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Dec. 15, 2023 - On Brand

02:31:50

OB #33 - Matt Taibbi

We are BACK on our BS and predictably Russell is back on his, supported by lies and spin from none other than Matt Taibbi, otherwise known as the world's most boring speaker. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a MAGNET! - lookattheshinyshinygogetem

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's Show with my co-host Lauren B. Hey, that's me, Lauren B. And I don't know what we are in for today, but I know that it's not gonna be good.
	It's not gonna be good, it is in fact gonna be bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	Oh no, I didn't think of anything, oh my god.
	I can go first if you want.
	Yes please!
	Okay, no worries.
	So, it's been a minute since we've done this, which is probably why you've forgotten.
	And it's been my birthday, and that was the thing.
	I had a bit of a mixed bag of a birthday, but we'll save that for another time.
	But around that time, I also went to see Macbeth.
	And I went to see Macbeth with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma as the leads.
	And oh my god, it was just...
	Unbelievable.
	The performances, the production, every single thing about it was completely flawless.
	Went to see it in like a, it was kind of a warehouse that they'd set up in and kind of kitted out as like a theater and it was such a Such a unique kind of thing.
	It was only 153 seats in the place as well, so pretty small.
	Went in there and they've got kind of a bar waiting area as you wait for the theatre doors to open.
	As soon as I walked in, I was like, the vibes in here are pretty weird.
	This is strange.
	Something feels off.
	Maybe part of it was they were piping in some war kind of sounds because it was kind of a... Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, go set the stage!
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah.
	And I was like, okay, fine, whatever.
	Went to get a drink and some water and everything else.
	And then an air raid siren played to signify that the theatre doors were opening.
	I was like, okay, interesting.
	And then As that happened, the entire room fell silent, could have heard a pin drop, and just started shuffling towards the doors in silence.
	I was like, oh, this is weird.
	Tight.
	This is really, really strange.
	Just everyone completely quiet.
	And then as you walk in, there's like, um, Just past the main doors, there's like a burnt out car there.
	Some of the actors are wandering around in army fatigues and everything, you know, in character, staring at you while, you know, as you walk past the stage, you're like, oh Jesus, this is, this is a lot.
	That's fucking cool though!
	It was incredible.
	And that's just as you enter the theatre, let alone the actual thing itself was just sublime from start to finish.
	If anyone out there can see it, I know they're going to London in like February-March time, and then I think they're in Washington DC like, I don't know, April I think?
	I'm not sure.
	But if you can see it, fucking go see it.
	They might make it to Chicago!
	I mean, Chicago's like at a big theater, like... I mean, I guess it depends on how the run goes, right?
	Yeah, I don't know whether they're adding any more dates or not.
	These ones have been pretty kind of dialed in.
	This was in Liverpool, of all places.
	And yeah, holy shit.
	Yeah, Ray Fiennes as Macbeth.
	Just terrific job.
	So good.
	Indira Varma was incredible as Lady Macbeth.
	Had a chap called Stefan Rodri as Banquo.
	And, you know, nice hearty Welshman.
	And good lord, just outrageous from start to finish.
	I was so very happy.
	So very, very happy.
	So what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	Oh, I did.
	I do have one.
	I think.
	Hey, okay.
	What do we got?
	And it's exceptionally stupid.
	So we went highbrow.
	Love it.
	With yours.
	Okay.
	And we're going to go real lowbrow.
	And honestly, it's been, it's kind of been a lifesaver for a few weeks now because like, this is the busiest time of year.
	I know that, you know, when you make stuff and you sell them, Christmas time is just, is not good.
	Yeah.
	And I mean like, I, you know, I, I grew up in like a, you know, my, In a retail environment.
	So I knew this genetically.
	I've watched this as my mother did and her mother before hers make our Decembers fucking really stressful and miserable.
	And I'll tell you what's been working it out.
	And and Mike, you know, like it's kind of there's just a lot of stressors happening.
	And so we've been rewatching the Jersey Shore.
	Oh, okay.
	It's such a gift.
	Those human beings, they really... And listeners, if you're judging me, go listen to the pop history episode that they did on page seven, the podcast, about Jersey Shore.
	Or there's a documentary too, which is kind of crazy.
	Or just try watching it.
	I can't think of any Reality show that struck the goal that they did with Jersey Shore every single person like all the people except for Angelina she's she gives me anxiety even when I try to like her.
	But all everybody else in the cast is just so like charming and relatable and like human and nobody's like I mean like funny and even if they're not like jokes jokes jokes funny they're like Silly.
	Like, they don't take themselves too serious.
	Like, they're self-aware, and they're, like, in a way that is... It's so refreshing.
	It's so refreshing, and, like, yeah, they're just totally, like... I didn't expect this.
	I know.
	It's weird.
	Well, but, like... This is your defending Evanescence.
	This is what this is.
	Oh, no, that's not true.
	No.
	Well, I think you'll be surprised, honestly.
	Maybe.
	Maybe my buddy Matt was really into Jersey Shore.
	Well, they've revisited it.
	And so actually I have a friend of mine that hooked me up, so hopefully we'll be able to watch the new season.
	We're watching the original seasons, but now they have a whole new series of seasons because people fucking like it.
	I mean, I've got to admit, you know, in the kind of the interim period between them going off the air and now coming back on it, crazy shit has happened.
	So, you know, you do kind of want to see what's happened to them, don't you?
	It's a little bit like drilling into the core of the ice of America and seeing kind of how...
	We are?
	You know?
	As a reflection of society, that's an interesting way to measure it, but I like it.
	Yeah, well, and, you know, if you've ever been, like, a drinker or a partier in any way, there is something to be said for, I mean, anybody out there, I think that, you know, there's definitely, like, there's something to be said for, like, doing, you know, like, being a dickhead, but, like, When everybody's kind of in it together there is a certain kind of forgiveness of being a dipshit, like a forgiveness of like your pants falling down at the bar or something you know like or falling on your face and you know like that kind of like
	You're stupid and you're taking care of each other.
	There's a lot of humble pie that you have to accept.
	There's a lot of humility, I think, if you take it the right way.
	I kind of feel like these people, they've got kids and some of them have had very public legal battles or divorces and stuff.
	The situation went to prison for tax evasion, didn't it?
	Yeah, and they found out on the show.
	All the other cast members were in a bar by the courthouse and found out from the TV coverage.
	It's all in that season.
	That's funny, it's funny.
	Holy shit.
	The camera crew follows him up to the Crescent- I mean, sure, they just are probably filming whatever at the Crescent facility, but the story is all there, and it's- That's hilarious.
	I mean, I know that now I'm being an asshole, but it's kind of fucked up that they made- it's one of those financial crimes that normally they wouldn't Prosecute so voraciously, but they wanted to, like, vociferously, I think is a better word, but they wanted to make an example of him.
	Because he also, like, went to rehab, he had, like, a pill problem that, like, they couldn't say on the show, but it's, like, obvious in retrospect.
	It's so human, and they really do bond?
	And there is something to be said, like, even in this, like, meathead, you know, like, guido, you know, guerrilla way, they have this way of talking about their feelings and, like, you can tell that they've all, not they all, I think at this point you can tell they've all been to therapy, but even, like, Vinny had been to therapy and so he brought, like, brought therapy, like, tools.
	After a couple years like into the house and it's just like there is a way that like they they handle you know like hurting each other's feelings like that's it's so I don't know, genuine and like the way they show each other kindness is like, you know, it could be very macho and very specific, but still like they, they all have very sensitive moments.
	I don't know.
	It's, it's, it's like really, it's, it's, and it, I mean, it's also a comfort watch and like, I mean, I still get, my mic still gives me mic situation updates, weekly every other week.
	'Cause he follows them on Instagram and like, - Great.
	It's, they're just like really charming.
	And it's a comfort, it's like a comfort watch thing that's just like, you can just unplug your fucking brain.
	None of this is what I expected, but I'm glad you're enjoying it.
	I'll clearly have to revisit.
	It's literally a vital emotional crutch that has gotten me through the past couple of weeks of extremely high-pressure stress work.
	It's pretty fascinating.
	That's fuckin' weird, I know.
	Yeah, it's a little strange, but you know, I'm not one to judge.
	You know, we've spoken about this before.
	I've delved into plenty of terrible reality television, the likes of Below Deck and all of that good stuff.
	I think everybody has on some level, and if not, you're just no fun.
	Like, come on.
	But I don't know, it's crazy, but Jersey Shore specifically is like, they struck And they talk about Sally Ann Salsano.
	She's the producer.
	She recruited all of them, basically.
	She's like, there's no way that you could recreate this.
	And they can't.
	That's why they brought them back.
	They tried, and they can't.
	This combination of people is so unique.
	It's lightning in a bottle.
	Yeah, and why?
	It's so weird.
	Why, indeed.
	Weird is usually the reason, but you can't force.
	It's not the kind of weird you can force.
	Yeah, totally.
	So, we have a show to deal with.
	Oh, but before I do that, quick apology for this being a day late, it's because I am sick as a dog!
	So, in case you couldn't hear.
	Y'all didn't hear El yesterday.
	Was it yesterday?
	Yeah, it was yesterday.
	It was just yesterday.
	Oh my!
	On death's door!
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm doing my best, I'm hopped up on vitamins and steam and tea and all that good stuff, so hopefully it'll see us through, and I didn't want to let you all down.
	But yeah, we do have a show to deal with, and first we should thank some of our new Patrons!
	So, I'm here for the Knowledge Fight, you are now an Awakening Wander.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wander.
	Thank you!
	Thank you!
	Let's awaken them wonders!
	That's great, that's great.
	Love those boys.
	Mrs. Gigi Giri, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you, Gigi.
	Thank you, Gigi!
	It could be Gigi, but I think it's Gigi.
	Either way, terrific name.
	This one I'm gonna fuck up.
	Guawa, I think it is?
	G-U-A-U-A.
	I'm gonna say Guawa.
	You are now an Awakening Wanda.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wanda.
	I'm gonna sit out on this one!
	But alright!
	Thank you, either way!
	If I did fuck it up, let me know!
	If you just misspelled Guawa, hilarious.
	That would actually be really funny.
	Guava Wawa?
	Ethan Corey, you are now an Awakening Wanda.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wanda.
	Thank you, Ethan.
	Thanks, Ethan!
	And I'm gonna fuck up this one as well.
	Alexander S. Mrugala, you are now an Awakening Wanda.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wanda.
	Thank you, Alexander.
	Thank you so much, Alexander.
	I can do that bit.
	I can do that bit.
	Yeah, I'm gonna stick there.
	I'm gonna stay in safe waters.
	Yeah.
	Thanks, Alexander.
	That's fair.
	That's fair.
	Hell yeah, that's awesome.
	And ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between and beyond, we have a new member of the Invisible Hand.
	So, Sasha, you are now a member of the Invisible Hand.
	Let me tell you that we love you.
	There is a sort of an invisible hand guiding these events.
	You are fundamentally beautiful.
	Not others, you.
	I believe you are fundamentally beautiful.
	I'm right wing.
	Now get me some shit fuck ice cream, you pig dick!
	You big sexy despot baby.
	I'm right wing.
	I only suggest how to think and how to vote.
	Another big subject over here with us right-wing fascists.
	How do you feel about past you at this point?
	I don't even recognise that idiot anymore.
	I'm right-wing!
	Oh God!
	I just had a poo and a bit of my bum fell out!
	God!
	It's propaganda.
	Did you guess it?
	Did you guess it?
	I'm right-wing!
	Yay!
	Thank you, Sasha.
	Thank you so much, Sasha.
	Oh, dear, dear.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	And just for letting me play that drop is reason enough.
	I've missed doing that.
	I do also want to say that we have hit a milestone, Lauren.
	We have surpassed our next Patreon stretch goal, which means in the near future, we're going to be tackling Russell's comedy special Brandemic with at least one comedian guest.
	And I could not be more excited.
	I could.
	Yes.
	I mean, I know that that's, listen, this is the name of the game.
	Oh God, okay.
	It's gonna be a whole lot dumber than his regular show, let's be honest.
	That's true.
	Yeah, and I'm not 100% who we're gonna get in, but I have some ideas and it's gonna be good.
	That much I can guarantee.
	But thank you so much, Patrons, one and all.
	It's you that makes all this fun stuff possible, so thank you.
	Yeah, kind of wild.
	Appreciate it so much.
	Pretty nuts.
	So if anyone wants to support us and what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It's this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free, and as a patron you will also get a shoutout on the show and access to our patron-only show Offbrand, where we talk about pretty much anything but Russell Brand.
	And this week we've put up a good couple of hours of us talking about our own professional creative backgrounds and what inspires us creatively.
	Um, and it was a super interesting chat and we got to show off some of our own work, which is cool.
	Um, so yeah, go check that out.
	Uh, and please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you're listening to Spotify app, the video should come up there too.
	And the other off-brand episodes.
	So if you like the history thing that I did, there's more and there will be more coming hopefully.
	Christmas time has made it a little difficult to follow up, but I have More to dig into from the first one too.
	So more tulip mania, not just Dutch.
	So yeah, if you want to find more of that stuff, first of all, let us know.
	And if you want to hear of anything, definitely let us know.
	And yeah, it's a fun little jog.
	So there's like bonus content.
	Oh no!
	Is that where the screw came from?
	The listeners, I had a random screw appear on my desk.
	I was like, where the fuck did this come from?
	I'm concerned.
	No, that was just, that was, that was a, in fairness, poorly positioned and very cheap and old guitar, just maneuvering itself elsewhere.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	It didn't move far.
	It just sounds dramatic.
	Okay.
	Woo!
	That was a lot.
	Oh, that's what I was going to say.
	Magnets, everyone.
	Get a magnet.
	The link is in the description.
	Cool-ass magnets that Lauren makes with the paws.
	That's some cool-ass magnet with gold on it.
	Real gold.
	Real gold.
	We don't just sell you the promise of gold, we sell you real gold on this podcast.
	Thank you so much.
	Literal gold.
	Yep.
	So to front load this episode just a little bit, the last couple of weeks has been busy in terms of the right-wing grift of us, with Alex Jones being allowed to return to Twitter slash X, and Tucker setting up what he and others are describing as a network.
	There's been a whole big thing about it, right?
	Russell describing it as another nail in the coffin of the legacy media, blah blah blah blah blah.
	Oh, Tucker Carlson setting up a network, it's a whole big thing.
	But in reality, it's almost identical to Russell's Locals channel, just a little bit more expensive.
	There's no network element to it, it's give me money and I'll give you some behind the scenes shit and maybe some extra content.
	That's all it is.
	That's all it is.
	Oh, the Tucker Carlson network or whatever the fuck he's called it, it's like, no, this is just This is just you.
	This is just you behind the scenes.
	That's all it is.
	It's fine.
	But, you know, call it what it is.
	Don't pretend that you're setting up, like, a news network or something.
	Call it TCTV!
	Duh!
	Right!
	Great!
	Perfect!
	There you go.
	Already punched it up for you, Tucker.
	TuckerVision!
	Yeah!
	Yeah!
	Yeah, yeah.
	He's not going to do any of that fun shit.
	Oh, I hate it.
	I hate how lame they are.
	No, it's true.
	They suck.
	They're so bad at their jobs.
	And as for Alex Jones, well, he's pushing damn hard to return to relevancy and By all accounts, it looks like he's succeeding for the moment.
	I know some people pooh-poohed the idea of Jones coming back to social media, but given the broader response to him from both users and the media, I am concerned.
	He's setting up a new show exclusive to X and had a chat with the likes of Musk, Andrew Tate and Vivek Ramaswamy which basically amounted to what I call the most aggrieved Olympics.
	A pissing contest of who is the biggest victim of the bunch while they also rake in millions of dollars apiece.
	A central theme of this rogue's gallery of shitheads is censorship and how they're all so dangerous that the world, or the globalists, or the MSM, or insert probably Jewish boogeyman here, just wants to take them down!
	And that leads us to our conversation with Russell today.
	See, I'm not going to be covering his coverage of all the goings-on, because it's painfully obvious what his response is and would be.
	This is a victory for free speech, diverse voices, Alex Jones is a shaman, legacy media hate it, so I love it!
	Okay, okay, buddy.
	I'd rather not hear the sycophantic stuff.
	No, no, it's so very much tongue in various places of other people.
	We don't have to debunk, we don't have to, y'all know that.
	There's no meat on the bones.
	This just feels gross.
	And also there's a lot of him kind of talking about like, oh yeah, Vivek and RFK Jr.
	Am I in that list?
	I don't know.
	And then his audience goes, oh yes, you're the top of the list, Russell.
	There's a lot of that going on.
	I think he was a little bit upset he wasn't invited to the conversation, to be honest.
	I thought about that too.
	I think there's a little bit of him that's like, aww.
	Nobody even mentioned me?
	I didn't even get to go to the party.
	Sorry, Russ.
	You can stay in your little woodshed.
	But yeah, instead we're going to take a look at an interview that Russell did a couple of weeks back with someone who I consider to be a veritable fountain of censorship industrial complex bullshit.
	As ever, let's hear Russell introduce the guest.
	Hello there you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Bradd.
	It's a very special episode.
	You've probably come here to especially see it.
	It's Matt Taibbi talking about new revelations from the Twitter files or X-Files as it now has to be called.
	Can anyone provide that?
	That's Twilight Zone.
	That wasn't the right thing.
	See if you can find that sound effect for God's sake.
	It's a brilliant conversation.
	You can follow Matt Taibbi on Substack or at Racket News.
	Both of those links are in the description.
	You can hear us talking about the UK files, which shows how there's all sorts of spying, Discrediting and dissenting going on, how there's a formula emerging for setting up these things called NGOs, non-government organizations, that are essentially sock puppets for power that legitimize it.
	We talk about Elon Musk and his latest case, and we talk about the Election Integrity Partnership, and with a name like that, you know they're stealing elections.
	We're coming in hot today, huh?
	Wait, did someone name... I mean, the thing is the Election Integrity Network sounds like a Kraken moment.
	It sounds like a Sidney Powell type affair.
	And so maybe he just didn't do his... Do they mean it?
	Are they sincere?
	Because if they're not, or they're like, what, the cyber ninjas or something from like in Arizona?
	It'd be funny if he accidentally was shady to someone that's like... No, no, no.
	It is a sincere thing.
	Okay.
	But yeah, just right off the bat, just, oh, well, you know, they're stealing the elections.
	That's happening.
	So it's, oh, my God.
	Okay.
	Are we already prepping for the Trump loss?
	Is this what we're doing?
	Well, they've been doing it for...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Many years at this point.
	It's so embarrassing and weird.
	And extremely dangerous.
	Yes, exactly, exactly.
	Yeah, election stealing right off the bat.
	Now, we're going to be looking at most of what he just said and whether there's any validity to it.
	Place your bets, folks, but the odds are weighted heavily in one direction.
	But it's all coming from Matt Taibbi, right?
	He's the source of all this bullshit.
	Now, this is a name I know that you're familiar with, Lauren.
	What are your thoughts on Matt Taibbi these days?
	How the mighty hath fallen!
	That was a person who I knew, you know, growing up and, you know, when I was younger.
	I think that, I don't know if he worked exclusively with Rolling Stone, but I know that I read a lot of really good reporting for Matt Taibbi.
	And I never got around to reading Grifftopia and now I don't want to because I think it just made me sad.
	Yeah, yeah, me too.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He was with Rolling Stone for a good while.
	So for anyone who maybe knows the name and doesn't know who the fuck Matt Taibbi actually is, because he's definitely one of those people who has that name recognition, but you know, these days that's kind of about it.
	That's a super unique last name.
	It's really, it sticks in your head.
	Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Branding wise.
	He's a journalist, and these days I'm going to use the word loosely, though that wasn't always the case.
	So, Tayibi began his career as a freelance reporter in the former Soviet Union, later working as a sports journalist for the Moscow Times.
	In 1997, he co-edited the tabloid newspaper The Exile and founded The Beast in Buffalo, New York in 2002.
	He then worked as a columnist for the New York Press before writing for Rolling Stone in 2004, and that's where he started to gain notoriety for his bold style.
	For example, he described Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid in a 2009 article.
	That should give you an idea.
	His work often drew comparisons to the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
	He was once celebrated by liberals for his reporting on the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and his critiques of financial and governmental powers.
	He's done some good shit in the past, but around 2017 his positions began to shift.
	Curiously, this happened immediately after there was significant backlash towards Tayibi for a memoir he wrote about his time in Russia called The Exile, which contains startling accounts of misogyny, harassment, and, in the case of his co-author Ames, threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend if she didn't get an abortion.
	I'm going to read a passage that involves Ames and Taibbi's first business manager, an American woman named Kara.
	Quote, We'd never given her any respect or credit.
	We were glory hogs and obnoxious jerks.
	Worst of all was our sexism.
	Our sexism and sexual harassment of the Russian female staff, as well as the sexism in our newspaper, was too much for her.
	Watching us harass the young female staff had to be the most painful part, because we'd never in a million years have thought of harassing her.
	You know I'm not PC, but there's a limit.
	You go too far.
	You're always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blowjobs.
	It's not funny.
	They don't think it's funny, Kara complained.
	But it is funny, Matt said.
	We have been pretty rough on our girls.
	We'd ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us.
	We'd tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs they'd have to perform unprotected anal sex with us.
	Ha!
	Nearly every day we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex.
	That was a fixation of ours.
	Can I fuck you in the ass?
	Huh?
	I mean without a rubber?
	Is that okay?
	It was all part of the fun.
	Fun that Kara was no part of.
	Unquote.
	So this was initially published in 2000 and resurfaced in 2017 in the wake of the Me Too movement where we decided as a society to try and start holding at least some men accountable for the things that they say and do.
	Taibi came out on Facebook not long after to say, oh the whole book was satire and overblown and it was supposed to be funny.
	Critics then pointed out that the book has in it a statement clarifying that it is, in fact, non-fiction.
	Yeah, and then the publishers of The Exiles said, well, it's both.
	It's both.
	There we go.
	It's both.
	An official category doesn't exist for something that is both fiction and non-fiction, so we had to pick one, so we went with non-fiction.
	No it's one or the other.
	That's the situation.
	Also like come at it from like yeah I was awful and I want to be bad like show the world you are no longer that person and then the world gets to decide you don't get to control how anyone feels.
	After you just try hard to come back from that and then the rest of us get to choose whether or not we've accepted it.
	Accepting what you are doing to improve.
	That's how that's supposed to work.
	Yeah, he made a different choice.
	Yeah, sounds like it.
	So what happened next was Taibbi began railing against council culture and liberal media bias.
	He got involved in the Twitter files alongside the likes of Michael Schellenberger and Barry Weiss.
	He went on to suggest that the Russia-Trump collusion allegations were overblown, and he attended a congressional hearing on the weaponization of the federal government, as he put it.
	And in more recent years, he's just been parroting alt-right talking points and conspiracy theories as an independent journalist on Substack.
	I've been pretty clear on my opinion of substack journalists and their lack of accountability and Matt Taibbi is no exception when it comes to editorial standards.
	He will frequently cite sources on a trust me basis and Matt, buddy, I don't.
	So that's where we land with Matt Taibbi.
	Pretty much.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you know, this isn't the first time that Taivi's been on Russell's show.
	He's been on a couple of times before.
	Most of it's just been really fucking dull.
	But I was like, you know what?
	I'm gonna have to deal with this guy at some point.
	Let's take a look.
	Oh, and guys, listen, everybody, if he says something that's upset you, it was obviously a joke and you should lighten up and not take it so seriously.
	Exactly.
	But can he fuck you in the ass without a rubber?
	Would that be okay?
	I don't want to hear about other people's workplaces sounding like mine.
	That's what I have to deal with.
	It's such a fucking bummer, dude.
	Oh my god.
	At least I got to yell back sometimes.
	That's true, that's true.
	And got to prank them occasionally.
	Which also, prank wars, great in Jersey Shore.
	I'm gonna go back to my happy place, thank you.
	That's, I don't blame you, because yeah, he's been on before and I had an idea and then I start looking into the guy proper and I'm like, oh, why is it always worse?
	Why is it always so much worse?
	Why is it always so much worse and constant and feels like you can't turn over a rock without finding a Jimmy Savile under it?
	Seriously!
	Okay.
	Yeah, there is a degree of like, am I allowed to like things?
	Or is just anyone I like gonna turn out to be, you know, some kind of... What's going on with your phone?
	I'm so sorry.
	My phone just thought I said Siri when I said seriously.
	Alright.
	That's hilarious.
	I'm leaving that in.
	I'm sorry.
	Oh my.
	Invasive technology.
	Well, I hate you too.
	Okay, great.
	What an asshole.
	It's never done that before.
	Ever.
	It doesn't respond when I do the thing, when I say the S word.
	Yeah, yeah.
	When you say it, yeah.
	Cool.
	Well, fuck you, Siri.
	I mean, my phone was like my dog whenever I'm like, you're upset, but I don't know what to do.
	Can I help?
	I don't know.
	No!
	Maybe.
	I'm upset because, yeah, am I allowed to like anyone these days?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Anyone I like, I'm like, ugh, yeah, but in 10 years are you going to turn out to have, you know, I don't know, assaulted someone.
	I don't think it takes 10 years anymore.
	No, well, no.
	It usually takes less time for it to come out.
	Six to eight months, I think.
	You just don't know.
	You just don't know.
	Jail.
	Go to jail.
	Yeah.
	So, anyway, that's my introduction of Matt Taibbi.
	Let's hear Russell's introduction of him.
	Time for us to have a conversation with a genuine, legitimate, fantastic journalist, a man with integrity, authenticity, a man whose spirit will inspire you and help you to recognize that no matter how disempowered you feel, no matter how far from truth you may feel, no matter how hard it may be to maintain optimism, there is always hope because there are men like my next guest out there fighting for freedom by acknowledging the complexity of truth.
	Please welcome to the show, Matt Taibbi.
	Matt, thanks for joining us, mate.
	Thanks for having me back, Russell.
	I appreciate it.
	So what is the significance of the UK files, Matt?
	How are we going to make an American media audience concerned with the UK files?
	What's the function of them and why are they globally significant?
	Well, we've only released a piece of them so far.
	Actually, some of these documents came out some time ago in A couple of Al Jazeera pieces, but for the most part, there's an enormous quantity of Labor Party internal email communications that a whistleblower got hold of, and now an investigative journalist named Paul Holden has, and he's been writing for us.
	These documents are really important because of an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
	Which has become one of the most influential, quote-unquote, anti-disinformation organizations in the world.
	They have been tremendously successful in getting people taken off the internet by accusing them of hate speech, disinformation, and other offenses.
	And they've always claimed to be independent.
	These documents show that they were actually a Labor Party operation.
	And they're pretty damning.
	Okay, okay, Jesus Christ.
	I mean, if I could vote for the Labour Party, I'd be like, this is your job.
	This is one of your jobs that I want you to do, is to curtail hate speech.
	I think it's a great idea, and I think that white tax dollars should go to curtailing hate speech, because it feels like that's a very clear yes or no answer to do you spread hate speech, do you speak hate speech, do you spread disinformation.
	That's a real black and white.
	I do agree with what you're saying.
	The reality of what Matt Taibbi is saying, however, is very different.
	So firstly, big swing, flinging shit at the left, in his view, and we'll see how that holds up.
	Oh, and Russell's introduction, a little bit different to mine, huh?
	The introduction also, can I say, because I had to write down, Matt Taibbi equals Hope, question mark, exclamation point, question mark, exclamation point.
	That's not the reporter I'm familiar with.
	No, not at all.
	It's a little, like, you have to prepare yourself for some very disappointing and infuriating information, is what I have come to know about this reporter.
	I mean, he doesn't sound like Hope, does he?
	Well, but his reporting in the past is, like, exposing corruption.
	That's, like, not fucking hopeful.
	At all!
	Yeah, no, I don't know.
	I don't know where the hope is supposed to be, but I don't think it's coming from his work or him as a person.
	Weird.
	Weird choice.
	Weird choice.
	Lots of weird choices.
	Yeah, my introduction was a little bit less freedom fighter-y and a bit more sexual harass-y, but to each their own, I suppose.
	So the CCDH, or Center for Countering Digital Hate, described themselves as follows, quote, Our mission is to protect human rights and civil liberties online.
	Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation.
	Social media companies deny the problem, deflect the blame, and delay taking responsibility.
	CCDH holds them accountable and responsible for their business choices by highlighting their failures, educating the public, and advocating change from platforms and governments to protect our communities.
	Okay, fine.
	They've released a number of pieces of research regarding X since Musk's takeover, highlighting how hate speech has been allowed free reign over the site, providing actual data which is invaluable, and Musk is suing them in response.
	But not for what they've said, no, you can't argue with that, no, for supposedly breaching terms of service.
	You've been mining data, so I'm suing you.
	Okay, okay, he's just deflecting.
	I mean, I feel like any of these lawsuits, you know, post Alex Jones, post Fox News and Dominion,
	like, this is a sticky wicket.
	Because you all, like, Discovery.
	Discovery, everybody, the discovery process in a lawsuit, are you sure that you want to do that?
	I don't think you do.
	Well, CCDH have described the suit as being, quote, riddled with deficiencies, which I can't say I'm surprised, it's got to be said.
	Yeah, that's kind of what I thought.
	Yeah.
	One thing I did wonder was who is this Paul Holden guy that he mentioned who's writing for Taibbi's Substack publication?
	Seemingly he's a South African journalist who has previously written for The Guardian and The Independent, left-wing publications, and has recently written a book entitled The Fraud, Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy.
	I've not been able to read it because it's not actually releasing until June 2024, but I will read the end of the blurb for you.
	Quote, In these pages we see how Labour together selected Keir Starmer to be its frontman, helping him win Labour's leadership with the most mendacious campaign in recent political history.
	The party under Starmer has since embraced the ugliest forms of racism and Islamophobia and shared information hacked from journalists critical of its allies.
	The Labour Together project has subsequently transformed the party into an authoritarian machine entirely intolerant of dissent, rowing back on an ocean of previous commitments and propagating an agenda of reheated austerity.
	Bold claims.
	That's like, man.
	So, you know, I've shared before that we have a lot of conspiracy books in our home, the collection's always growing, that sound batshit insane.
	And what we don't have, but what I do grow up around, and I'm still very familiar with, is like John Birch Society Material that just sounds like a total subversion of reality.
	It's just under the conspiracy alien book that is completely wackadoo.
	It's just under that and what a dumb person thinks a smart person sounds like, but also still outraged and still like, your hinge It's hanging by, like, one screw that's, like, rattling voraciously, and, like- This is semi-accurate, this one sentence in the paragraph, you know?
	Barely not, I have proof of life on Mars, the government is- you know, like, that kind of, like, it's barely hinged.
	It's just a little bit, and like, ah, I can just- As in, mostly unhinged.
	Yeah.
	Exactly!
	Listen, I'm prone to hyper- Listen, Hyperbole is a sandbox I have a fucking grand old time playing around in, but- And you want to sell your book, okay, fine.
	Sure, but like, it's too much.
	Just dial it back like two more degrees under John Birch, and then I won't immediately get a red flag.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I read that and I was like, already there are definitely some things wrong here.
	That does not marry with my reality.
	Let's put it that way.
	The accusations are just a little too, like, you back it off, and maybe we can talk.
	You know what I mean?
	Obviously I can't critique it yet because I don't know what's in it.
	Allegedly Paul Holden has the documents, the infamous documents, but we shall see I suppose in June 2024 if it returns to relevancy.
	That'll be the interesting point is whether When it pops up.
	If excerpts of it start actually getting circulated in legitimate media channels, then okay, maybe there's something to it.
	But I'm unconvinced so far.
	It's apparently based on emails traded back and forth, you know, with a lot of political machinations going on.
	Okay.
	It's just the accusations of, like, Islamophobia.
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	Okay, okay.
	The ugliest forms of racism and Islamophobia and shared information hacked from journalists critical of its allies.
	These are bold claims.
	Yeah, because the worst examples of racism in Islamophobia I can think of, and there's like a body count.
	So you're telling me that like millions are dead?
	Okay, wait a second.
	I don't know.
	It's Kistama's fault, right?
	You're being a little...
	A little much.
	A little alarmist.
	Well, yeah, I mean, when you're describing the current Labour Party as an authoritarian machine entirely intolerant of dissent, then maybe a little much, yeah.
	So yeah, I can't speak to the credibility or accuracy of this book or this man who has written it, but all that said, what the fuck does it have to do with CCDH, right?
	Let's hear Taibi's explanation.
	Why are they damning?
	Who do they target?
	Are there recognizable establishment figures from within the British political establishment and even the American political establishment?
	And would you say that knowing that they are not neutral and unfunded, that an agenda can be discerned based on the individuals targeted?
	So this group, this Center for Countering Digital Hate, Its origins trace back to a faction within the Labour Party that you're probably familiar with called Labour Together, that is most directly allied with Keir Starmer, right?
	So, you're likely next Prime Minister over there.
	And yes, they have targeted individual politicians, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.
	Okay.
	So Labour Together were the, or are they I suppose, but they were the centrist slash right-wing of the Labour Party, right, which came into existence when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader as sort of a reactionary response, right, because Jeremy Corbyn very much our Bernie Sanders but, you know, was actually in a leadership position.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, well, you know, it would be like having Bernie as your presidential pick.
	Like a top leadership position.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Leader of the Labour Party, you know, went up and went toe-to-toe with two prime ministers and lost both times, unfortunately.
	But yeah, so Labour Together was a reactionary response to that from the centre slash centre-right of the Labour Party.
	That said, there weren't that many MPs actually involved in Labour Together, about 7 or 8 kind of spearheading the thing, and that was about it.
	It came into existence in 2015, according to Companies House.
	CCDH, on the other hand, came into being in 2018.
	And in its earliest moments, the director of CCDH was a chap called Malcolm McSweeney.
	Or rather, he was director of a company called Brixton Endeavors, which would later be renamed the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2019, four months before McSweeney left the company.
	McSweeney was listed as a secretary for Labour Together from 2017 to 2020.
	I'm laying out this timeline for a reason.
	Now, the narrative being spun by the likes of Taibbi, Branko Markatic at Jacobin, and writers at The Canary, which is a British left-of-left publication with questionable editorial standards, is that MacSweeney and Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, were colluding to bring down Jeremy Corbyn by propping up arguments of anti-Semitism.
	This idea is exacerbated by McSweeney going on to become Keir Starmer's campaign manager, right?
	So that's what McSweeney does now.
	So it's all like, ah, look at what this guy was doing!
	I'm yet to see any actual evidence of this in any of the articles mentioned, of any kind of collusion to bring down Jeremy Corbyn.
	Not a shred of evidence has actually been shared in any of the work from any of these people.
	Apparently we have to wait for the UK files to finish coming out or some shit.
	I don't know.
	Another nail in the coffin, according to these people, is that CCDH and Labour together share the same address.
	Suspicious.
	Sounds weird.
	However...
	Taking a quick glance at Companies House, 108 other active businesses also share the same address.
	So the building doesn't look massive, so my guess is it's sort of a shell for companies who need to register an address.
	It's a Delaware.
	Yeah, don't necessarily need an actual office, right?
	So yeah, that makes 110 active businesses.
	Unless there's a really, really big conspiracy with, you know, cleaning companies and accountants and all kinds of other things also being involved in trying to take down Jeremy Corbyn.
	Yeah, I don't rate this very highly, personally.
	That's where I stand on it.
	Well, there's this documentary that didn't get released.
	It's on YouTube, but it's called The Lobby, and it's not great.
	It's one of those things that even if you take it with a big grain of salt, it doesn't look good.
	But I don't know how connected I'm, I'm like searching in my mind to like, make sure I'm not, you know, inserting this information in the wrong spot.
	But it's also like, it's, it's, it's, uh, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of stuff in politics that gets muddied to the point of being impossible to talk about.
	Like, You know, like Russian interference with political campaigns in America or elsewhere.
	There can be like some proof, but none of it's conclusive because it's a cumulative kind of like decentralized thing that's like...
	It's hard to measure the impact.
	And I think it's easy to skew the impact and make claims when it's not 100% and it's not zero.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	As far as like interference and misinformation is kind of subtle and very targeted.
	Yeah, no, absolutely, and what these people have done, what Taibbi has done, well, mostly it was the Canary did it, then Branko Markadic, and eventually fucking Taibbi picks it up, you know, because they love nothing more than reheating old news, these people.
	What they've essentially done is kind of seen a pattern of events where they're kind of assuming that it equals X. And it's like, well, no, actually, you can't assume that based on the information that you have.
	You just can't.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	They're just kind of leaping to that and being like, wow, this must have happened!
	Well, I mean, yeah, but did it though?
	Yeah.
	And yeah, especially when you take into account that CCDH, you know, was only kind of named as such at the tail end of 2019.
	It was August 2019 and it was December 2019 that Jeremy Corbyn stepped down as Labour leader after losing the election to Boris Johnson.
	And the kind of anti-Semitism bullshit had been going on a lot longer than that.
	That's, I think, more what the lobbies... Yeah, yeah.
	But also, our Congress just, like, legally equated...
	Anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
	So, uh... Fantastic.
	This really... That's helpful.
	Yeah, a little while ago.
	And it's a House resolution, but that also means that any... I've seen buried reporting, but it's not fucking good, because Critiquing a government and their actions has literally nothing to do with critiquing the people.
	No, no.
	It's so tone-deaf and it's so extreme and, boy, it's just, oh, it's like so, that was a very dystopian moment.
	It strikes me.
	That it's hideous to watch.
	It strikes me as a very kind of point-scoring kind of thing to do as well, just to, look how big our allies we are!
	Look what we're doing!
	Okay, shut the fuck up.
	Well, it's specifically to target student groups that are trying to protest.
	Pro-Palestine.
	Yeah, that are pro-Palestine, and it's so insidious, and it's just right there.
	Oh boy.
	Yeah, it's gross.
	Yucks all the way down.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But, um, but yeah, when it comes to Taibi and his bullshit, it's, it's, I mean, yeah, there's muddied waters, but it's, it's like, okay, you're saying all of these things, but again, you've not actually provided any evidence.
	So, um, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna wait until I see some and, and you know what?
	Maybe it could have happened.
	It's certainly, it's certainly within the realms of possibility of British politics.
	Abso-fucking-lutely.
	We've had some Horrible things happened over here in the last decade.
	Some incredibly shady bullshit has happened within the last few years alone.
	So sure, believable, but there's no evidence to support it.
	One final thing.
	Taibbi described Keir Starmer as our next most likely Prime Minister, to which I say that is a powerful dose of hopium that you're dealing out there, buddy.
	Oh, that's the hope!
	That's the hope they were talking about.
	I see.
	That's it, yeah.
	The Tories have been in power for the last 13 years, and the notion of a down-the-middle tin of wallpaper paste managing to oust them is optimistic at best.
	I mean, I'll take it if it happens, but my prediction is kind of grim.
	So next we get possibly an insight as to why Taibbi doesn't like the CCDH.
	Even further back than that, or farther, I always get that wrong.
	There was a sort of controversy involving Grant Schapps, remember the Tory MP, who was accused of editing his own Wikipedia pages.
	These documents show that that story came from this group.
	It was later recanted.
	And so It's a group that's dedicated to stopping fake news, but they themselves appear to have trafficked in fake news.
	So that's, that we think is significant.
	In the United States, we saw them all over the Twitter files because, among other things, they were really, really intense in trying to get the so-called disinformation dozen removed, which included Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
	And they've been recently sued by X slash Twitter.
	Uh, because they've been involved in, um, accusations that, uh, X or Twitter or Elon Musk are all trafficking in hate speech.
	So they're a pretty significant organization.
	Because they are.
	It's what they do.
	It's either there or it's not!
	It's either there or it's not!
	Like, it's... This isn't... Oh, okay.
	Alright.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I mean, that's almost exclusively what they do.
	Like, if you go to that site, that's what it is now!
	It's... Oh, anyway.
	It's causing all the problems that are very public!
	And he's like, GFY!
	And oh, the most awkward moment!
	Ever!
	So those allegations he mentioned at the beginning there about Grant Schapps, the then Tory party co-chairman, editing the Wikipedia pages of other Tories under a pseudonym, those are from 2015, long before the CCDH was formed.
	So 2015, it was only registered as Brixton Endeavors in 2018 and then became thingy in 2019.
	Not only that, but the man had priors, right?
	Grant Shapps had been caught editing his own Wikipedia page back in 2012, supposedly to make it more accurate while also conveniently deleting anything embarrassing.
	Again!
	It's either there, or it's not!
	This is not rocket science.
	This isn't like a debate.
	Either Wikipedia is like, archive knows what happened.
	Oh, they're trafficking in fake news themselves, supposedly, four years before the CCDH even existed in any formal sense.
	Oh my god.
	It's just like, either the evidence speaks for itself or it doesn't.
	Like, this is a very, to me, very cut and dry.
	To me, I go, evidence?
	I've not seen any, and that's exactly like, oh, the UK files, they prove this.
	Do they?
	Show me the emails.
	Go on, show me something, anything, please.
	I'll believe you if I can see it, possibly.
	Yeah, absolute nonsense.
	Yeah, is Wikipedia conspiring with this man?
	I just, I don't...
	That's weird.
	That's weird.
	Yeah.
	As for the disinformation dozen, yes, the CCDH wanted them off Twitter.
	It was researched and reported by them in 2021 that 65% of the COVID vaccine misinformation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter was coming from just 12 individuals.
	This naturally included the likes of RFK Jr.
	and Joseph McCullough.
	They campaigned to have these individuals removed from social media because they fucking should be.
	It was that simple.
	It's like 65% from 12 people.
	That is absurd.
	And yeah.
	Again!
	Most of human existence, we have not been able to trace a telephone game until now!
	The technology exists, and it bears, and obviously, statistics or whatever, even if it's just numbers and just the facts, obviously can be manipulated, but these are like, Because the way that information moves on the internet, you can trace it.
	Like there's actually a footprint.
	And so it's just people measuring and then reporting the measurements.
	It's not, I mean... And saying, this is a problem, and Taibbi takes issue with that.
	Yeah, and if reality didn't reflect that and people's everyday experience, then I would say, well, let's kind of curious, let's look into this and maybe not take it at face value.
	But like, this is supporting, I don't, okay.
	This is supporting reality is what it is supporting.
	And that's why it's quite jarring.
	As for why he doesn't like the CCDH, in case it's not obvious, most bullshit misinformation comes from the right, which means they're tackling right-wing figures, and Tayibi is right-wing these days, and can't be doing with his buddies getting held to account.
	He still, as far as I'm aware, he still technically identifies as liberal, according to him.
	Oh, I bet he does!
	Even Bill Maher, right?
	SEAN Yeah, right, exactly.
	Though, I feel like even Bill Maher wouldn't stoop to this fucking guy, but... LAURA Yeah, he would!
	SEAN Maybe I'm being generous.
	Maybe I'm being overly generous.
	Though, I think even Bill Maher would recognize bullshit.
	Anyway.
	LAURA He has a mirror, I'm sure.
	That is true.
	That is true.
	Probably too many.
	Anyway, Russell pivots the discussion about the CCDH to saying, well, a lot of this stuff isn't really hate speech anyway, is it?
	You know, it's just being used for political ends.
	And to that I say the CCDH also tackles mis- and disinformation, which is a big part of their whole shtick.
	It's not just hate speech.
	But all of that conversation kicks Tayibi off on a little bit of a rant.
	It's one thing when, you know, a bunch of college lefties come up to me and they say we're really concerned about the proliferation of hate speech online.
	It's another thing when I see an organization quoting the U.S.
	Joint Chiefs of Staff and taking money from the Department of Defense and they're worried about hate speech?
	Like, I don't think so, you know?
	You know, the sudden concern with defense and intelligence agencies with this topic and It is very hard to believe, and why is it so significant that they're involved?
	Well Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU, he's the person who's famous for defending the Nazis who marched at Skokie.
	He once talked about why he was against hate speech codes on campuses, and he told students, and even minority students, he says, The issue isn't the speech.
	The issue isn't the hate speech.
	The issue is who's going to decide what is hate speech and who do you think that is, right?
	If you get these hate speech codes, it's not going to be you deciding what's hate speech.
	It's going to be the trustees at the university.
	And, you know, this was 30 years ago when he was saying that.
	Even then he was saying it's not going to be you deciding.
	Now it's even worse.
	Now it's going to be some conglomeration of executive branch groups, defense, intelligence.
	Do you really want them deciding what hate speech is and using that as a way to get things off offline?
	I think that's very suspicious.
	Oh, the defense and intelligence agencies are suddenly so interested in hate speech.
	I don't think so.
	I mean, we'll leave aside that hate speech online is directly and obviously linked to almost every case of domestic terrorism in the US for the last 20 years, but why would intelligence agencies possibly be interested in that?
	I mean, here's the thing.
	I get where he's like, yeah, right?
	Well, but I mean, just like, yeah, it's, he's muddying the waters because invoking, it's this kind of a, you know, invoking like, oh, you don't want the government making decisions for you.
	Like, no, no, no, the government's also us.
	The government does the people.
	So keeping them accountable.
	Definitions of hate speech don't come down to college trustees or some rando in the DoD somewhere.
	They come down to law.
	There is a legal definition of what is and is not hate speech, Taibi, you dumb fuck.
	Yeah, and that's supposed to be a mandate from the- That's who decides it.
	Lawmakers that we elect, that's who decides it.
	We choose for them to go there and do the thing.
	That's our decision to send them there to do that.
	We leave that in their hands.
	That's how democracy works.
	I mean, the thing is, this argument 30 years ago on a college campus is so fucking different now, it's crazy.
	Yeah, right.
	There was a whole different decorum argument and the argument against public interference and protection.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, I mean, I don't know.
	I'm also old, so I used to watch very boring documentaries and Not Crossfire, but not not Crossfire, you know.
	Donnybrook.
	Oh, that was the PBS version.
	And, like, it was these really, like, kind of, you know, that was whenever it was, like, snooze, snooze-fest policy talk that was very granular.
	And if we had an example of, I mean, it's like saying, look, nobody's civilizing politics anymore.
	Well, okay, like, oh, Trump's doing all this stuff that we just didn't do before.
	It didn't even occur to us to make a rule about it.
	Okay, well, then now we make rules about it.
	No, we make rules.
	Maybe now is the time to do the thing.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree.
	I do feel like Nazis would get a different response these days as well.
	You know, for me personally, if I see a Nazi, I might end up swinging.
	But also, even in the Zeitgeist, there's a move and there's a reaction to that.
	Yeah, yeah, no, that was the general vibe.
	That was the general vibe.
	You know that my favorite movie is the Blues Brothers, so I tend to side with their side of things of like, well, let's try driving through them and see if they jump in the river.
	Oh, they jumped in the river.
	Okay, it's fine.
	Well, what else?
	Even that movie could just make an automatic Like, you know, that was the instant go-to comedy villain, or the Illinois Nazis.
	I hate Illinois Nazis, yeah.
	Goddamn, I love that film.
	And now it's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, I mean, he's got some good points, I don't know.
	Yeah, right.
	Let's listen to both sides!
	No!
	Automatic bad guy!
	Yeah, yeah, there's a reason.
	There's a reason.
	It's basically a trope.
	Good lord.
	Anyway, that said, what they're actually covering for here at the moment is COVID and conspiracy bullshit rather than hate speech.
	That's what they're actually Disgusting.
	So right now when they just said it, you know, just said all of that, they're saying, oh, what they're actually saying is who gets to decide what disinformation is right now.
	That's, that's more what they're concerned about.
	It's less the hate speech element and more, what does disinformation, you know, because that's much more relevant to their specific fields.
	It's an argument that we'll see return a little bit later, so I will deal with it then.
	But yeah.
	The reason that they couldn't get into it properly right this second and why they couldn't call a spade a spade Is that because for the minute they're still on YouTube but this next clip we see the dismount from YouTube to rumble and Well, well, Russell has a tendency to, let's say, overstate how dangerous his show is, or the things he says, and he'll sow a good chunk of fear in his audience while he does it, and this clip, to my mind, shows something of an escalation.
	Before you answer the next question, Matt, I'm going to stop you there.
	Stop right now.
	Enough's enough, because AwakendWonders over on YouTube, we need you to click the link in the description and join us over on Rumble, because me and Matt are going to start speaking pretty freely now.
	It's going to get so free that it's the sort of thing that, well, you're listening to this conversation.
	Dissent is illegal now.
	Your consciousness is illegal.
	Your ability to speak freely is their problem.
	So you're going to have to join us over on Rumble.
	Dissent is illegal, your consciousness is illegal, so you're gonna have to join us over on Rumble and that'll, I don't know, change the laws or something?
	I don't know, but join us over on Rumble.
	Baby brain.
	Just such ridiculous self-aggrandizing bullshit.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	He's, he's, he's warning out him and Taibbi.
	No, I was already tired.
	That's not fair.
	I was already really tired.
	And now I just know he's a dumb baby.
	He's, he's a dumb baby and he's interviewing the world's most boring man.
	Correlation does not equal causation.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	Learn a thing or two, frankly.
	Thank you so much.
	Oh, there's a lot that man could learn.
	Anyway, I mentioned Taibi going to like a state of, trust me, I have a source, honest!
	And in this next clip, we get a fine example.
	When we started working on the Twitter files, one of the things that we didn't understand at first was, how come there are so many people who come from the military and sort of counter-terrorism suddenly involved in content moderation in Silicon Valley?
	And when we finally started drilling down into organizations like the Global Engagement Center in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security had agencies against disinformation.
	I had one person from one of those agencies telling me that, look, basically, originally these anti-disinformation groups were built to combat Propaganda from ISIS and Al Qaeda.
	But after the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Tea Party, as you mentioned, Podemos, Syriza, you know, Viktor Orban's Fidesz Party, right, like the Australian far-right movements, and then even Bernie Sanders, Trump, Brexit, and then Jeremy Corbyn, I think, is a really important example.
	That whole mission just shifted home, right?
	They had this huge, basically illegal operation directed overseas at terrorist groups and they just turned it inward.
	The switch was described to me as CT to CP, so it's counter-terrorism to counter-populism.
	Wow.
	Yeah, thanks, Russell.
	Um, yeah.
	What?
	Firstly, none of that timeline matches up.
	Like, when the fuck was the Arab Spring?
	But it was definitely before 2019, I know that much.
	Also, too much stuff.
	Sir, you named too much stuff.
	Yeah, it's a red flag.
	You're trying to back yourself up too much, buddy.
	So that all sounds terrifying.
	All of these agencies both public and private suddenly using counter-terrorist techniques on the populace according to some guy possibly at the Global Engagement Center or an agency something to do with Homeland Security maybe or I mean it could be some guy on Reddit or 4chan or in the YouTube comments section somewhere who Who knows!
	But hey, that guy said that to me, that we went from counter-terrorist to counter-populist, and that makes it true!
	Because I said so.
	Well, here's how that strikes me.
	Is the issue post-Oklahoma City bombing, basically the backlash from Waco.
	Yeah.
	It cast such a pallor on the way that the US government was handling domestic extremism, Christian terrorists, whatever.
	The way that they were handling it, it looked so bad and got people like Alex Jones and Bill Cooper just in a tizzy to the point where, like, they could mobilize.
	Also conservatives in general that maybe are, that consider themselves a silent majority, mobilize to pressure the government not to focus on domestic terrorism and to look where we are.
	The amount of mass shootings, like, we can't even keep track anymore.
	There is a massive Domestic terrorism problem we do have in America, and it was allowed to get out of hand.
	That's why Alex Jones' bitch is about the NIAC report all the time, which was a thing that was right!
	And they basically, like, the conservative fucking psycho wing, like, shouted these people down and now that it's gotten so bad,
	the government's finally been pressured to actually have to pay attention
	to domestic terrorism because, like, kids have to wear bulletproof fucking backpacks.
	Like, it's gotten so bad that we have-- there's even still pushback within the agency,
	like, you know, the alphabet agencies themselves, and there are people that
	have tried--
	that have, like, spent their careers trying to focus on this massive problem
	when the most of, like, the loudest part of our government establishment are actively fighting against,
	like--
	Addressing a real pervasive problem that people are dealing with in all 50 states.
	Like it's, it's, it's not, well, they're screaming about like, call it extremist Muslim terrorists, you know, like extreme Islamic terrorists when like, I don't know.
	No, no, no.
	I'm worried about the landlord down the street that stabbed a kid.
	Like that's, that's the problem.
	That's, that happened in my city and it's a nightmare.
	That's what we need to be worried about.
	There's still, like, they being, you know, this, the, like, howling conservative psychos are, like, still trying to, I think, I'm relieved that, to some degree, the problem is, I'm not, okay, I didn't say that right, the fact that the problem is visible enough, I'm not, I mean, yeah, the first came out wrong, but, like, the fact that it's finally, Getting attention from the government agencies that we pay for?
	That's fucking great!
	That's fucking great!
	Should have been happening the whole time!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Whether that's happening in the way that Matt Taibbi says it's happening is a very different question.
	That's what it is, yeah.
	I went on my own little tirade, and then it was fine.
	No, but I agree with your assessment in general.
	Yeah, but I just...
	Yeah, all of what he's saying is complete horseshit, because none of that is happening.
	And what the fuck that has to do with the CCDH, or even the Global Engagement Center?
	Like, I just, no.
	It seems tenuous.
	It seems like a tenuous connection, yeah.
	Also, prove it!
	And also, who's your source?
	Where is he specifically?
	Because you were very vague about where he's from, or how high up he might be, because technically, you know, the custodian at the Global Engagement Center does work there, so you know, Yeah, yeah.
	Oh, my guy, the GEC.
	Well, yeah, I mean, technically you do have a guy there.
	That's true.
	Yeah.
	I mean, this sounds like conservatives whining that people are paying attention to what they're saying, honestly.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I'm just saying if you're going to be an independent journalist, you need to need to show up with the goods.
	You need to provide the tea.
	And Matt Taibbi does not.
	As for former analysts from intelligence agencies going to work for private companies to analyze the spread of disinformation, adieu.
	It doesn't take long to figure out.
	We mentioned it in the Lee Fang episode, because obviously these people are going to be good at doing the job.
	Like, they're already doing it, but for terrorism rather than COVID bullshit.
	But Silicon Valley will pay them more money than the government will, so they go and do it for that shit instead.
	That's it.
	It is that kind of like, well, this guy used to work here, and now he works there.
	Okay, but what did he do?
	What's the thing that he did that we need to be concerned about?
	Because, again, I don't disagree with that being a starting point.
	But that's your end point, is like, well, this guy worked for the government and then went and worked for a private firm.
	And like, okay, that's where we start, not where we end.
	Is the job title the same?
	Is there still supposed to be some kind of affiliation?
	Like, if you're former FBI, are you then FBI for life?
	Is that what they're trying to get at?
	Did he want to move?
	Did he not want to live in Virginia anymore?
	Better health insurance, who the fuck knows, you know?
	The whole thing is ridiculous.
	To depart from all of that, Russell has some commentary on his transition to being right-wing, though of course he doesn't describe it as that, but still.
	It's weird.
	I've had this said for a long time, you know, as Mexican folk used to say in California, I didn't cross the line, the line crossed us, that there's just been this sort of creeping line of what's sayable and permissible now.
	And suddenly I found myself in alliance with groups I never thought I would be in alliance with, just because to be anti-establishment now requires all sorts of new affinities.
	Once I never thought I would find myself having it.
	I didn't think I'd find myself getting on with Tucker Carlson.
	And now, like with the escalation of events in the Middle East, there are new fractures, new fissures, new fragmentation.
	It really feels like a time of annihilation.
	Matt, can you tell us a little bit About the new Twitter files and the election integrity partnership that sounds so sort of bureaucratic and has the word integrity in it and normally a sort of diagnostic tool that I've learned in my own short time in journalism is if something's calling itself the trusted news initiative or the friendly cuddly bunny party that you should probably get yourself a bunker
	And stop stumping up and getting ready to survive.
	Oh yeah, no.
	Now as soon as I see the word trust, I just assume the person's lying.
	Okay, okay.
	If trust didn't also have financial meanings, then like, I don't know, that's a little weird.
	Yeah, right.
	These people describe themselves as journalists.
	Journalists.
	Russell just self-described as a journalist.
	That was rich.
	That was fun.
	I needed that today.
	That brought my spirits up.
	I've actually come to really enjoy when he goes on this tirade that really tells on himself super hard and very publicly.
	It's like, oh, oh, you're almost there.
	Oh, you're almost there.
	Oh, didn't stick the landing.
	You broke your ankle instead.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	Yeah, that's wild.
	It really feels like a time of annihilation.
	Okay.
	Yeah, but I mean, but at the same time, yeah, like, Federal Bald Eagles Love America Foundation.
	Yeah, like, they all sound, you know, like, completely benign and they're, like, they're setting books on fire in the Missouri- Can't trust that.
	Yeah, in the Ozarks in Missouri.
	Like, yeah, it's very, like, yeah, certainly But like, I mean, then your complaints with your bureaucracy, and like your complaints with... Yeah, okay.
	I mean, that was kind of gold.
	What Russell just said was solid gold.
	Yeah, just... We're gonna get a little bit more of that in a little bit.
	But yeah, good lord.
	If someone says the word trust, I just assume that they're lying.
	Great journalistic instincts, Taibi.
	Well done.
	Way to assess something before Before firing a judgment at it.
	Good job.
	I mean, like, putting a pin in that is different than automatically being like, I don't trust you.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	I mean, everything that comes out of Matt Taibbi's mouth and Russell's mouth has an asterisk next to it, but I will at least check, you know?
	I'll be like, mate, broken clock is right twice a day, right?
	You know, I still need to check at the end of the day.
	Next, I can only assume, and this would explain a lot, that Matt Taibbi is living in a different
	reality to the rest of us.
	[00:10:00]
	Matt Taibbi Yeah.
	Michael Schellenberger at Public, with whom I testified in Congress earlier this year
	and then also again this week, will be doing the same thing.
	We got hold of a large new trove of documents involving something called the Cyber Threat
	Initiative League, or CTI League.
	This is like the precursor organization to that Election Integrity Partnership.
	It involves people from the Pentagon, from DHS, from the FBI.
	There's a woman from the UK who was central in creating this group, but it really lays out In tremendous detail what the thinking and strategy of all these anti-disinformation people are.
	They're talking about creating fake sock puppet accounts to infiltrate groups they don't like.
	They're saying we're going to be doing the same things that the bad guys are doing.
	They're openly talking about describing Republicans as needing reprogramming.
	There's just all kinds of stuff in these documents when people see them.
	You know, the Twitter files were important because they showed, they proved a link between this kind of stuff and official agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security.
	This, I mean, there are like whole quotes about, well, we need to do this in a quasi-private way because the Department of Defense can't do it legally.
	You know, Department of Homeland Security doesn't have the capability.
	And the Global Engagement Center only has $250 million.
	So they're not going to be very capable either.
	So it needs to be done by people like us who aren't officially, you know, attached to anybody.
	And that's kind of the model for how these things work.
	You see these NGOs that look independent.
	Behind the scenes, they're working with, you know, intelligence groups and enforcement agencies.
	And they believe They really believe that, you know, sort of domestic political movements, like whether it's Trump in America or Corbyn in the UK, that those things are threats in the same way that the terrorists are.
	And we see that in these documents, and it's pretty shocking.
	Okay.
	None of that is especially shocking to me.
	And here we just see a massive denial of reality from Matt Taibbi.
	Jeremy Corbyn aside, because I don't think anyone would try and argue that Corbyn or his followers were ever terrorists, but many Trump extremists are or were terrorists in some sense of the word, though a chunk of them have since ended up in prison for seditious conspiracy or conspiracy to kidnap elected officials or fuck knows what else.
	Yeah, maybe that should be worth looking at, just to keep tabs on some people if they're prone to extreme behaviors.
	That's just a thought.
	And sock puppet accounts.
	Yeah, it's called research.
	It's called investigating.
	That's literally exactly what it is.
	Standard, standard fucking infiltration of a life.
	If I wanted to go check out Stormfront, do you think I'm going to use, like what, my real name?
	Am I going to use my real name?
	Am I going to use my regular email address?
	Right.
	I don't fucking think so.
	Absolutely not.
	But maybe I want to see what these people are saying because, you know, keeping tabs on the Nazis is not always a bad idea.
	And Matt Taibbi, so NGOs never work with the government.
	Is that what you want?
	Say that!
	Or is it just the ones you don't like?
	Because this sounds like I have a problem with this actively harming my ability to make money and for my friends to make money.
	I have a network, me, Taibbi, has a network of Buddies that want to stochastic terrorize for fun and profit by themselves, and I don't like that there are NGOs that are working with the government to use government resources.
	Okay, listen, if you want all NGOs to never step foot in the government, I don't know what that even looks like.
	No, that's absurd.
	That's, like, it's so, way too general.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's so unwieldy.
	It's very much, oh, these people are helping to diminish my influence and therefore I take issue with them.
	My influence and that of my friends.
	Also, his description of the CTI League is completely off base, probably intentionally.
	The Cyber Threat Intelligence League is a volunteer cybersecurity trust group formed in March 2020 to protect healthcare organizations from cyber threats, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
	Hence March 2020.
	The CTI League's primary goals include reducing or neutralizing threats to medical organizations, supporting law enforcement agencies in combating public safety threats, and creating a safer cyberspace for hospitals, the medical sector, and life-saving organizations globally.
	The League's members consist of cyber threat intelligence experts, incident responders, industry experts, law enforcement, and government personnel.
	Their objectives are to reduce the level of threat to medical and life-saving organizations by preventing cyber attacks, to neutralize cyber threats that exploit the COVID-19 pandemic, support law enforcement organizations in their fight against public safety threats, and create disinformation resilience among medical and life-saving organizations.
	That's the line he takes issue with.
	But the rest of it is the majority.
	Either way, they're not some big bad, you know?
	Oh, the CTI league?
	Oh!
	No, no.
	They're trying to protect the fucking medical industry from shitheads like you.
	That's all it is.
	That's all they're doing.
	Don't tell me they're there.
	Tell me what they did.
	Specifically, Date, time, tell me what they did that you are taking an issue with specifically now.
	Like, well, I don't like that's there.
	Show me the documents!
	Yeah, right?
	Yeah.
	I don't like that they exist, because their name is big and scary.
	Okay, Matt.
	As for quotes about, oh, government agencies don't have the resources or direction to do what needs to be done, so we have to do it.
	Like, yeah, no shit.
	That's a lot of the reason why NGOs exist.
	It's also the same thing as, like, no news company can deal with all of Russell's bullshit comprehensively, so we have to do it.
	It's a very similar fucking thing.
	I'm not happy about it, but it's where we are.
	I couldn't tell if he was being shady or if he was being serious.
	Like, oh, they only have 250 million, so they can't do it.
	I'm like, are you... But also, like, don't mix in sarcasm or, like, you know, like, throwing shade with, like, a real complaint.
	I'm like, are you mad or not?
	Like, is that too much money or not enough?
	Because that sounds like a lot of money.
	A tendency to obfuscate his own point.
	And also, as you've pointed out, you know, like, of course they would then work with intelligence agencies to ensure accuracy and validity of information, as well as just plain good old reporting that probably needs to be done in some cases.
	And what's the alternative?
	Like, should they just have no relationship with intelligence agencies whatsoever and just be left to their own devices?
	Because that sounds dumb, and also potentially riskier.
	Should NGOs never submit a FOIA request?
	What qualifies as working with the government?
	Checking your facts?
	Investigating?
	Hey, we found this thing that's a problem.
	You might want to look at this.
	Is that working with the government?
	Well, that's what I'm saying.
	A lot of working with the government means that you're holding the government accountable.
	I mean, it's an audit, and that shouldn't have to happen.
	And vice versa as well.
	Whatever kind of government agency that they're working with will also be holding the NGO to account to a certain degree.
	There will be a level of, oh no, you guys have fucked up, or whatever, that I think is good.
	I think that's better than that not happening.
	Yeah.
	You're not doing the thing, so you don't get funding, or you don't get access in the same way, because you're doing something differently.
	Which I didn't even get into on the episode we talked about, the grifter income episode.
	There's so much under the table overlap with political and organizations that are legally supposed to specifically not be political.
	So that's a whole level of oversight that's been gutted out of our government through defunding and through austerity claims and measures.
	It's insane.
	Right about that, Matt.
	So all of this talk seems to get Russell thinking and you can get if you look back you can kind of see the cogs turning and so in the next clip we have a good old-fashioned bramble coming and it becomes incredibly revealing and I must warn you this is a long one.
	Yes, it's interesting how often there are apparently independent organizations that are advocating
	for ending hate speech or for a fairer and more just world that are actually merely a conduit for power.
	And that becomes discernible through their funding.
	And then you find sock puppet accounts that are supposed to be legitimate independent
	individuals, but they too are a conduit for the same power.
	And it seems like whether or not a popular or anti-establishment figure emerges from the left wing space using left wing
	rhetoric or the opposing space using the appropriate rhetoric there, that they would be opposed.
	And it seems now that whatever language is required to legitimize the foreclosure of those groups
	can immediately be accessed and defined.
	And our time, it seems to be, I suppose, the power of identity politics.
	And I mention that only because of how it might relate to hate speech is that it's by its nature.
	Divisive.
	It's divisive not only in terms of ethnographics, but also in terms of time.
	It indicates that the culture moves at a pace where it's pretty clear, I would say, and this is just a guess, that generally, I would imagine, America is a less racist place than it was 50 years ago, and the UK is a less racist place than it was 50, 60 years ago, and I would say that of most Western countries, and yet there is this feeling that the tension is being amplified
	And I suppose it's going to... I watched the British, I guess, right wing, certainly nationalist, populist figure Tommy Robinson yesterday being arrested for his attendance of a essentially a pro-Israel march, I guess is what it was.
	And I thought, wow, that's, you know, in the end, we're going to have to... The only way, I think, to form the kind of alliances that are going to be required in order to oppose centralised authoritarianism Is by accepting that, you know, like ideas that you sort of simply don't agree with, that there would be communities that are like, we are a ethnically defined community, whether that's, you know, like an ethnic community of African Americans somewhere in America, or
	Communities that are organised around religion or culture or sexual identity or progressivism.
	Seems like how else is this tension ever going to be diffused without the alternative otherwise is to yield to some centralised authority that's going to, as you said earlier, determine what hate speech is, unpersoned practitioners of it.
	I don't see how that, the same way as they enter into these wars without giving you a
	vision of, and this is how we beat Russia eventually and Ukraine joins NATO and it doesn't
	need to lead to a nuclear war, or this is how we involve Iran in this conflict and it
	doesn't cause some massive, terrible apocalypse in the Middle East.
	There's no vision, is there, Matt?
	There's only sort of attempts to manage, control, shut down, curtail, a sort of a desperate
	attempt to continually oppose what seems to be organically happening just as a result
	of one, total lack of trust in authority, whether it's state or media or corporate,
	two, the ability to organize differently as demonstrated by the Arab Spring.
	And even, you know, in terms of the corporate space, Napster, you know, there were examples.
	The online space was going to collapse existing power centres.
	Independent media collapsing existing media power centres.
	And to oppose that, these new categories have to be invented to sort of roll back what appears to be the natural, if you can say natural, trajectory of more accessibility to comms.
	So these new ideologies have to be legitimised through Yeah, I suppose a number of measures, but it seems the one at the moment that's important, certainly when you watch coverage of that riot in Dublin, you hear the Irish police say, there's a far-right extremist faction in Ireland that we have to shut down.
	That doesn't make sense in terms of Irish politics or Irish history.
	Or a figure like Tommy Robinson, with whom I'm sure I would disagree on religion and gender and all sorts of stuff I'm sure, but getting arrested as he arrives at a protest.
	Yeah, and you even see, actually, Matt, sorry to go on, but in normal legacy media reporting, you say, like I saw a pundit say the other day on MSNBC, in order to prevent fascism, you have to vote for the Democrats in this election cycle.
	You can't vote for Cornel West or you're voting for Trump.
	So they're sort of, in a sense, fashioning a kind of tyranny with the aesthetics of progressivism.
	Oh boy.
	What the fuck?
	First of all, Bastion of Civility Tommy Robinson.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I'm gonna get to him in just a sec.
	I was hoping!
	Yeah.
	I hope it's clear why I didn't chop that one up, because taken as a whole, it comes off so much worse than just the individual snippets.
	I'm like, oh no, the way he hops around in this is nuts.
	Also, in a two-party system, a vote for Cornel West is unfortunately a vote for Trump.
	Yes, I'm not happy about it, but that is the situation.
	Well, that's the Electoral College's forces into that type of situation.
	Yeah, no, exactly.
	It sucks, but that is the reality.
	Yeah, we've been hemmed in by this Anne-fucking-Teak, you know, this Anne-Teak institution of the Electoral College, which was intended to disenfranchise in the first place.
	It's very similar over here in most places, to be honest.
	Unless you're in Brighton and Hove, or if you're in Scotland, then fine.
	But everywhere else it's the same situation, basically.
	Alright, so, to go back closer to the beginning there, Russell made it abundantly clear that he believes that racial segregation could be the answer to world peace.
	I don't know, I've been talking about his tiny ethnostates theory for some time, but never has he formalized it in terms of race quite so clearly before.
	Like, that was... that was a lot.
	Well, he tried not to, after that.
	He heard himself say it, then was like, or other stuff, too, and they want to do it, so we should support it.
	I liked his example of like, well, you know, there could be a thing of some African Americans somewhere, because it was like, well, I can't just say a thing of white people, can I?
	Because that's what's actually going to happen for absolute sure, if this situation ever comes to pass.
	Yeah, and to go from race to racist, because that seems like an easy leap, Tommy Robinson, who is a fucking Nazi, Though he takes far more issue with Muslims than he does Jews.
	There was an anti-Semitism rally in London a couple of weeks ago.
	Anti-anti-Semitism, but not pro.
	Not just like, yeah, fuck the Jews!
	The thing is, if Tommy Robinson's showing up, you don't know which one it's going to be.
	But yeah, so Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and I only say that because he's a transphobic piece of shit who most certainly does not respect the chosen names of others.
	Actively has not, publicly.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Stephen Yaxley-Lennon attended that rally despite the organizers making it clear to him that he wasn't welcome.
	So the organizers were like, oh no, don't fucking show up here.
	No, that's gonna be a problem.
	We know who you are and what you do.
	Because his intention was definitely to go there and shout some hateful shit, because that's what he does.
	When questioned by police while he was there, he said that he was attending in his capacity as a journalist.
	Fuck off.
	Sure thing, buddy.
	Yeah.
	And he refused to leave when ordered to do so by the police, which in certain circumstances is illegal in this country, and so he was arrested and charged with failing to comply with a Section 35 direction excluding a person from an area.
	He fucked around and found out- That's too big!
	That's too big!
	I get it.
	I can bring up the statue, that's just what he was charged with.
	No, it's a fun name.
	It's a fun, like, person-place thing.
	Yeah, kind of.
	Yeah, there are obviously a long list of like, here's where this applies.
	But yeah, he fucked around, he found out, he got charged with a crime.
	And that's that!
	As for what happened in Dublin, huh, right.
	I don't know, did you see any of these things happening in Dublin a few weeks ago?
	A couple of weeks ago?
	Yeah, but I didn't have an opportunity to look into it further.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	So a man in Dublin stabbed a woman and three children the other week on November 23rd.
	I believe all of them are still alive, though one I think is still in intensive care at the time of recording this episode, so that's a good few weeks.
	So, very severely injured.
	The man was then stopped and restrained by an Irishman, a Brazilian and a Frenchman.
	I'll bring that up for a reason.
	A walk into a bar joke?
	Is that why?
	Yeah, I know.
	It seems like a terrible one, doesn't it?
	I bring it up because the man who did the stabbings was Algerian and had lived in Ireland for 20 years and had become a naturalized Irish citizen.
	So you have someone who was an immigrant into the country doing the crime and then Yeah, two immigrants and a natural Irishman stopping the guy from doing it.
	Intervening, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Following the stabbing incident, rumours spread on WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal that the attacker was an illegal immigrant and that the children were dead.
	They stated that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism and claimed that the stabbings were part of a larger pattern of violent attacks by immigrants, including the murder of Aisling Murphy, a 23-year-old Irish primary school teacher whose killer, Slovak-Romani immigrant Josef Puska, had been sentenced six days earlier.
	So this was close to the sentencing, so naturally gonna rile things up.
	Some people decided to connect the two things.
	Members of the far right urged people to go to the scene and to quote make your feelings known and they use the hashtag Ireland is full.
	Uh by yeah we're off to a good start.
	By 5 p.m a crowd had gathered at the top of O'Connell Street which is near the scene of the stabbings.
	Some people carrying the flag of Ireland or placards with the anti-immigration slogans such as Irish lives matter.
	Around 6 p.m.
	the crowd of between 100 and 200 people was joined by a whole mess of young people carrying metal bars and wearing facial coverings including balaclavas and hoods.
	Members of the crowd began throwing fireworks, flares and bottles at the Garda, who were
	maintaining a cordon at the crime scene.
	Vehicles were vandalised and set on fire, including Garda vehicles, buses and a tram.
	Shops and businesses were looted and set on fire.
	At the peak of the riot, the crowd grew to around 500 people, which is a lot to be fucking
	rioting.
	Members of the Garda Public Order Unit were deployed to the area.
	A witness described the rioters as young people, late teens, early twenties, who were being egged on by older people.
	Yep, that fucking makes sense to me.
	By this point, social media people on Telegram were encouraging rioters to target foreigners, stating to kill everyone you come across.
	Also, okay drama.
	Jesus Christ.
	It's very easy to say when you're not the one doing it, you cunt.
	The Garda cordoned more areas off, brought in their mounted division, began making arrests, and things eventually dispersed.
	Arrests are still being made at the moment, because much like the Jan 6 situation, there's plenty of footage to go through, and most of these people will be found.
	Garda Commissioner Drew Harris stated that a, quote, complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology, unquote, was behind the violence and he condemned it as disgraceful and I think he's absolutely fucking correct.
	So, that's what's been going on in Ireland.
	It's a whole tragic, horrible thing that then spiraled into an incredibly hateful thing by a bunch of shitheads.
	Russell has already covered this subject, using it to say, oh, they're not right-wing.
	Ireland is a small country to have so many immigrants.
	They have their reasons.
	Let's leave them alone.
	Also, should Conor McGregor be Prime Minister of Ireland?
	Yeah, and had Taibi not been on, this is very much what we would have been covering, because Russell's take on it is nothing short of disgusting.
	But I hope you get the picture, at least.
	It's gross.
	And he just spends his entire time whitewashing and making light of the whole situation, and it's like, nah man, there's three children stabbed.
	Come on.
	Back the fuck off.
	Right?! !
	Jesus!
	I mean, but you know what?
	A thing that, because I am so interested, okay, so basically, like, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, is chock full of extremely old, like, the oldest cultures we have, and is also historically, and why I get all, some of y'all that have listened to, you know, my History Corners and whatnot understand that, like, I get very upset about these like micro ethno state things because the older, um, the oldest,
	Communities and cultures had to, like, new religions were constantly forming and being, you know, and cults, different than what we would use for a modern, you know, like, it's an interpretation of a religion.
	So there's all these, like, religious ideas that are constantly, like, springing up, and then, like, they're very diverse They got diverse first, because they were progressing as a culture first.
	It's fucking heartbreaking to hear the broad brush that is used to describe everyone from Algeria or everyone from Ethiopia, when Ethiopian Christians are the oldest Christians.
	That's the sect of Christianity.
	The oldest ones are in Ethiopia.
	And those people are black.
	I don't know, it's something I think about.
	Jesus was brown.
	Very much so, yes.
	And that's the thing, is having the idea that there's... Assuming that an Algerian man, who's lived in the country for fucking 20 years, is... I think to myself, I'm like, oh, please be Zoroastrian.
	Anything.
	Please, just... I know it's so useless to think, But like, you're so quick to, because there's, you know what I'm saying, like a white person from America is way more likely to just be a regular old Christian than a brown person from like the Mediterranean, Middle East, North African area.
	There are so many different religions that have been circulating for Thousands of years at this point like to say that you can make this snap judgment about and even like it adds to the stereotype of a sharia law dictatorship that people are suffering under not benefiting from.
	And those are brand new things, and people like Russell think that this has been an ancient tradition, when it's the fucking opposite.
	It's this xenophobia on such a deep... The xenophobia that is drawing from such a deep misunderstanding of history, and so I can get real fucking cranky about it, and it just drives me fucking nuts.
	It's so stupid.
	I agree completely.
	And yeah, the whole...
	The whole Ireland situation is just very upsetting.
	I love Ireland.
	I've got plenty of friends there.
	Dublin especially, one of my favourite cities.
	Fantastic fucking place.
	There's been a lot of shock and a lot of heartbreak from the Irish people.
	The way that the Garter have been describing the situation is, this is unprecedented.
	We did not, there's no way we could have anticipated this in our culture.
	If only, jeez.
	Yeah, no, I know, I know, I know, I know.
	That seems quaint to Americans.
	A Chicagoan, even, yeah.
	Because that kind of, yeah, that kind of riling up is, yeah, not something that usually- A Chicagoan from St.
	Louis.
	That's a Tuesday, man!
	And it sucks!
	It fucking sucks!
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	But you know, it's some crazy shit, and Russell just uses it to be like, oh, they can't be right-wing!
	They can't be right-wing, it's nothing to do with their history!
	Look at their history, they've been oppressed the whole time they've existed!
	What does that have to do with anything?
	Wales has been oppressed the entire time that we fucking existed, but we definitely have right-wing fucking racists.
	I know that for sure.
	Ridiculous.
	Well, it's the link to stochastic terrorism, the link to violent, vehement, xenophobic disinformation to scare people Those connections can directly be made in a way that we've never been able to prove in the history of the human race.
	You couldn't look up Jack the Ripper's Google searches, you know?
	No.
	I mean, I realize that I picked an unsolved.
	I apologize to my true crime heads out there.
	No, no, no.
	I think that works, because had we been able to look through people's shit, we would have probably found them.
	Yeah, we couldn't look up, like, Jeffrey Dahmer's, you know, like, recipe, you know, looking on recipes.com.
	Couldn't figure that, like, that was not something that we have, that we do have now.
	Like, we know exactly why that fucking landlord stabbed a kid to death!
	Here and it was directly connected to misinformation that was being like that was one being used to incite fear and retribution in reactionary frightened people and to make somebody fucking money off of it we know that.
	And the fact that we can't do something.
	Admittedly, our justice system is woefully ill-equipped to deal with a specific kind of problem, but that means we need to fix it in a very stagnated governmental system that we have.
	Yeah, we need to fix it far more quickly and flexibly than our system will realistically allow.
	But, you know, we've got to do fucking something at the end of the day.
	And even part of looking in the Magna Carta thing was so disappointing that like, oh, our founding fathers wanted Much more dynamic documents, some of them.
	Some of them.
	Yeah.
	That are still cited now.
	It's like, oh, well, we wanted a much more dynamic, well, there were some people that wanted a much more dynamic system of government that could react to the people a lot more fluidly than it does.
	And it was such a bummer to read that and remember that.
	And part of the research for last week's episode was like, oh.
	These fucking dudes that are like, you know, the pantheon for people like Alex Jones to rattle off when like, oh, they disagree with literally everything you've ever said, sir.
	Get his name out your mouth.
	I don't agree with everything he said either, but better ideas than you.
	Yuck.
	Yuck.
	I don't think Alex and Thomas Jefferson would have been friends.
	Maybe on the slavery point.
	We're gonna skip ahead a little bit, where we get into some COVID bullshit, and Taibi has one hell of a comparison to make.
	Um, you know, once doctors cared intensely about informed consent after World War Two, after what we found out about happened in the concentration camps, you know, the Nuremberg reports made it mandatory, like for every civilized country to have informed consent with medicine.
	But when the COVID vaccine came along, there was a strong public relations campaign, like, no, just take the shot.
	And, you know, You don't need to know exactly what the results are, whether there have been side effects or not.
	That's not your concern.
	That's our concern, right?
	And that's totally antithetical to how we think in free societies, but they want to change that.
	That's a necessity for them to change that.
	And they will, you know, unless there's significant opposition.
	So that's direct comparisons of the COVID-19 vaccine to Nazi human experimentation and death camps.
	This man was once compared to Hunter S. Thompson.
	That's how lauded he once was, by the left in particular.
	And now fucking look at him.
	You said fall from grace?
	Jesus Christ.
	Ask a woman about informed consent.
	I'm sorry.
	Right.
	Get fucking real.
	Watch Rosemary's Baby, everybody.
	You don't have to watch the scary part.
	Watch the parts where she has to talk to the doctor and get help.
	I get that it's a horror movie, but it was...
	The finger on the pulse of the way that women were treated by doctors.
	This guy could talk to a woman to ever have an idea about informed consent and doctors needed to, specifically male doctors, needed to be forced.
	To explain themselves and to get informed consent.
	To say that World War II started informed consent from doctors is ahistorical.
	That is crazy.
	And stupid.
	And also, I don't remember seeing the doc- I'd like to see the thing that details that, because I don't feel like it happened quite the way he says it did.
	Yeah, ask my mom!
	Fucking come on!
	Let's just ask your mom!
	It's nuts!
	He would just have to talk to a woman to probably know better, but he's too busy asking if he can fuck them in the ass without a condom.
	No shit!
	So instead we get this line of nonsense.
	Yeah, we've covered it a million times.
	What he's saying is obviously bullshit.
	Like, the vaccine was in its early stages.
	It was very publicly known, with all the results publicly available as they came in.
	No one forced anyone to take the shot, which is why there are still plenty of people who don't have a fucking vaccine now.
	The ones that are still alive.
	And societal pressure is not the same as government order.
	And you know that, Taibi.
	You fucking know that.
	Like, you're not that stupid.
	You're a little bit stupid, but you're not that stupid.
	Also, I fucking guarantee that he's vaccinated, so he had to sign the same shit that I did, and he had to hear the same spiel from a lovely Walgreens employee just like I did.
	I'm sorry.
	Absurd.
	I would be very shocked if Russell isn't also vaccinated, but I can't... Oh, he definitely is.
	Get real.
	Get fucking real.
	I know, he'll say that he's not, but there's no way fucking...
	In the next clip we hear a couple of questions from Russell's audience as to what they want to say to Matt Taibbi.
	We've got a few questions and comments to pass on from our community.
	One is, does Matt from Jim Earthsey in our community, does Matt think the silver lining of COVID could be the starting of a revolution as it's awakened previously idle people?
	Then this is from Testimony.
	This is like a comment rather than a question.
	The internet was a CIA project.
	It's literally designed to conduct surveillance and distribute propaganda.
	I'd like you to tell me if that's true from testimony or it's just a sort of an on like a sort of a rumor from the dark edges of the internet and what did you think about the comment as well as that CIA internet comment?
	Um, you know, on the CIA internet front, I mean, look, obviously the internet had defense roots.
	Uh, I don't know that it was necessarily exactly created specifically with social control in mind.
	initially created as a means for factions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines to communicate with one another
	efficiently.
	And once they figured out how to do that, they realized it had all sorts of other applications.
	I don't know a whole lot about that history, though, so I probably shouldn't comment on it.
	That was fine.
	You just did.
	You said the right thing.
	Yeah, no, but well, so, yeah, Tayibi's pretty much correct there.
	DARPA essentially created the foundation of the modern internet way back when.
	It was called something different then.
	Yeah, that's the one.
	And it was developed from there into what we know today by universities, governments, and then private companies.
	But at the end there, he's like, yeah, but hey, what do I know?
	Maybe it is a CIA project.
	I don't know everything.
	I mean, there are some things you don't need to care.
	It's fine.
	You can just say, like, now.
	Maybe they're like, you've proven that you can identify a situation that you can't speak to.
	So you've shown your ability, you can't speak to this.
	So then where else, where else should we maybe apply that standard?
	I mean, the thing is, he's saying he can't speak to it, but he also just spoke to it accurately, so it's like, well, no, just stick with what you've got and don't try and kowtow to the person saying that the internet was developed by the CIA.
	You don't need to.
	You don't need to.
	It's not a thing.
	Yeah.
	As though Russell's audience isn't fucking chock full of conspiracy idiots with batshit ideas.
	I frankly find this terrifying.
	We're going to use this subject now as a jumping off point into internet surveillance, and
	here's what Taibbi has to say.
	I frankly find this terrifying.
	One of the things we see in these documents, there's a ton of these sort of corporate marketing
	types who are involved in these projects, and they're applying technologies that they
	use to monitor how people feel about their products.
	Like does this, they use algorithms to analyze, does this social media post make people feel good or bad about software X, right?
	Now they're applying that to how people feel about their governments, how people feel about government policies, and they're dividing everything into These binary categories, friend, foe, positive, negative, you know, with us, against us.
	Again, that's totally antithetical to what we think of in traditionally democratic society.
	We think, well, there's a lot of us with lots of different ideas, and collectively, we all get somewhere really cool together.
	They do not think that way at all.
	They think there's one North Star truth, And everybody who's on the other side of that is wrong and needs to be suppressed.
	And that's, to me, that's the beginning of, like, authoritarianism for real.
	And that's scary as hell.
	Yeah, authoritarianism and sort of at least one definition of fascism, you know, the state corporations and media coming together.
	So what he's talking about there is COVID misinformation.
	That's what he's talking about.
	It's so hard for me to remember that.
	It's so hard for me to keep that in my head.
	That's what they're actually fucking talking about here.
	Private companies and governments hunting it down on the internet, which they do.
	They act like, oh, there's just one North Star truth and everything's in these binary categories, and let me say this for the second time in as many weeks, truth is binary.
	Something is either true or it isn't.
	There's wiggle room when we don't know whether something is true or not, but when we do know,
	it's either true or it's false.
	That is it.
	So when people are saying things online that are not only harmful but demonstrably false,
	then yes, they need dealing with by removing said content or putting a big sign over it
	saying "This is bullshit, here's why."
	Um, yeah.
	It's fucking absurd.
	Yeah.
	The position of these people.
	Again, it's like, oh, I don't like that they're, like, okay, cite, give me an example.
	Give me, like, put it in, like, take it from the pie in the sky and put it in real terms and write it.
	I know what Russell's examples would be.
	It'd be like, oh, yeah, there are things on transmission and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Like, well, yeah, you're wrong, though.
	You know, what you're saying is bullshit.
	And that's why it needs to be highlighted and pointed out.
	This is bullshit.
	Yeah.
	And be worried about corporations monitoring us and data mining and stealing our data.
	Like, yeah, be worried about that.
	Oh, wait, you're talking about fucking COVID?
	Come on!
	Yeah, so speaking of data mining and all of that, you know, Russell does mention it at some point in this episode, and I cut the clips out because it wasn't overly relevant, but I've told you that he's been working with a company called Sticker Mule for a while.
	I've told you that way you can get free stickers.
	Cheap.
	We have, yeah.
	Well, they're free.
	Stickermule.com slash Russell, I think it is.
	You go on there, type in your details, they send you a pack of Russell Brand stickers for free, right?
	Free shipping?
	Really?
	Yeah, completely free.
	Completely free.
	Which, to me, anytime there's something that's available for free, I'm like, well, who's the product?
	It's probably me.
	And so I started to take a little bit of a look at their Terms of Service and everything else, and yeah, they're selling everything.
	They sell every little thing they can to everyone they can.
	And then Russell's on here talking about how, oh yeah, people selling data, that's not good, is it?
	By the way, stick-a-mule!
	Get my stickers with my face on!
	Now listeners, I will say that I asked about shipping because usually if something is free, free leggings, free stickers, and then they just charge you shipping, it's not free.
	Yeah, they just got cheap shipping and it's a very cheap product, but free shipping.
	Okay, that like something to show up to your house for free.
	10,000 packs of free stickers.
	And so, yeah, you can get them if you want them, but that fucking sticker mule are gonna have your data and they are gonna sell it.
	They email a lot.
	Yeah, right.
	What was interesting was, I remember looking for some of those stickers when everything came out about Russell being a rapist.
	And they were there before, and then kind of in the immediate aftermath, the page disappeared.
	And I was like, oh, that's interesting.
	And then they brought it back.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	If I can pick a lane.
	Do one thing or the other.
	Clearly just like, let's see which way this lands.
	Oh, he's still there?
	Okay, yeah.
	Let's keep making money off these people's data!
	Yikes.
	Fantastic.
	Yeah, so Russell's just literally selling his audience.
	Alright, so there have been a few direct comparisons between Russell and Donald Trump.
	Selling of the audience is probably a good one, actually.
	And not least of all, the tendency to sexually assault women.
	But another thing that they have in common is the tendency to perk up whenever their name is mentioned in something.
	Like how in policy documents, you know, they'd put the name Trump in there as many times as possible to make it more likely that the sitting president would actually read it, because otherwise he wouldn't.
	He'd get bored and put it down.
	So funny.
	It's cute.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Like a puppy.
	What's next is kind of Russell's version.
	In Lee Fang's piece about Moderna, which I obviously paid a special interest to because I was in it, it showed how yet another NGO, I think they were called something like the PGA, have been set up and how Moderna have been employing former FBI agents, or at least FBI operatives, and how Moderna are spending a lot of money observing online dissent and are looking to control shadow banks.
	I can't believe that a company that didn't exist a couple of years ago are targeting dissenters online and have the compliance of the government, have the compliance of social media sites.
	That, again, and obviously something that's affected me personally, is an indication that this is escalating, I suppose because it has the capacity to escalate, into Inconceivable territory now, doesn't it, Matt?
	Oh, absolutely!
	Yes, and... Yes, and.
	Yes, and.
	So, the PGA, Pro Golfers Association of America, is spying on you, apparently.
	I could give him the correct acronym for the public good projects, but I like this version better.
	That's cute.
	The PGA is spying on you, yeah.
	Tiger Woods, coming to get you.
	LBG LPGA not at all Anyway, I debunked literally everything he just said a
	couple of weeks ago in our Lee Fang is an idiot episode because Lee Fang is an
	Idiot and this clip goes to prove one thing specifically and that is that Russell just blindly believes whatever
	guests on his show Tell him or or
	Or possibly someone looks into it and Russell just doesn't give a shit whether it's true or not, but either way, it's the same result, and given his nature, I'm betting it's the first option.
	I mean, there's no way he's looking into it himself that much, is for sure.
	And that he's extremely susceptible to flattery is a great way to track him.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	A hundred percent.
	I'm willing to bet the more times that I put his name into an episode, the more he'll be like, Because that's just the nature of the man.
	That is just absolutely the way he is.
	I wish I didn't have the opposite reaction.
	Me too!
	Me too!
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you know, his staff have previously documented how he sits there obsessively refreshing trends and whatever else to see what people think of him and his name and everything else.
	So, you know.
	It's not entirely shocking.
	I'm just an incredible fucking narcissist.
	Now from here, Taibi fucks off back to his cave somewhere to whinge about cancel culture.
	So we don't have to deal with him anymore.
	And thank God, because Jesus Christ.
	But we have one final clip to play, which is the sign off from Russell.
	And again, feels like an escalation to me.
	Click the red button to become an Awakened Wonder so you can join us live for that, as well as...
	Readings with the Lord, whether you are a follower of JC and the almighty forces in the Old Testament, or the single force, of course, that's what Monotheism is, or you might love the Bhagavad Gita.
	We joined together to, remember in the conversation I was saying about where you're going to get the energy from, you're going to get the energy from God, is where you're going to get the energy from.
	You're going to summon it up from your belly, baby, and we're going to learn how to do that together.
	And some new people who have joined us to do that include You're saved!
	and doggy-do. Welcome! You're saved, you're on the Ark, we're heading to a glorious new
	future together. Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
	Until then, if you can, stay free.
	[Sigh]
	[Burp]
	[Gasp]
	You're, you're, you are saved, you're on the Ark. So become an awakened wonder and give
	me money and you will literally be joining Noah's Ark as the world floods around you.
	That is a fantastic deal.
	That's a lot, man.
	That's a value.
	That's value for money.
	For the low, low price of $6 a month or whatever.
	Yeah.
	I don't even think Jim Baker offers that.
	You've got to buy the buckets if you want to be saved.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	How much were the buckets?
	I don't remember.
	I don't, I mean, I have no idea.
	Way more than they were worth, I know that.
	More than if you just made one, which is insane.
	Well, yeah, and you could, because, well, wasn't it Jim Bakker's that all started expiring as well?
	All the food started going off because someone opened them?
	Oh, no, no, no, because they, like, oh, yeah, I mean, the way they're set up, there's, like, every single part of it is wrong.
	The food is too expensive, and it's gross, And a lot of it is, like, infested with vermin, or is too easily accessed by vermin to whom it is interested in infesting.
	Or it's just already bad, but the expiration date has nothing to do with it.
	So, like, it's supposed to last for a long time, and they open up, and it's just lies on lies on lies.
	And you can't return them.
	And specifically, I remember, like, there was, I think it was a Guys episode.
	It was, like, the company's selling these buckets, Anything goes wrong.
	There are no returns under any circumstances, which, boy, that's genius.
	If you just don't want to be accountable at all as a business, you're like, and even if it shows up fucked up and gross and full of bugs, you can't return it and we won't refund you.
	Amazing.
	I mean, it's bold.
	I question whether it's legal, but it's bold!
	Well, I mean, it's America, you can do whatever you want.
	Yeah, you're not wrong.
	Consumers are right for the picking, but yeah, it's amazing.
	Amazing!
	We get cheap stuff from Sticker Mule sometimes, that bums me out.
	Oh, and for listeners, Russell is currently holding up a sticker with a crow and Stay Free.
	With the farting bird.
	Yeah, fantastic.
	Alright, fuck that.
	Yeah, wow.
	So yeah, that was Matt Taibbi, anyway.
	How are you feeling about him now?
	No, you know what?
	This was honestly way less distasteful than I thought it was going to be.
	It was kind of more entertaining, too.
	It was kind of fun to see him just paddle around in their little boat, you know?
	Because, I don't know, I think about... First of all, what I want to say is, with the Twitter files or with Hillary's emails, all those kind of document leaks... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	The Panama Papers, the Pentagon Papers, those are very important, dire, like journalists have died.
	That's a distinction.
	Yeah, those are very important and extremely vital, you know, like whistleblowing moments that need to be reported on and need to be examined.
	But it takes experience to examine those, and I guess it's not fair to accuse Matt Taibbi of being inexperienced in analyzing information.
	But you can kind of make anything out of it.
	Yeah.
	With enough information, you can do your magnetic poetry and put it together.
	And what I will say is, if you have enough emails from enough people that sound official or that you can speculate about, then you can come up with whatever you want.
	The Hillary emails, that cache of emails that was released, Is still being milked by QAnon folks.
	Oh yeah.
	They're still going into it, and they will continue to go into it.
	It's a perpetual text because we have so much electronic information that we're exchanging in our modern world that you can pick up a thread and wrap yourself around the axle in any of these big document dumps.
	If you want to, so just keep that in mind.
	Yeah, it also drives me nuts with these things with the Twitter files and with now the UK files and everything, how they just drag it out.
	Oh, we're going to release them a bit at a time for the next 15 fucking years.
	Okay, Jesus Christ.
	Why?
	Either you have something or you don't.
	Exactly, why?
	Or you want to drive traffic to your substack, is what you want to do.
	Exactly, which is why we have, oh, what are these new Twitter files?
	No, it's the same fucking ones.
	They're just making up new shit.
	That's all it is.
	It's not the same as an actual leak like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers or whatever else.
	There are legitimate things and then there's this bullshit that people like Taibi and Schellenberger use to try and ALICE Well, to try and legitimise themselves, and yeah, for anyone just taking even a cursory look at the actual things, because if you go and look at Matt Taibbi's article, it's exactly as you've said.
	It's just bullshit pieced together, of like, oooh, I made a picture!
	Like, ah, but did ya?
	Did ya, Matt?
	Did you?
	Yeah, it's that kind of like, well, let's just insert a question mark here so that we can kind of just, just enough, like, sowing doubt.
	Pretty much.
	You want, like, plausible deniability.
	You want, like, reasonable doubt.
	That's what it's like.
	Yeah.
	And it's such a, it's such a fucking lazy thing as well, because, like, obviously, as I mentioned, the Canary already did this to start with, then Branko Markatic in 2020 fucking wrote about this.
	And now Matt Taibbi is like, Like, oh, look at this thing I've got!
	Like, no, buddy.
	This is old.
	This is old.
	Well, I mean, yeah, right?
	And are other people... Why don't they have access?
	The selectivity with who gets to have access, whereas if you want to look at the Panama Papers, you can find them.
	You can find the Panama Papers.
	You can find... This is all readily available.
	Very harrowing to read.
	Of course.
	And to think, yeah, the implications are insane.
	Right.
	Yeah, the other thing that I was thinking about... The harrowing part is that no one's doing anything about them.
	That's the harrowing part.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	And to see, like, the, you know, I mean, watching the documentary is the easiest way for me to access this information, to have it organized in front of me so that I can Yeah.
	I can do something with it.
	It's a good overview, and also watching the dejected... These journalists that work so hard, and they're so diligent, and they're dedicated, and to just see the dejection that's just boiling up from their souls, that like, oh, nothing's changing?
	Yeah.
	Oh, when Warren Bernstein... That was the one time.
	Exactly, exactly.
	That was the one time everybody cared.
	Exactly.
	It was like, oh, this is going to be the next Watergate.
	This is going to be huge.
	It was fucking heartbreaking.
	This is going to rock the world.
	Nothing.
	Yeah.
	It was almost too big.
	Almost too big.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, right.
	But also, that's what Matt Taibbi is relying on, is them, they.
	It's very like the globalists.
	It's not unlike... Yeah.
	It's not unlike that, you know?
	I would say that the Panama Papers and everything are too big in terms of just the sheer number of people who did fucking really bad things, definitely did these really bad things, but there were just so many of them that it's like, well, how can we even?
	Where do you even start?
	Whereas Taibbi's is just like, well, look at these thousands of documents!
	Like, what?
	There's all kinds of things in there.
	But that's the thing!
	They recruited other journalists because Panama Papers, as an example, they knew going in, the sheer volume of information would have to be parsed out because it was so massive.
	And so they delegated parts to different journalists all over the world, and they coordinated all over the world, which is incredibly impressive.
	Maybe almost like the vaccine rollout.
	It's incredibly impressive to coordinate whenever you really need to do something important for people.
	Crazy.
	So that's the thing.
	If it's too big and too unwieldy, then you can't report on it by yourself.
	It's like that's what journalism understands is to apply journalistic principles.
	It's like, well, then it's too much for one person to tackle and you need to call in a team and you need to have people that give enough of a shit to make it work.
	And then you can report like, all right, I have proof that there's money laundering from drug cartels going through this, you know, like HSBC, like there's these banks and this is the problem and Wells Fargo and blah, blah, blah.
	That's specific.
	You are making specific accusations and then you work.
	Following up with proof.
	Not saying, just creating like a questioning miasma.
	That's not reporting!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Just gesturing at some people going, ooh?
	Yeah.
	That's vibing.
	That's vibing.
	It's exactly what it is.
	And honestly, the whole article reads exactly like that.
	I'm sure it does.
	Wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if you do, sure, go to Matt Taibbi's sub stack, it's terrible.
	Well, yeah, that and like, you know, I've been thinking about and hearing, basically, especially like the Twitter files thing came out and Matt Taibbi kind of popped up in my consciousness again.
	And, I mean, obviously he's been bopping around doing all this stuff for a while now, but, you know, and I've heard other people ask, and I've asked myself, like, how does someone who has such a great reputation and was so, like, was a serious reporter for such a long time be, just fall off the deep end?
	And I think that, I would say that if you are the kind of person that behaves towards women in the way that he admitted himself, that undermines your credibility and maybe that you're kind of just a piece of shit human being from nose to tail and that you were, but also, yeah, right?
	But also.
	I think that there is, like, just how independent journalism has had to respond to the defunding and the defanging of journalism.
	Regular old investigative journalism that was local or that was, you know, like, there was And they were independent in a way, you know, pre-Gannett taken over or whatever.
	There was already independent journalism.
	And they fell by the wayside because of capitalism, because of consolidation, because of the internet.
	I can't help but think that the quote-unquote independent media, which honestly, we are in an incredible renaissance, I believe, of independent media for both good and ill, right?
	Podcasts are making deep dives.
	It's the same thing with the rich socialite lady who had a cause and she Got, I mean, they took her right to Bedlam, you know, a hundred years ago and locked her away.
	And then she came back on and reported on the hideous conditions within the, you know, within the institutional system.
	I think that was, was it in London?
	Is that around London?
	I don't remember.
	Anyway, but she was in the UK.
	And so that kind of reporting, that was a moment in genuinely investigative journalism.
	And regardless of how rules used to be different and veracity was questionable, if it was in a newspaper 100 years ago, yellow journalism, all that kind of stuff.
	But there was a social cause that she saw and that she identified and she went after it.
	And we have these moments where there's these big pushes and shifts, basically when capitalism is proven that people like knowing stuff and they'll pay to know things.
	And so capitalism's like, well, okay, we'll pay them some more money and then you guys can know some stuff as long as we secure our bag.
	And there is, I wonder if people like Matt Taibbi, and even like Michael Schellenberger and, oh my god, the other guy, fuck, whatever, anyway, people that- Fang?
	Well, they were already established reporters or established authors.
	I don't think it's just money.
	I think that there's probably a frustration with the fact-checking.
	Fact-checking is hard.
	Having to report for Rolling Stone means that you are going back and forth with lawyers all the time.
	It can feel like you're being browbeaten.
	It can feel very difficult and challenging to say what you want to say.
	So it also was probably less profitable.
	But the thing is, getting to write for Rolling Stone or whatever, pre-internet or even early internet, in order to make a living doing a reporting job, working for Rolling Stone was the ticket.
	And I don't necessarily think that that's the ticket anymore.
	I think that Yeah, yeah.
	can probably have a very ideologically, you know, like he can feel very self-righteous
	about still being a reporter and still like exposing blah blah blah, but like, you make
	more money if you're grifted. And you get to keep more of it. And you get treated differently.
	I think with the state of journalism today, there is no ticket anymore.
	Exactly.
	It's good luck.
	And this is what we're seeing is the challenges is like, if you don't have, like being able to just go on Substack, no one is, no one is checking up on you.
	No one is going after you.
	No, there's not And the thing is, I look at these people's fucking articles on Substack, the problem is it always comes down to something that is inherently uncheckable.
	It always comes down to, I have this source.
	Well, how the fuck am I supposed to identify the veracity of this fucking claim if it's all from this mysterious source that only you know about and there's no fucking editor, there's no anyone to be able to actually verify the things that you're saying.
	It's just you saying them.
	Right, and you can have anonymous sources!
	That is a thing within journalism, but there has to be corroboration from several different angles to add up, not just this one source.
	It has to be verified by, like, the information has to be verified by more than just that, as well.
	And it always hinges on just that one fucking thing.
	It's never like, oh, this is double-confirmed, at least.
	This is triple-confirmed.
	No!
	It's the one fucking guy.
	Oh, this is wonderful!
	I'm wonderful!
	Okay.
	How am I supposed to check that?
	I can't.
	Right, whereas, like, subsect articles I come upon in my own media diet, every other fucking word is blue!
	Like, there's citations all over the place!
	Yes, hyperlinks everywhere, there's a fucking reference list at the bottom.
	Yeah, the reference list, yeah.
	Here is the detail, here is the information.
	Exactly.
	Right, I mean, Taibbi does hyperlink stuff, I'll say that, and he's fucking hyperlinks all over the place.
	They lead to bullshit like Branko Markatic.
	I'm like, well, that's making it worse.
	That's not helping.
	Exactly.
	That's what I'm saying.
	I think that they have learned.
	The thing is, and what's scary is that misinformation is getting so much more sophisticated because it's looking more like journalism than it ever has been able to because they're all feeding into... It's like, It's it's you know we are moving from a time where like Breitbart and Drudge Report and like you know like Rush whatever like you had this kind of like conservative cacophony that could launder ideas that maybe they got from the spotlight or the John Birch Society or whatever and they could kind of churn through these ideas to get them into the mainstream and now you have so many people that are like that.
	Do not have to answer to an editor and a legal team to get the word out, and we're getting the spectrum again of legitimate journalism to absolute hogwash, because the limiter has been taken off.
	again of, you know, of legitimate journalism to absolute hogwash because there's no, you
	know, like the limiter has been taken off, you know, the controls have been completely
	thrown out the window.
	I do feel like that is also a distinction between the US and the UK as well because
	like obviously your television news is fucking insane, but your printed media is generally
	better.
	Whereas over here, we are fucking ruled by the tabloid press, and when it's not the tabloid press, you've got places like the Torygraph just throwing out propaganda in more subtle ways than safe.
	What's the Wall Street Journal here?
	Right, right, right, right.
	Whereas then you've got, like, The Sun or The Daily Mail.
	I mean, The Sun does it with tits, at least, I guess.
	It's like, well, here's boobs in propaganda.
	Okay, at least you get boobs, I suppose.
	Whereas The Daily Mail is fucking, here you go, immigrants are coming to steal your cars and give you cancer, okay?
	New York Post, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, right, you know.
	And, yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know.
	But I can't get the World Weekly News anymore at the grocery store.
	What the fuck is up with that?
	What's Batboy up to?
	It's not even fun.
	Used to be fun.
	Yeah.
	Somebody used to be getting abducted by aliens on the front cover of that shit.
	I genuinely do miss it.
	What a moment.
	I had no idea how lucky we were.
	To get the Batboys.
	To get the Batboys of the world.
	Did any of us.
	Alright, well.
	Well, that brings us neatly to a close, I think.
	That's a nice place to finish.
	BATBOY!
	Koda!
	BATBOY!
	Fiend!
	So, if you want to support us and what we do, come and join us on Patreon.
	It's patreon.com slash offbrand.
	Yeah, come check out our latest show, talking about our own creative shit.
	You can hear some of my tunes, you can see some of Lauren's art.
	It's all super cool.
	Speaking for Lauren's art, less for my music.
	But yeah, we have a really interesting conversation, and we'll probably do more of that, I imagine, as well.
	Because there's a lot to talk about with creative stuff, with two people who do creative stuff.
	So there you go.
	Especially as a massive nerd about all this.
	Like, art's the history drug.
	That's how I got dosed.
	So that's what my brain is full of.
	So if you want to hear about Swedish wedding attire of the 1600s, oh, I can tell you all about that!
	And I can talk to you about Swedish death metal, and then we can marry it up, right?
	They are connected.
	I actually can.
	We can do a Swedish death metal opera about that.
	Much like turnips, you'd be surprised.
	Fucking turnips.
	I know, I need to do a turnip history corner.
	We need a turnip magnet or a turnip badge.
	We need something.
	Well, I gotta do a turnip expose is what I have to do.
	Turnip expose and then a turnip badge.
	We need emotional support hammers.
	There's all kinds of merch we need.
	Lauren, you're gonna be busy.
	Oh yeah, right.
	Because you've got loads of time.
	If you want to drop us a line, say hi, that's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	We'll get back to you at some point.
	There's a Facebook group, On Brand Awakening Wonders, full of lovely people.
	Oh yeah, it'll definitely be the next year at this point, probably.
	But yeah, come and join the Facebook group, there's lovely people in there, On Brand Awakening Wonders.
	There's also a subreddit, which is onbrand underscore pod, and that's also full of lovely people.
	And you know, if you're a Reddit person, Go there and say hi.
	There's interesting discussions happening.
	On the socials, we're the on-brand part of most things, except for Twitter.
	We're something else there, but you know what?
	It's full of racists.
	Who cares?
	And personal socials, I'm at lworthofficial and Lauren is at may.by.lauren.be.
	Come follow us, too.
	Come and say hi.
	Not a lot of promises.
	You can see a picture of Ralph Fiennes being Macbeth and being a badass if you come and look at mine.
	And a picture of my kid, I guess.
	I don't really post there enough, to be honest.
	Oh!
	I certainly don't post enough lately.
	But, I mean, you can get a vibe.
	And I'm going to try to at least do some, like, story sales, I think.
	Yeah, that'd be cool.
	But if you're in the Chicago or St.
	Louis area, I do post wherever I have.
	I'm kind of furiously restocking on my consignment in Chicago and St.
	Louis right now.
	So there are places you can get stuff and Go check out Lauren's shop as well, in the magnet link, just have a little scoot around the shop as well, see what's there, see what you like.
	I'm gonna try and grab some of their magnets at least, we'll see.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
	Oh, and if you do venture to my Instagram, there are also pictures of my birthday shenanigans in Liverpool, and there is a pigeon that has been shitting on a statue of Carl Jung, which is very amusing.
	So I enjoyed that quite a lot, given the topic of this show, how often he is brought up.
	Anyway, that's our show, everybody.
	We love you very much.
	Thank you for listening.
	Thank you for hanging in there.
	It's good to be back on our bullshit a little bit.
	You know?
	Yeah.
	Thank you so much.
	Yeah, your time and attention is really valuable.
	So I appreciate it a great deal.
	Hell yeah, and we've got some exciting stuff in the works thanks to our patrons.
	Alright, we'll see you next week with probably some more crazy bullshit.
	I hope it's less dull than Matt Taibbi, but we'll see.
	That guy, good lord.
	Stick to writing, buddy, stick to writing.
	Alright, well, we'll see you next week, everybody.

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