Authoritarian “Congresswoman” Threatens Matt Taibbi w/ Jail Over #TwitterFiles, BuzzFeed News Shuts Down, & Media Blackout on DOJ Indictments
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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 Democratic member of Congress explicitly threatens a journalist with prosecution in prison After he revealed secret actions by the U.S.
security state that she, the member of Congress, supports.
Stacey Plaskett, who pretends to be a member, a Democratic congresswoman from the Virgin Islands, but in reality is nothing more than an on-voting delegate, wrote a letter to the journalist Matt Taibbi today, explicitly threatening him with prison for allegedly making false statements to Congress when he testified on March 9th before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about the Twitter files.
That reporting, as you recall, revealed the role played by the intelligence community and other parts of the U.S.
government in censoring vast amounts of online speech posted by American citizens.
It's easy to dismiss these threats from her as the act of a small-minded, impotent government functionary desperate for social media applause and with an obvious petty tyrant complex.
And all of that is clearly true.
But the mindset displayed by the adored on Twitter Stacey Plaskett, as blatantly repressive as it is, has become the defining mindset of her party and the liberal political faction which cheers her and for that reason deserves more attention than it or she otherwise would merit.
Then, the collapse of Brooklyn-based liberal digital media is now happening so quickly that one wonders whether this rotted subculture will even exist by next week.
Today, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News is closing.
Not laying more people off, as they've repeatedly done, not trying to replace their banal and cliched writers with chat GPT, which they've also tried, but just closing, ceasing to exist, disappearing from the face of the earth.
The company itself, BuzzFeed, is laying off 15% of its workforce, 180 people.
Sadly for the nation, they will continue for now to try and prop up the diseased and wheezing corpse called the Huffington Post, though that merely exists in its multiple layoff plague shell.
Yet another standard issue liberal outlet called Business Insider, be grateful if you don't know what it is, but also you probably won't even have to find out because it's unlikely to be around for a lot longer, announced today that it was laying off 10% of its workforce.
And just a few hours ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about BuzzFeed demise with this ominous headline, quote, Vice could be next.
Vice could be next.
While I do not, as a matter of principle, celebrate the misfortune of others, these outlets are a blight on our country and their demise is well deserved.
We'll examine why.
Then on last night's show, we devoted the entire program to examining a genuinely dangerous prosecution brought by the Biden Justice Department against four American citizens who are radical black American leftists.
They're accused of being Kremlin agents and refusing or failing to notify the Justice Department of that status.
Very few media outlets have covered this prosecution and no prominent National Democrats, at least to my knowledge, have objected.
And yet, Earlier today was on the radio program of Glenn Beck, where he urged his listeners to rise in defense of these Americans, despite the fact that his audience overwhelmingly disagrees with their ideology, in light of the dangerous precedent this prosecution will set for the criminalization of dissent.
And then later tonight, right after the show concludes, I'll be on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program to discuss this case as well.
Surveying who is and is not willing to denounce this prosecution by the Biden Justice Department speaks volumes about where our politics are.
As a reminder, System Update is available as well in podcast form.
To find us, simply follow us on Spotify, Apple, or any other major podcasting platforms where you can rate and review us to increase the visibility of the program.
Today is Thursday, which means that we will have our live after show on Locals, where we respond to your feedback and take your questions and, in general, comment on your critique.
But because I'll be on Tucker Carlson's show right at the top of the show, immediately following this one, We'll be a little bit delayed, probably will start around 8.30 p.m.
Eastern.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the most important acts of journalism, over the past year at least, undoubtedly is the Twitter files.
A series of reporting covering 20 or 25 different installments at this point that was enabled when Elon Musk, after purchasing Twitter, opened up the Twitter files to a slew of independent journalists, none of whom had any restrictions on what they were or were not permitted to publish or how they were or were not permitted to report.
The only requirement was that they report the stories originally on Twitter, which they did, but there were no other constraints imposed beyond that.
And it revealed all sorts of things.
We spent a lot of time in this show reporting on multiple evenings, the different revelations.
We interviewed four or five of the journalists, including obviously Matt Taibbi and Lee Fong, about the findings that these documents revealed.
But at their core, what they were about was the censorship regime that has been imposed on the internet by the U.S. government, and in particular, by the U.S. security state.
Document after document after document, email after email after email, attesting to the fact that the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and multiple other agencies in the United States government have a systemic program in place to influence and multiple other agencies in the United States government have a systemic program in place to influence and dictate what documents, what viewpoints, what people can and cannot be
This is something that was known before the Twitter files even started.
In fact, a month before the Twitter files began, Lee Fong, along with Ken Klippenstein, two reporters at The Intercept whose work I actually value, got a hold of Homeland Security documents that contained their plans for how they intended to control the content of the Internet posted by American citizens.
And months before that, there was a major controversy when Homeland Security attempted to create the office of a disinformation czar, led by Nina Yankovich, a cartoon of a resistance figure.
And she was a bridge too far, even for our political culture.
and people responded with a lot of rage and a lot of anger over the fact that the Homeland Security Department was trying to create a truth ministry, a ministry of truth inside the government to decree what is true and what is false and censored the internet on the basis of those proclamations.
But the Twitter files took what had been some percolating suspicions, some partial reporting, and really spilled the entire story in great detail for all of us to see, which is what happens when you go to one of the most influential technology corporations which is what happens when you go to one of the most influential technology corporations on the planet, twitter.com, and open up the files to American journalists who are then able to
security state was doing and what Twitter executives who were aligned with them ideologically were doing as well in censoring the internet.
Obviously, there were a lot of major stories that that was preceded by, including the banning By Twitter of the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, in collusion with multiple other major social media outlets.
All as well as the decision by Twitter and Facebook to suppress or censor reporting about the Biden family shortly before the election.
So the censorship regime has been visible for all to see for a long time, but the Twitter files, journalistically, gave body and life to it.
It made it concrete and manifest in terms of exactly what was happening and who was responsible.
And amazingly, Actual employees of media corporations who are called journalists by those corporations who bear that title in the Human Resources Department treated these revelations with contempt from the very start.
On the very first night that Tayibi kicked off the reporting, they all banded together in a creepily identical script and announced that the entire reporting was a quote, nothing burger, which was really their way of instructing the public to ignore everything the Twitter files had revealed on that night and would reveal into the future.
It was just a nothing burger.
The fact that all of these security agencies had their hands in the primary tool that we now use to engage in political debate and political discourse, attempting to control what you can and can't hear.
To journalists at media corporations, this was irrelevant, trivial, something that ought to be ignored.
But then, as this reporting evolved, it became almost impossible to ignore it.
And the Republicans in Congress, as part of a House committee designed to investigate the weaponization of the federal government for political ends, called Matt Taibbi, along with Michael Schellenberger, who was one of the reporters who did the reporting and who we interviewed on our show as well, and that elevated the visibility of this reporting.
And Americans got to hear for themselves from the mouths of those journalists exactly what their reporting revealed.
And that's when it became impossible to ignore any longer.
And so the security state and establishment Democrats and the White House went searching for a hack, an apparatchik, To try and aggressively attack and malign the reporting and the journalist who did it.
It was no longer sufficient to ignore it.
And the person they got is the person in media who I would argue is the single most craven individual.
One of the most, one of the emptiest careerists you will ever find in your life.
somebody who will say anything, literally anything, for the smallest career advancement, even if it completely contradicts what he said moments earlier.
And that's MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan, who actually only has a show on Saturday on MSNBC.
Most of the time his program is on this thing called Peacock, which is a streaming service.
Peacock is the name of it.
It's a streaming service similar to the one that CNN tried to launch, CNN Plus, until CNN Plus died after one of you 21 days.
But Peacock is like the little train that could.
It's chugging along, still trying to gather and attract an audience.
So the way they did this was Metti asked Matt Taibbi to come onto his program, didn't really tell him much what it was about other than that he wanted to talk about the Twitter files.
And the staff of MSNBC had prepared two or three tiny trivial mistakes, a confusion and an acronym of one of Matt Taibbi's installments, one other small mistake that they a confusion and an acronym of one of Matt Taibbi's installments, one other small mistake that they sandbagged him with, that they revealed for
And because Matt didn't have the reporting in front of him, he didn't have the documents in front of him, he assumed that Mehdi Hassan was operating in good faith when he told him on the air live that he had confused these acronyms that one of the organizations that Matt had said was linked to the U.S.
government was in fact just a nonprofit organization that had no link And Matt's a friend of mine.
I've known him for a long time.
I think he's one of the nation's greatest journalists.
But if he has a flaw, it's that he sometimes is a little bit naive about the war that is taking place in the United States over the flow of information and the viciousness and lack of ethical limits that people on the side of the U.S.
security state are willing to use in order to destroy their adversaries.
And so he went on METI's show thinking it was going to be a good faith conversation, a good faith interview about the reporting that he was done.
And any reporter, like Matt, who believes they have a story that is important and that people should hear, are willing to go on programs, even ones with no audience, like MSNBC's, in order to talk about it.
So Matt accepted the invitation, believing that that's what would happen.
And when METI claimed that MSNBC staff had caught a mistake Even though we didn't have the documents in front of him, Matt agreed that it was a mistake and then corrected it.
Listen to what this exchange consisted of.
That's an error.
Let me finish the question.
You can come back in.
You also claim the EIP was partnered with the government cybersecurity and infrastructure agency, CISA, to censor Twitter.
But you mix up CISA, CISA, a Homeland Security Agency, with the Center for Internet Security, the CIS, which is a nonprofit.
In fact, you added an A to CIS.
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.
But the other ones aren't.
So Matt said that was an error.
There was a tweet in which he confused the acronym.
We're talking about thousands of tweets between all the journalists.
And so there was a tweet in which the wrong acronym was used.
And all of liberal Twitter, politicians, Media figures like Jon Stewart, hacks in the Congress like AOC, all proclaim that Medi had debunked the entire Twitter files because of these two mistakes that his staff prepared and purported to show.
Somehow, the entire reporting was now debunked.
If you say to any liberal, random liberal, the Twitter files demonstrated this, they will immediately say, no, that was debunked.
That's how easily led they are, how easily manipulated they are.
That if you find two typos, then they will be told that the entire reporting is debunked.
Now, as it turns out, the claims that Mehdi Hassan made in order to try and lead the public to believe that they can forget about the Twitter files because now it's debunked, those claims from Mehdi Hassan were the things that were actually false.
And that was proven by the journalist Li Fang, who published an article describing he's now at Substack.
And he published an article which documented that even these minor errors that Mehdi Hassan purported to demonstrate.
And by the way, before I get to this, I just want to say, when I said that Mehdi Hassan is the most craven person in media, that he's willing to do and say anything, what I mean are things like in 2010, when he was desperate to get a job in media, he wrote to the Daily Mail, the right-wing tabloid in the United Kingdom.
And he wrote a letter saying, I think your newspaper is one of the most important in public life, the way in which you're so committed to morals and politics.
Public behavior and social order is something I find deeply impressive and although I'm generally associated with the left, Mehdi said in a letter, and I'm a Muslim who opposes the war on terror, I would love to come and write for your paper and be the leftist Muslim who attacks the left for you on issues like abortion and family values and teenage pregnancy and
And then two or three years later, when Manny got a job with the Huffington Post, which then was on the left, and he got to go on TV as now a leftist, he went on TV and he would say things like, the Daily Mail is a Nazi rag.
They're fascists, they're Nazis, they're white supremacists.
And the Daily Mail finally had enough of it, and they said, hey, remember when two years ago you wrote us this letter heaping praise on us as this incredibly important Presence in the public life when you were begging us to give you a column so that you could be our house leftist to attack the left.
And there's videos of many saying that homosexuals are going to hell.
He just has a completely radically different persona, whatever his job at the moment requires of him.
There's a lot of examples like that.
We went over the fact that he recently said that if you talk about George Soros' money and the way in which he spends his money to gain influence in public life, it means you're an anti-Semite, even though many himself has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism.
And he himself has spent years talking about the money spent by Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish American billionaire, and claiming the Republican Party are puppets of Sheldon Adelson.
Because he spends his money to turn them into supporters of Israel.
It's just this never-ending conflict and transformation of personality and belief system based on whatever gets him a tiny amount of career advancement.
I can't think of a drearier way to live than that.
So Lee went and dissected this interview and proved that the typos that many claim to have found themselves were inaccurate.
There you see the headline from Lee Substack, and I hope you'll support Lee Substack and subscribe.
He's really one of the most important investigative journalists in the country.
He recently left The Intercept in order to go do real journalism, and there you see the headline from About 10 days ago, MSNBC's Mehdi Hassan gets basic facts wrong on Homeland Security Content Moderation Partnership.
Exclusive Twitter file emails and publicly available documents show Mehdi Hassan's accusation is false.
And we'll just look at Part of what happened, because in that interview, Mehdi not only accused Matt of making mistakes, but of making false statements to Congress, which Mehdi pointed out is a crime.
So essentially, Mehdi Hassan, doing the bidding of the U.S.
security state, of Homeland Security and the CIA to prove that they weren't censoring, accused Matt Taibbi of committing crimes.
And Lee wrote, quote, it's a serious charge and federal crime to make false statements to Congress, one punishable with prison time.
But the record shows that CISA, the government agency, was involved in the very formation of EIP and was one of the most important government partners to the group in its bid to influence content moderation decisions at firms such as Facebook and Twitter.
So Meti was claiming that EIP had no role to play in the government or in any kind of government censorship.
And by claiming that it did, Matt made a major mistake.
And yet Lee is saying here that EIP, the records show, worked with CISA, the government agency, in the formation of EIP, and that they were one of the most important government partners in doing this censorship.
The article went on, quote, EIP's own leaders have said as much, and there is endless documentation from publicly available websites to discovery from litigation and from the Twitter files that all confirm this relationship and CISA's role in assisting EIP.
This history isn't particularly hidden.
EIP, in a publicly available report on its website, notes that the group was formed in consultation with CISA in July of 2020.
The organization very clearly states that CISA is one of its main stakeholders, along with CIS, which was contracted to manage information sharing in consortium with CISA and local election officials called ISAC.
Here's the EIP report and then Lee provides a chart that demonstrates that these organizations that Mehdi claimed were completely unrelated were in fact inextricably linked, which means that even this trivial error that Mehdi Hassan tried to claim Matt Taibbi committed In order to debunk this reporting, as if this reporting would be debunked, even if this error were true, it turns out there was no error at all.
There was one time when Matt confused the acronyms, but the substance of the reporting itself about CISA was absolutely true and absolutely what Matt Taibbi claimed it to be.
Now, you're never going to make any headway with that among liberal journalists or liberal politicians.
They've done their work, which was to convince themselves and the public that there's nothing to the Twitter files.
The CIA, the Homeland Security, FBI are all exonerated forever.
You'll never get these facts into those closed precincts.
But it's nonetheless important to highlight here That Taibbi's reporting was accurate, even in the trivial ways they tried to attack.
And the reason it's so important is because earlier today, a letter surfaced, which was dated April 13th, so last week, written apparently.
And it's from Stacey Plastit, who likes to pretend she's a member of Congress.
She sits on committees in Congress.
She was one of the impeachment managers for Donald Trump's second impeachment.
For a trial, she became very popular on social media among liberals.
She's a black woman who loves melodramatic liberal gestures about Donald Trump and so she attracted a lot of attention.
She represents the Virgin Islands, even though she was born in New York.
She wasn't born in the Virgin Islands.
She didn't grow up in the Virgin Islands.
She went to the boarding school, Choate, which is one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country.
She spent a year abroad in France, where she was educated.
She then went to Georgetown Law School.
And she worked in and out of Washington firms and for members of Congress.
And then she goes to the Virgin Islands, backed by huge amounts of corporate cash.
and gets elected to represent the people of the Virgin Islands who are faced with all kinds of material deprivations.
But she doesn't care at all about the people of the Virgin Islands.
Why would she?
She's never lived there.
She barely has any connection to the island.
So she spends all of her time in things like Trump impeachment and every Russiagate she She was a fanatical Russiagater.
Anything that gets her social media attention, that's what she really wants to be.
And the people of the Virgin Islands continue to suffer with no real representative.
The Virgin Islands, of course, is not a state.
They don't have members of Congress.
But they give them delegates who are supposed to represent their interests.
Even though she can't vote on the House floor, she votes in committee.
But she's not a real member of Congress.
She's a fake member of Congress.
She's a delegate.
And yet, today she wrote a letter to Matt Taibbi, who's a journalist, threatening him with prison based on this MSNBC segment that itself has been debunked.
So let me show you what this letter says because for all the talk about how Donald Trump was this grave threat to a free press, every time he would insult Jim Acosta or Wolf Blitzer or Chuck Todd, They would have op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post and emergency cable segments convened to warn of the impending doom to a free press because Donald Trump insulted Jim Acosta.
He never got close, Donald Trump.
To any sort of threat to press freedom, like what Stacey Plaskin is doing here, other than the prosecution of Julian Assange, which ironically is the real press freedom threat that these journalists who made such melodrama out of Trump's threats to Jim Acosta never mention.
And we'll see they'll never mention this as well.
A member of Congress, or a pseudo-member of Congress, threatening a journalist with prosecution in prison.
Here's what she wrote, quote, on March 9th, Immediately before your appearance, before the subcommittee, you released an additional installment of the so-called Twitter files on your personal Twitter account.
As part of that installment, you allege that the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, worked with cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, to ask social media companies to remove disinformation on their platforms.
You wrote, quote, it's crucial to reiterate EIP was partnered with state entities like CISA and GEC, while seeking elimination of millions of tweets.
In the Twitter files, Twitter execs did not distinguish between organizations using phrases like, according to CISA, escalated via EIP.
Then she writes to him, when you appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on Weaponization, you told Congressman Stewart, Republican of Utah, quote, what we see in the Twitter files is that Twitter executives did not distinguish between DHS or CISA and this group, EIP, For instance, we would see a communication that said from CISA escalated by EIP, so they were essentially identical in the eyes of the company.
So, yes, we have come to the realization that this bright line that we imagine that exists between, say, the FBI or the DHS or the GEC and these private companies is illusory, and that what's more important is this constellation of a kind of quasi-private organizations that do this work.
Now here's what delegate Plaskett says to Tayibi, quote, the above statements now seem to be contradicted by your own admission.
On April 6th, 2023, you appeared on an interview on the Mehdi Hassan Show on MSNBC.
During that interview, Mr. Hassan pointed out that your March 9th tweet added a parenthetical A to the acronym CIS.
changing the meaning of the term from Center for Internet Security, a private organization, to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
This mistake is important because by adding an A, you weren't making a harmless spelling error.
Rather, you were alleging that CISTA, a government entity, was working with the IP to have posts removed from social media.
When presented with this misinformation, you acknowledged that you had made "an error" by intentionally altering the acronym CIS, and you subsequently deleted your erroneous treat.
That is an absolute lie, what she just said there.
I just showed you the video.
Did Matt Taibbi admit that he intentionally altered the acronym?
She says here, quote, you acknowledge that you had made a, quote, error by intentionally altering the acronym CIS.
That is not even remotely what Matt Taibbi said.
He, in good faith, accepted Mehdi Hassan's false claim that he had confused the acronyms throughout the reporting.
And then she takes that and says he acknowledged that he intentionally altered the acronym.
Let's continue with this letter.
Prior to your appearance before the subcommittee on March 9th, you signed the Judiciary Committee's Truth and Testimony form, certifying that you understood that, quote, knowingly providing material false information to this committee, subcommittee, or knowingly concealing material information from this committee, subcommittee, is a crime.
18 U.S.C. Section 1001.
In addition, at the beginning of the March 9th hearing, you swore, quote, under penalty of perjury, that the testimony you were about to give was true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief.
Under the Federal Perjury Statute, 18 U.S.C. Section 1621, providing false information is punishable by up to five years' imprisonment.
For all of these reasons, I am sure you understand the importance of ensuring that your testimony is true and accurate.
I look forward to your prompt response.
Now, if there's anything more despotic than a member of Congress very explicitly threatening a journalist with five years imprisonment and prosecution, Over what she claims is a mistaken acronym based on an MSNBC segment that she uncritically ingested and has no idea was debunked.
I'd like to know what it is.
Tell me anyone what Donald Trump did that even got in the same universe as threatening press freedoms.
Then writing a letter to a journalist threatening them with prison based on this incredibly trivial allegation that you've made that he made a mistake in doing.
And I want to emphasize this because this is the real context here.
When Mehdi Hassan and all of these liberals in the media and these liberal politicians, AOC did it as well, stand up and express anger at the Twitter files and the journalist who reported it.
What they're really doing is running interference for.
They're defending the U.S.
security state.
They're angrily defending the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, and saying, how dare you accuse these agencies, these honorable agencies, of censoring the Internet?
They're being unjustly accused.
This is what Democrats are working to do.
This is why she's threatening a journalist to defend the U.S.
security state.
Now, let's just take a look at what happened on that day at the hearing.
We covered this extensively, but let me just remind you of what Stacey Plaskett and her Democrats on this committee said and did during this hearing, because the context for all of this, and this is why I wanted to cover this story today, It goes way beyond just a letter from a fake member of Congress threatening a journalist of prison, which would be bad enough.
It is about the fact that Democrats passionately believe in the censorship regime that the U.S.
security state has imposed.
They're defenders of it.
And what they're really angry about with Matt Taibbi and these other journalists and Elon Musk for enabling it is that they exposed it.
They exposed it.
And it reminds me a lot, I'm not comparing the stories, but it reminds me a lot of what happened when we exposed in 2013 and 2014 the domestic spying regime that the NSA had constructed spying on millions of Americans.
The people who attacked me, the people who attacked the reporting, were the people who believed in that spying machine, who believed in that spying system, who set it up, who defended it, who wanted Americans indiscriminately spied on, and they were angry at me, and Edward Snowden, and other people with whom I worked, because we exposed that which they supported.
And the same thing has happened whenever I've exposed secrets.
Here in Brazil, when we exposed the corruption on the part of the highest level judges and prosecutors in cheating to politicize the judiciary and punish the politicians that they wanted to render ineligible, much like the Democrats are doing in the United States now with multiple pending prosecutions against Donald Trump.
The people who were angry at us were the people who supported the corruption, who were happy the corruption happened, and therefore angry that it got revealed.
That's always how it works.
Obviously Stacey Plaskett is not threatening Matt Taibbi with prison because he made a mistake in an acronym.
She's threatening him with prison because she's enraged that he exposed something that she wants to continue, which is the censorship regime imposed by the U.S.
government that routinely censors dissidents of establishment orthodoxy and adversaries of the neoliberal order.
That is really what she's angry about.
So let's watch how she behaved On that day, this fake member of Congress, just a few short clips from the time that Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger testified.
...and 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 it's a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us now.
These so-called journalists.
That's how she's referring to Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger after they just broke this huge story when she is the so-called member of Congress.
That's the contempt she heaped on them.
Let's watch another one.
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.
Of all the things that the media These people pose a direct threat to those who oppose them.
And the thing they often harped on the most was that he called them the enemy of the people.
The enemy of the people.
Listen to what she said about 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.
These people pose a direct threat to those who oppose them.
And here's one more.
That's correct?
That's correct, yes.
And then, who gave you access to these emails?
People at Twitter.
Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the emails?
Well, the attribution from 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 from 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, there's 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?
Will the gentlelady yield for a second?
Uh, as long as my time is not used to it.
Are you trying to get journalists to use their sources?
No, I'm not trying to get, no, I'm not.
I am asking, no, well.
Have you seen a liar more brazen than that?
It reminded me of that time we showed you recently when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent 90 seconds saying the Biden administration should ignore court orders in the case of the abortion pill.
And then when a CNN host said, are you saying the government should ignore court orders when they don't like the ruling?
She said, no, of course I'm not saying that.
She sat there for 45 seconds demanding Matt Taibbi reveal his source.
And then when Jim Jordan said, are you insisting journalists reveal their stories?
She said, no, I'm not.
You just watched her do it for 45 straight seconds.
But here's the most important clip I want to show you.
This is a really important one.
It's from Colin Allred, who is the Democrat from Texas, because he was very candid and honest about the real position of the Democratic Party at this hearing.
And this is why this story matters so much.
He explicitly urged Matt Taibbi to try and open his mind and accept the fact that we should be grateful to the security state for censoring the internet, that this is a good thing.
Listen to what he said.
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.
Mr. Congressman, may I ask a question?
And it should be a bipartisan goal.
No, you don't get to ask questions here.
OK.
It should be a bipartisan goal.
Let me just stop there, too, because that's such a bizarre thing to say.
You don't get to ask questions here.
You just sit and listen.
Why invite them there?
This is such an abyss of power.
I can't imagine having a platform where I have somebody in front of me and I hurl accusations at them of every single conceivable kind and then when they go to respond or defend themselves you cut them off because it's the only tiny little power you have and tell them to shut up and listen.
So listen to what he wanted them to listen to.
To ensure that Americans and only Americans determine the outcome of our elections, not fear-mongering.
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, but that ordinary folks and national security 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 I mean, that is amazing.
It really is amazing.
think they're trying to undermine, they may be trying to protect.
You'll bet.
I mean, that is amazing.
It really is amazing.
45 years ago, the Democrats in Congress were meeting the Church Committee, investigating all the nefarious acts undertaken by the U.S.
security state.
Fast forward 45 years later, and Democrats are the ones demanding that people express gratitude to the U.S.
security state.
That they understand that the censorship regime they've imposed is for our own good.
They're protecting our democracy by controlling the source of information.
Now, we have for you here A huge number of articles in which Donald Trump was accused of being a menace to a free press and I went through them all.
Here you see just from I'm not sure where this is from, but the headline there is Donald Trump's attacks on the press are an attack on democracy.
I believe it's from Nation Magazine from August 28, 2018.
The president is trying to construct an alternative reality where he alone tells the truth.
What attacks on the press did Donald Trump launch that were even close to what this fake Congresswoman is doing?
Here from April 2020 from the from IGNIT the headline is Trump administration threatens press freedom the CPGA report finds that's the Committee to Protect Journalists.
So you can go through it over and over.
This is a major theme here from The Independent.
Trump is the biggest threat to press freedom in the US in my lifetime, says Dan Rather.
And if you just look at the article here, the closest thing would be the Nixon years.
However, there are great differences between now and the Nixon time.
This is unprecedented.
Here you have a Yeah, and my staff actually prepared an interesting chart here that shows that after Dan Rather said that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to press freedom, he barely ever has talked about Julian Assange.
In fact, here he says Dan gives his thoughts on Julian Assange and whether news has become more entertainment than news.
So this idea that Donald Trump was a great threat to press freedom because he went around insulting journalists was a major theme of the media for years and yet here we have a Let's call our member of Congress just for the moment to indulge the humorous pretense, the conceit that she likes to use.
Unofficial letterhead writing a letter to a journalist invoking prosecution in five years in prison because he confused an acronym and she has no idea, she really is completely ignorant of the fact Now, one of the most prominent and accomplished investigative journalists in the country, Lee Fang, went and debunked the MSNBC segment.
She did nothing in preparation for this letter other than sit and watch an MSNBC segment, and then mindlessly wrote down what she heard on the TV, and then threatened a journalist with prison.
And you will not hear any Democrat, not a Democratic member of Congress, not a prominent member of the media, condemn this.
And again, the key context here is that the Democratic Party supports the censorship regime.
And that is the context in which this is all taking place.
So let's turn to our second story of the day, which is the fact that digital liberal media, the entire kind of Brooklyn-based Part of the media that is digital in nature, that has overarching loyalty to the Democratic Party, that comes from Brooklyn political culture, that is liberal on the culture war, has subservience to the DNC, and otherwise sounds exactly like every other media outlet.
They all copy one another, they all think exactly alike, they all publish the same things over and over and over.
They're in free fall, in utter collapse.
Multiple episodes today demonstrate that, all taking place on the same day.
So here's the first one from CNN, and there you see the headline.
It's very simple.
BuzzFeed News will shut down.
BuzzFeed is the media outlet that first published the Steele dossier, put it into the public bloodstream, even when they said they have no idea whether the claims in it are actually true, and here's the article on how Much struggles this company faces they also own the Huffington Post as well.
Quote, BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning digital news website that took the internet by storm roughly a decade ago and inspired jealousy from legacy media organizations, will shudder.
BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti announced Thursday the move was part of broader layoffs across BuzzFeed, Peretti said in a memo to staffers, with the company moving to slash 15 percent of its workforce or 180 employees.
Quote, While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we've determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization, Peretti told staffers.
BuzzFeed is not the only news organization facing struggles.
Nearly every major news, media, and technology company has announced layoffs in recent months.
Business Insider on Thursday, for instance, said it will lay off approximately 10% of its staff, telling employees in a memo that, quote, the economic headwinds that have hurt many of our clients and partners are also affecting us.
Now, for those of you who don't know, business insider, insider, and I don't blame you if you don't.
You should be happy if you don't.
It's just, it's one of these outlets that just produces the same exact thing that you find in every single one of these liberal outlets.
Vulture, and Vice, and Gizmodo, and Buzzfeed, and the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast, and they just go on, and on, and on, and they don't understand why They do nothing.
Why?
They fail because when every day you pick up these articles in these websites, and they're completely redundant of one another.
They don't allow dissent of any kind from liberal orthodoxy, with very few exceptions.
I want to be clear, there are some good journalists at each of these.
When you gather enough people, you're going to have exceptions.
But by and large, this entire industry is as unjournalistic as it gets.
It has a very specific ideology that's the same hegemonic ideology of the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and MSNBC.
So there's no reason for them to exist any longer.
And they are failing for exactly that reason.
So just today, you have BuzzFeed closing, Insider Laying off 10% of their staff, and this is part of a very long The process of failures from this digital media culture.
Here on April 20th, you see Insider Inc., formerly known as Business Insider, announced it would begin cutting an estimated 10% of its staff in an effort to, quote, keep our company healthy and competitive, an Insider spokesman told Forbes.
March 30th, Disney's broadcast news division announced it was laying off 50 people at ABC News, following an earlier announcement by CEO Bob Iger, indicating the company would continue an ongoing round of layoffs.
March 23rd, NPR canceled four podcasts, Invisibilia, Louder Than a Riot, Rough Translation, and Everyone and Their Mom, and began laying off 100 employees as part of a push to reduce a reported budget deficit of $30 million.
March 21st, NPR affiliate New England Public Radio, Public Media, announced it will lay off 17 employees, 20% of its staff, by March 31st after facing, quote, serious financial headwinds during the last three years, New England Public Media Management tells Boston Public Radio.
January 21st.
Vox Media, which owns The Verge, SB Nation, and New York Magazine, laid off 133 people.
7% of the media conglomerate's staff, in anticipation of a declining economy, Chief Executive Jim Bancroft reportedly tells staff.
This is something that has been going on and on and on.
And part of it is a structural economic problem in digital media.
They don't have really any way to monetize their product.
But a big part of it is the fact that they just don't provide anything people want to read.
If all you want to read is agitprop about how the Republican Party are fascists and are installing a white supremacist, white nationalist dictatorship, and how Donald Trump is in bed with Vladimir Putin, you could just read the New York Times and the Washington Post and you get all of that you need.
You don't need these digital outlets for anything.
They don't add anything.
They are entirely redundant, and that's a big part of why they're all failing.
But another big reason that they're failing It's because if we can get the Washington Post article up on On Donald Trump.
When Donald Trump left office, he essentially said that these media outlets were going to fail without him.
That the only reason why any of these outlets got saved from doom that they were facing in 2014 and 2015 was because he attracted so much attention and he floated the entire industry.
And here you see the Washington Post, and you know there's pain in them to admit it.
The headline was, Trump predicted news ratings would quote, tank if I'm not there.
He wasn't wrong.
And let's look at what this article said.
All of Donald Trump's prophecies and predictions, that Mexico would pay for a border wall, that the coronavirus would spontaneously disappear, that he would be easily re-elected, at least one wasn't entirely wrong.
This is the Washington Post in their snide commentary.
Quote, newspaper, television, all forms of media will tank if I'm not there, he argued in 2017, because without me their ratings are going down the tubes.
Barely two months into the post-Trump era, news outlets are indeed losing much of the audience and readership they gained during his chaotic presidency.
In other words, journalism's Trump bump may be giving way to a slump.
After a record-setting January, traffic to the nation's most popular mainstream news sites, including the Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm Comscore.
The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year, when the pandemic became a major international news story.
The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26% from January to February, and 7% from a year ago.
The New York Times lost 17% compared with January, and 16% over last February.
Now that Joe Biden is in the White House and Trump has essentially disappeared from the news cycle, many of those viewers are drifting away.
The most deeply affected network is CNN.
After surpassing rivals Fox News and MSNBC in January during the January 6th riot, the network has lost 45% of its primetime audience in the past five weeks, according to Nielsen's media research.
MSNBC's audience has dropped 26%.
In the same period, Fox News, the most Trump-friendly of the three networks in its primetime opinion shows, has essentially regained its leading position by standing still.
Its ratings have fallen just 6% Since the first weeks of the year.
And, of course, the most humiliating failure was when CNN attempted to launch a new streaming platform called CNN Plus, recycling all the same personalities that the public already made clear they're not interested in, don't want to watch, and don't trust.
And it was killed after 21 days.
They had hired Chris Wallace away from Fox.
They had a whole lineup they prepared, they unveiled, they were all excited about, and it died after 21 days.
So if you talk to these people in these media outlets, they will say none of this is their fault.
That these are structural problems.
But the reality is, Fox News is doing as well as it ever has.
And independent media is thriving and growing.
Right here, for example, on Rumble, the audience size in general of Rumble, of this show, has exceeded all expectations.
If you give people things that they're interested in, if you establish a relationship of trust with your audience and with your readership, they will watch.
They will consume the content.
They will support it.
These outlets are dying because they deserve to.
They offer nothing of value.
The irony is that even these outlets realize that.
A couple of months ago, both BuzzFeed and Insider said that they would try and fire journalists and replace them with chat GPT, which they could do because none of these people have original ideas, they have no original voice, they simply spout the orthodoxy they're supposed to spout, and there's tens of thousands of them, and nobody's interested, and that's why they're dying.
We'll certainly cover this more as it evolves.
It's certainly, in a way, a positive story because, as I said, although I don't celebrate when anyone loses their job, I genuinely don't, and there's some good reporting that they've done, etc., etc., these entities on the whole are plagues On our body politic.
They disseminate disinformation constantly.
They agitate for censorship.
They're activist entities that have an agenda that is contrary to everything that our country is supposed to be.
And the quicker they fail, the quicker they collapse, the better.
So just quickly before we conclude the show, I just want to make an observation about the program we did last night, the story that we covered, which was about the Biden Justice Department's indictment of four American citizens who were accused frivolously of being Kremlin agents.
And what I pointed out was that the Justice Department was counting on the fact that because the four people they chose to prosecute are radicals, extremists, black radical leftists, Republicans, many of them, would be unlikely to care.
And Democrats, in particular, will get nowhere near these people.
These are not the kinds of nice liberal leftists who support the Democratic Party.
These are real radicals who hate Joe Biden, who hate the Biden administration, who oppose the U.S.
security state and the war machine.
We had on Nick Cruz last night at the Revolutionary Blackout network that comes from that political tradition, and you heard him talking about that.
And yet, as it turns out, the only people standing up and denouncing this are conservatives.
I was on Glenn Beck's program this morning, and he urged his listeners, before I really even said much, to rise up in denunciation of this prosecution and in defense of these American citizens who are indicted by telling his audience that if you allow this precedent to take hold, it is a very dangerous power to give the government that can easily be weaponized against them.
And in just a few minutes, I'll be on Tucker Carlson's show.
At the very top of the show, I believe he's leading a show, at least in part, discussing this case and the attempt to criminalize dissent.
And he, too, is somebody who wants to air the concerns about how dangerous this lawsuit is.
Think about that, the irony of that.
The Biden administration has indicted four black radical leftists For the crime of allegedly stating their views that they've always believed, but doing so because they got funding from the Kremlin.
And the only people who are willing to stand up in their defense, besides very independent leftists in the media, like Nick Cruz, who I had on my show last night, are conservatives who really understand these security state agencies are real menaces.
That is one of the major changes In our politics and in order to go and get opposition to the war in Ukraine, in order to go and get serious denunciations of what the U.S.
security state is doing and interfering in our politics, and in order to get real resistance to the fact that the U.S.
government is launching and has launched a domestic war on terror and is attempting to criminalize dissent, these are the precincts, the media precincts, the media platforms one now has to go.
So, as I said, I will be on Tucker in just a few minutes.
That will conclude our show for this evening.
As a result of that appearance, we will do Locals, our interactive aftershow, on our Locals platform tonight, but we'll probably be about 20, 30 minutes late.
We'll probably start around 8.30 p.m.
Eastern, as soon as I'm done with Tucker, so watch for that.
If you want to get access to that show, just join our Locals community.
For those of you who've been watching, we are appreciative as always.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
