mehdi that when testifying before Congress, Matt Taibbi lied under oath that he told Congress that the CISA, this government Matt Taibbi lied under oath that he told Congress that the CISA, this government agency that's a subagency of the Department of Homeland Security, cybersecurity and infrastructure agency, that they were
cybersecurity and infrastructure agency, that they were basically working hand in glove with a nonprofit group out of Stanford called the Election Integrity Partnership, and that Twitter executives did not differentiate between the government and that Twitter executives did not differentiate between the government or this Stanford-backed disinfo group when they were working to censor alleged disinformation, misinformation around the election.
That was the claim by Taibbi.
Mehdi claimed that this was a lie, an intentional misrepresentation of the facts under oath, that Taibbi had gotten this wrong and that It was not CISA, the Department of Homeland Security Agency, that it was in fact just CIS, the Center for Internet Security, this government contractor, that's a private sector government contractor, and so that kind of, as you mentioned,
Let me just interject there.
We have that portion of the video.
I think it's important to show.
Now, I just want to note, it's just kind of amazing.
You know, we had you on, we had Michael Schellenberger on, we had Tayibi on twice, we had a couple of other Twitter files reporting reporters.
This is a Very, like, sweeping story showing countless examples of the U.S.
security state influencing big tech companies, in particular Twitter, relentlessly to get material censored.
Even if Meddy had not been completely erroneous in what he was saying, the idea that this debunked the entire reporting is lunacy.
But let's look at that part of the interview that you just described, and then I want to ask you to kind of break it down on what your reporting showed about why Meddy Uh, everything he said here was false.
Let's take a look at that part of the video.
You also claim the EIP was partnered with the government's cyber security and infrastructure agency, CISA, to censor Twitter.
But you mix up CISA, C-I-S-A, a homeland security agency, with the Center for Internet Security, the C-I-S, which is a non-profit.
In fact, you added an A to C-I-S, I think people can see it there, in brackets to make that false claim.
It's just error after error, Matt, on just this one topic.
That's an error.
So, Matt, you know, I think, like, if you're confronted that way on live TV, being told without the documents in front of you that the staff at MSNBC has documented this error, I think Matt's kind of instinct was to say, yeah, look, maybe I got that wrong and I'll correct it, but in fact, your reporting showed that it was Matt who was corrected and Matty who was wrong.
How come?
Well, in this instance, yes, this was a mistake.
In one of hundreds of tweets, of Twitter thread tweets, Matt did switch one of the acronyms and get it wrong.
And Matt, after this, you know, viral interview, corrected the record on Twitter.
Well, I think he went on, he actually, he went on and corrected it before it even aired, once the interview was over.
Right, right, right.
The same day he corrected it, you know, after it was recorded.
And before it aired, he corrected it.
But Mehdi went on further after this interview to post a video of Matt Taibbi, you know, testifying before Congress about this issue and making the allegation that in addition to this mix-up, that Taibbi again mixed up the CIS with CISA while testifying before Congress.
That's not true.
There's several issues here.
One, there's this claim that CIS, the Center for Internet Security, is just this private sector contractor that has nothing to do with the government.
No, they were contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to run this partnership.
They're working hand in glove with the Homeland, with Department of Homeland Security to help facilitate this kind of attempt at censoring certain types of political speech.
But then even on the, that's kind of a basic misunderstanding that Mehdi doesn't have about how the federal government works.
I mean, you wouldn't, we all describe Edward Snowden as the NSA whistleblower, but he didn't actually work for the NSA.
He worked for Booz Allen Hamilton.
That's, you know, we have private sector contractors that fulfill the basic functions of government, and that doesn't separate them from the government.
But even with that point aside, Mehdi just gets the facts wrong in terms of the congressional testimony.
When Matt said that CISA, which is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, he was accurate.
And that's when I posted, and to show that he was accurate, I posted both videos and documents from the election integrity partnership showing that they admit that they worked hand in glove with the Department of Homeland Security.
And I posted new emails that haven't been published before showing that yes, it was the Department of Homeland Security elevating allegations of disinformation that were originating from this election integrity partnership, this disinfo group, and forwarding them on to Twitter to say, hey, look, make sure you pay attention to this and make sure you delete these look, make sure you pay attention to this and make sure you delete these tweets or
So both in terms of how, describing how CIS worked functionally as an arm of the government, Mehdi was wrong.
It was not just some, you know, Outside private sector organization.
No, they were contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to carry out this task and just getting the actual organizations and describing them accurately.
Matt Tybee was correct in his congressional testimony when saying that CISA was literally taking requests from these disinfo groups and then forwarding them onto Twitter and saying, hey, delete these tweets.
They were also doing that.
It was both CISA and CIS.
So Matt got nothing wrong, but I think maybe six or seven tweets now, Mehdi has now doubled down and continued to claim, even in the face of all the evidence that I published on my sub stack yesterday, that no, Matt Tybee lied before Congress.
It's just not true.
So I think, you know, what's clearly going on here is that for reasons that I want to actually ask you about, liberals have been incredibly hostile to this reporting for, From the first day it appeared, I'm sure you remember, that the day that Matt published the first installment, liberal journalists united and proclaimed it all to be a nothing burger.
They began immediately attacking his credibility, claiming he was doing PR for the world's richest man, using in creepy unison the same exact phrase.
At the end of the day, Lee, this reporting is designed to show secret conduct on the part of the U.S.
Security State, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and others in an effort to censor and control the Internet.
And yet, from the very beginning, liberals were incredibly hostile to this until they finally, they were claiming it was irrelevant, they didn't really reveal anything, and then they finally sent out Medhi, and I think, you know, you're never going to make progress.
They want to believe that the story has been debunked, and Medhi gave them this kind of fireworks, this like sort of, you know, theater in order to convince them.
Why are liberals so hostile to the story exposing the conduct of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA?
Why is it so important to them to defend these agencies and have many working so hard to do that?
What is the motive behind that?
I think a lot of this goes back to the early Trump era and this kind of desire for Comey and the FBI and, you know, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies to save democracy by prosecuting Trump and prosecuting conservatives.
This is kind of a new mantra of many sectors of the Democratic Party and liberals in general.
There's just been a complete turnaround in terms of how they view these very powerful policing agencies, how they view the Department of Homeland Security And look, I mean, these tactics they're using to diminish the Twitter files, I mean, it's kind of ridiculous.
I mean, they're carefully ignoring all the stories that, you know, My stories, for example, that look at the influence of the Pentagon or look at the influence of Big Pharma, BioNTech, attempting to censor critics that were demanding a generic, cheaper version of the COVID vaccine, the Pentagon creating these fake accounts, they ruthlessly ignore these stories and they obsessively focus on what are the motives of Elon Musk?
What are the motives of Matt Taibbi?
They try to personalize and diminish this in a lot of ways that we saw the national security state acting in the face of other leaks in the past.
I mean, you know, a decade ago, we had Chelsea Manning divulge the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.
You had hundreds of stories and revelations from those disclosures showing the operations of the U.S. and dozens of different countries around the world.
And instead of looking at those actual revelations and the duplicitous actions of the U.S., you know, they attempted to personalize the debate.
What was Manning's real motive?
So, you know, was she acting, you know, in concert with foreign actors?
Yeah, I mean, this is a long-standing tactic.
U.S. soldiers abroad, you know, anything to actually obscure and not discuss the actual substance of these disclosures.
And I think that's the basic kind of routine that we're seeing here.
Yeah, I mean, this is a longstanding tactic.
You know, when Daniel Alsberg leaked the Pentagon papers that proved the U.S. government was lying systematically to the American people about the war in Vietnam, The response of the Nixon administration was to try and break into the office of a psychoanalyst in order to get secrets about Daniel Ellsberg's psychosexual internal life as a way of just trying to distract attention onto him.
They obviously did that in the Snowden story.
We knew from the beginning, the minute we unveiled our sources, Edward Snowden, that attention was going to shift from the substance of the NSA reporting to who was Edward Snowden and what are his motives.
It's a very common standard technique.
And as you say, I think you're right that liberals in part are doing this because they recognize the CIA, the Homeland Security, the FBI as their allies in the fight against Trump.
But I'm wondering if you agree with my suspicion as well.
And it's based on things I saw at the Twitter files hearing when Matt Taibia and Michael Schellenberger appeared.
A lot of the Democrats on the committee were being very candid and explicit about the fact that they want Homeland Security to censor the internet.
They were saying things like, these are patriotic public servants who are trying to protect us from things that can undermine our-- meaning free speech.
They see this now as a threat and as a danger.
And to me, it seems like the reason why people like Mehdi Hassan and those who watch him and those who think like him are so angry about this is because this exposed a secret censorship regime led by the US security state that they, in fact, support.
Yeah, you know, - Yeah, you know, I was just looking in the congressional archives back in 2010 to 2011.
Some of the judicious, a fairly benign and relatively minor a fairly benign and relatively minor program of this agency. - Hey, Lee, can you hear me?
Your internet connection got a little sketchy there.
Can you just go back?
You were saying in response to what I asked you that you were looking at the congressional record and congressional service record.
Go ahead and then continue from there.
Well look, if you look a decade ago, Congressional Democrats were investigating the Department of Homeland Security for simply creating social media alerts at flooding, at protests, at acts that could be seen as a national emergency.
They said this is an unconstitutional overreach of the Department of Homeland Security.
We can't have these national security agencies potentially even monitoring First Amendment protected speech.
And now look at them.
10 years later, they're demanding that the Department of Homeland Security do more to actually, you know, have their staff members coordinating on a daily basis with the social media companies.
I mean, we get a particular look at Twitter, but this is going on at Facebook, at Discord, and even Nextdoor and some of these other, you know, communication platforms that people use on a daily basis.
And they're screening for, you know, supposed misinformation and political content that they view as potentially dangerous.
I mean, this is exponentially more dangerous and more problematic than what Democrats were then yelling about 10 years ago.
And that just kind of shows the evolution of a lot of sectors of the Democratic Party that they now welcome the security state involved very deeply in issues of political speech, of protest, of communication on the Internet.
Yeah, I mean, that's why it's so bizarre.
Whenever I hear, you know, that kind of cliche question, what happened to you?
Russell Brand gets it, Matt Taibbi gets it, I think you get it, too.
You know, the focus of my career, journalistic career, from the start has been, in large part, to expose the nefarious conduct of the security state, and it's not my fault that the Democratic Party has now become their biggest allies and their biggest boosters.
Speaking about the tactics of Democratic Party politics, Matt Medihasan did not ignore your article.
He did, in fact, respond.
Unfortunately, he did not respond by trying to engage the substantive critiques that you documented, but instead...
decided to accuse you of bigotry.
He essentially claimed that in 2019, three years ago, when all of us were at The Intercept, you had launched what he called an anti-Islamic phobic smear.
And here's the tweet where he says it.
You had basically called Ahmadi to own up to the mistake that you very compellingly documented.
And this was his response, quote, talking of owning up to mistakes, I remember when we worked together at The Intercept, I mean, that is juvenile and infantile to start with, but it's also incredibly ugly to just, out of the blue, as a response to your critique of his journalism, try and pin an Islamophobia label onto your forehead.
Yeah, owning up to mistakes indeed.
I mean, that is juvenile and infantile to start with, but it's also incredibly ugly to just, out of the blue, as a response to your critique of his journalism, try and pin an Islamophobia label onto your forehead.
What is going on with that?
Well, you know, Mehdi is a self-styled expert at debate, and I suppose when losing an argument, you describe your opponent as a bigot or a racist or whatever.
I mean, that's how to automatically win on the Internet, I guess.
But, you know, this is just absurd.
We had a back-and-forth about Tulsi Gabbard, at the time the only Hindu member of Congress, and, you know, there were a number of articles, including one at The Intercept, that described her as, you know, a Hindu extremist.
And, you know, there's some very strange passages in that particular article, including counting the number of Hindu names that showed up in her campaign disclosures.
I mean, that kind of, you know, scrutiny would not pass the muster against any other ethnic group.
You know, you wouldn't count the number of Jewish names donating to a politician to accuse them of being one way or the other.
Or if you did, your career would be instantly over.
Of course not.
You know, yeah, of course.
And so, you know, and yes, you know, certainly, you know, her record on any issues around India is open to, you know, debate and reporting about.
Of course, you know, I've been critical of pro-Modi RSS groups in the past.
But, you know, I just I was kind of pointing out a double standard here.
And, you know, he kind of went after me viciously.
And I said, look, you wouldn't want at the time, Mehdi was drawing a paycheck both from The Intercept and from Al Jazeera, which is a state owned media company and based in Qatar.
And I said, look, you wouldn't want you wouldn't find it fair for someone to say that you're a foreign agent of Qatar because you're drawing a paycheck there.
You have a financial connection there.
Just as it's not fair for you to point to to identify Tulsi Gabbard as a foreign agent, as an agent of Narendra Modi.
You know, let's just be fair here and see things how they are.
And, you know, he had a meltdown on that.
He said, I'm like, you know, I should put on my MAGA hat.
I'm making a Trump argument.
It was very childish at the time, just as his allegations are today.
People can look at this interaction.
I did delete some of these tweets because I talked to some of the editors at the time.
They said, if you have a problem with a colleague, take it privately.
Call them up on the phone and talk to them.
In a private channel, and I agree with that basic kind of principle.
There was no kind of claim that I was being Islamophobic or whatever.
That's absurd.
So yeah, that's kind of all there was to it.
But I see Mehdi kind of refusing to actually deal with the substance of the documents and videos and emails that I posted.
He hasn't actually responded to any of the evidence.
He's not talking or explaining the actual process of how the Election Integrity Project It is amazing.
partnership, worked with the Department of Security to censor tweets.
He's not actually grappling with any of the details that I posted.
Instead, he kind of just jumps to this ad hominem attack, I guess, as part of his strategy here.
I mean, it is amazing.
He did actually write a book, How to Win Every Argument.
And then in response to a critique, he just decides to hurl accusations of bigotry at you, completely unrelated to anything that anyone is discussing, which I presume actually in liberal political culture and liberal journalism, is a way that you win an argument.
Like, whoever gets to pin the tail on the donkey first, or in this case, the racism accusation, wins the debate.
It's just amazing the ease with which they do that.
It's just like a reflex at this point.
Lee, one of the things that has gotten lost in the
All these kind of like drama around the Twitter files is the fact that shortly before the first installation of the Twitter files, I think maybe about a month or so, maybe a little longer, you actually published an article based on Homeland Security documents you and Ken Klippenstein had obtained, who was your colleague at The Intercept at the time, showing that Homeland Security has a pretty comprehensive plan for how they want to increase their stranglehold on the flow of information over The Intercept.
completely apart from the Twitter files.
Remind everybody we actually covered at the time of what that article revealed. - Yeah, there was a lot of revelations in that article.
Maybe top line, there were plans to expand CISA's, you know, partnership with the major social media platforms to expand kind of what they're looking at.
They saw the kind of a partnership that existed in the 2020 election as a test run for how they hope to expand it on issues of racial justice, on the origins of COVID, on the U.S. role and the, you know, Ukraine-Russia war.
They were hoping to kind of expand the scope to kind of increase pressure on social media platforms to censor alleged disinformation, you know, and relying not just on the Department of Homeland Security, but working with this kind of massive task force that came but working with this kind of massive task force that came out of the, you know, 2017 anger around Russian interference in the 2016
This FBI task force with over 80 agents and based largely in San Francisco, where all the tech companies are, relying on them to exert pressure on these platforms to essentially censor social media.
And, you know, as we've seen in the election, in the 2020 influence, this was a very kind of lopsided effort.
It was very partisan.
Who gets to decide what is disinformation and what is accurate information?
That wasn't clear.
I mean, there were very few, very little discussion of constitutional checks on how the government would be interacting with government speech.
And the article really just takes a look at the evolution of these government agencies and how they've attempted, have they grown and sought to exert influence. - Our last question, Lee.
Kind of maybe burying the lead a little bit, at least as far as your career is concerned, but you're no longer at The Intercept.
You're now at Substack.
You published your first article there this week, the one that we've been discussing.
I think people have forgotten that the same thing that the BBC reporter tried to do today to Twitter and to Elon Musk and that the Washington Post and many others are still doing to Rumble, mainly saying, oh, that's just a right-wing site where disinformation and hate speech thrive.
They also tried doing that to Substack for a good while until basically Substack hired a bunch of standard liberal journalists and it kind of got diffused.
But in any event, talk a little bit about why you're now at Substack.
What it is that you're hoping to do there and how people can come in and read your work and support the independent journalism you're now doing.
Look, I joined The Intercept over eight years ago because it was, you know, a beacon for adversarial I remember!
of independent journalism, you know, holding the powerful accountable, including the media, including kind of conventional wisdom and powerful institutions going against the grain and pushing back against the most powerful forces in society.
You know, it's unfortunate that The Intercept has really drifted away from that mission.
There's been some very kind of publicly documented and well-known cases of that, including their attempt to censor U-Bland on the Hunter Biden laptop and, you know, many other cases, you know, that's been unfortunate.
But, you know, that kind of original purpose is something that I deeply believe in.
That's part of who I am as a journalist.
I those values are crucial for me and I hope to continue that tradition at Substack.
You know, I'm interested in holding the powerful accountable.
I'm going to march to the beat of my own drum and have a principled, you know, focus on the powerful in society.
and kind of calling into question conventional wisdom as it were.
So, you know, this was the first piece on Substack, and I hope to publish a lot more in the days and weeks to come.
Yeah, I mean, for everybody out there, Lee is my friend.
I have no trouble acknowledging that.
But at the same time, independent of that fact, he really is one of the most intrepid and principled investigative journalists in the country.
He really does journalism in the way that it used to be done, commonly in sort of the best sense of the word.
So I can't recommend highly enough that you read his work there, that if you're so inclined and able, you subscribe to his sub stack.
I think it's incredibly important that we find a way to do his journalism with the complete independence that journalism of the kind that he does So we will put that on the screen, especially for tomorrow's show.
You can just search Lee Fong on Substack.
I think we have it up in the description as well.
We're going to put it in the description.
I hope people will find you there.
Good luck with this sort of new stage in your journalism career.
We really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
Appreciate it.
Have a great night, Lee.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
We had indicated we had a third segment, but due to time constraints, I thought it was very important to spend the time dissecting this disinformation industry and talking to Lee about how the media responded to Twitter files and the errors that were replete in the critics.
All right.
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