A Farewell To Bad News feat Ken Klippenstein (E278)
A discussion of the corporatization of media, his departure from The Intercept, how stories get "killed" and how conspiracy theorists and MAGA supporters' claims about the media get their oxygen — with Ken Klippenstein, investigative journalist.
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Ken Klippenstein: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (http://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
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QAA was formerly known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 278 of Farewell to Bad News.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Ken Klippenstein, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
As we recently learned in Alex Garland's movie Civil War, America is polarized, and the only people who can save it, if we just let them do their damn job, are journalists.
But there's just one problem.
People trust them less and less.
Ask MAGA supporters and QAnon followers, and you'll probably hear a familiar line.
The fake news media is corrupt, and you can't rely on them for information.
This often causes a knee-jerk reaction from their liberal counterparts, who insist that journalism is under attack to the detriment of democracy.
But as usual, there's a grain of truth to the conspiratorial thinking.
The majority of the mainstream news media is owned by our ruling class, literally, and they often pay lip service to the very security state they're supposed to be covering critically, even using their spokespeople as sources while protecting their anonymity.
There's also the question of funding.
Billionaires bankroll media institutions, and in return, those in charge of these flagship outlets mitigate criticism of their supposedly philanthropic benefactors.
And if you don't take money from billionaire donors, you'll still have to answer to corporate advertisers.
In many direct and indirect ways, flagship outlets like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others serve the interests of the United States' ruling class, to the detriment of us commoners.
I've been quoted in four of those outlets.
That's right.
I'm trying to ruin your career.
Take him away!
You know, we'll do the opposite of the thing they do with cops.
We'll just say, there are some good apples.
Then there are outlets that for many represent a bastion of independent investigative journalism, like The Intercept.
But even they aren't immune to the encroaching influence of corporations and billionaires.
This has come into sharper focus recently when Ken Klippenstein, investigative journalist and friend of the show, published a Substack article entitled, Why I'm Resigning from The Intercept.
in which he laid out the increasing corporatization of the outlet and its adverse effects on the, quote, fearless and adversarial journalism it's supposed to produce.
Fascinatingly, part of the story Ken wrote involved a leaked members list of the Bohemian Grove, a men-only club and retreat composed of the richest and most powerful people in the world.
We've covered the Bohemian Grove in episodes 36 with Sophie Weiner and 172 with John Ronson, Although it's hardly what conspiracy theorists posit, a place where the rich and powerful sacrifice babies to an owl god and satanic rituals, the fact remains that it's a secretive retreat during which the elite congregate, drink, piss on trees, and plot, despite its motto declaring, Weaving spiders come not here.
Actually, I was recently in San Francisco, and I went to the block where they have their big, like, red brick building, and they do have a beautiful plaque with the owl, which we will name Moloch for our purposes, and it does have that motto, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.
It's pretty cool.
Didn't enter the building.
I did want to leave San Francisco, so.
All of this to say that we are delighted to have Kung Fu Kenny himself back on the podcast to walk us through his recent diss track, and more importantly, his reporting.
Welcome, Ken.
Hey, good to be with you guys again.
So first off, could you walk us through, and take your time with this because it's pretty juicy, the incidents that led to your departure from The Intercept?
Yeah, so the major precipitating incident was I tried to do a story on Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, and his decision to grant a $100 million charity grant to actress Eva Longoria.
This was 50-50, and then the other half going to the former chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, William McRaven.
And what was interesting about that decision was that $100 million figure was exactly what, in the last year, was the loss that the Washington Post posted.
resulting in, you know, devastating layoffs to the newsroom, which is
obviously something that's happening across the industry and not unique to
The Washington Post. But what is unique about The Washington Post is that it's
owned by one of the wealthiest men on earth who clearly had that hundred
million sitting around that he could have prioritized for the news as he said
he would when he first bought it, but he chose not to, instead giving it to this
former admiral and this actress. And that in itself just, you know, struck me as
And so I decided to write it up.
And honestly, I thought it was a pretty safe article by Intercept standards, just because, you know, one of our co-founders, Jeremy Scahill, wrote an excellent book and documentary, both called Dirty Wars, detailing the Joint Special Operations Command role overseas and Admiral McRaven's adventures or misadventures therein.
And so I thought, you know, this is vintage Intercept fare.
But what ended up happening was the general counsel, the company's top lawyer, ended up coming back with concerns that he had, which weren't legal in nature.
They were editorial in And those concerns, as described to my editor, who then
immediately called me and I, you know, notarized what he told me in a memo that I made
summarizing what had happened because I was just in such disbelief about it.
It was told to me that the general counsel said that he had concerns about how this might
sit with our own billionaire benefactor, who, like Jeff Bezos, is watching his outlet, you
know, flounder.
The Intercept had a number of layoffs several months ago.
And so there are some similarities between the Washington Post and The Intercept, which
he's not totally wrong about, but that can't stop you from doing the story just because
it's embarrassing to somebody that happens to give us money.
And so there was a showdown between my editor and the general counsel in which the general
counsel just said, I'm killing the story.
He just asserted that he didn't say, here's how we can do the story instead, or maybe
you can address these concerns about our own founder.
It was I'm killing the story.
And then my editor called me immediately thereafter and told me what had happened.
I took notes on it.
And then at that point, it became clear to me that, you know, I can't stay here because,
you know, if they're going to let, you know, non-legal concerns play a role, not just in
the direction of the coverage, but outright killing it and in ways that I might not even
know, that's just not a tenable position to be in long term.
Again, particularly when the story is something that is such vintage Interceptfare, for the reasons that I just described.
You know, it was interesting, when I first read your article, and I read the part about the lawyer coming in, not with legal concerns, but with editorial concerns, I, you know, it felt a lot like what I've seen happen in entertainment.
Not news, where legal counsel at these big studios will actually be involved in creative decisions of, you know, some of the features that the studio is putting out.
That was really interesting to me, because I was like, well, this seems indicative of something that an entertainment company would do, but now we're seeing it in a news organization, which, yeah, didn't sit right with me either.
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
You know, you kind of put things into perspective.
The $100 million, you know, the equivalent of that sum, you know, in relation to Bezos's fortune would be if someone making $100,000 a year gave 50 bucks.
Yeah, this is nothing to them.
And I could see why the General Counsel was afraid of, you know, The Intercept's billionaire donor, Pierre Omidyar, potentially being embarrassed by that.
I mean, honestly, I don't think he gives a shit and he's going to pay any attention to it.
But if he did, yeah, it doesn't make him look great.
But he shouldn't look great because this is nothing to them.
Absolutely nothing.
This is such a paltry, you know, sum of money for them to keep, not just The Intercept, but The Washington Post afloat.
And that's what they say they want to do when they get into the business.
When Bezos bought The Post, he didn't say, I want to make a bunch of money.
He said, I want to save journalism.
He essentially said that.
He cared about journalism.
He wanted to shore it up.
Well, what happened to that?
Also, it brings up the question, too, you know, if the Washington Post suffered a, you know, $100 million loss and then he makes a $100 million donation to charity, you know, is that a tax write-off?
Is that, you know, something that's going to look better for his books as opposed to, you know, putting the money back into, you know, the journalism that he claimed he wanted to save?
Yeah, I'm interested before we jump into the McRaven stuff and why Eva Longoria also requires $50 million.
I mean, obviously, I want to get into that, but I also want to kind of go over a little more some of the stories that The Intercept caused issues with.
So what other than this story, you know, has occurred along the way?
And what is it about the structure of The Intercept that makes you say that the corporatization is kind of encroaching on the journalism?
Yeah, so the Bezos case is kind of the most outrageous, but there were other stories that That made it clear I couldn't stay.
And one of those was, you know, I got a set of leaked diplomatic cables from a source of mine in the U.S.
government detailing the U.S.
attempts prior to the U.N.
vote on Palestinian statehood, which took place about a week or two ago.
And, you know, these cables detailed not just the U.S.' 's attempts to lobby member nations in the U.N.
to vote against it, but specifically one country, Ecuador, which has a far-right government right now and is under enormous pressure in the Latin American region after having stormed a Mexican embassy to arrest someone, which has led to condemnation from various international bodies both in the region and the world.
It made them very unpopular within the region.
And the U.S.
comes to them, and I'm paraphrasing from the document, but essentially saying, hey, maybe we can work together.
We need a vote on the U.N.
Security Council so that we're not unilaterally vetoing Palestinian statehood.
So the goal is get at least one other country and then you can say there were multiple countries and the headlines are not US vetoes Palestinian statehood vote.
And so, you know, that obviously to me was extremely important to get out before the vote so it can inform public debate, inform the region, inform the people of Ecuador to understand what's going on.
And, you know, in the documents were given to me several days prior to the vote.
So I had limited time.
I type it up.
I get, you know, expert comment.
I interviewed a foreign foreign minister of Ecuador to give me some color and context, like the Mexican embassy example that I described to you a moment ago.
And so I send it publication again, legal.
intervenes and says, "Okay, we need to, this is a source protection issue. We need to run this
through our security expert." And you know, I don't have a problem with that of itself. But
then the security expert comes back with, I'm not exaggerating, like over a dozen different
concerns that need to be addressed before we can run it.
And I had tried to reason with them before, you know, in cases of classified documents. That makes
sense.
I'm willing to go through that because there are criminal sanctions for it.
But this particular document is what's called sensitive but unclassified, meaning it's perfectly legal to disclose it, to leak it to the press.
There's not going to be an FBI investigation.
There can't be.
It's not within their mandate.
It's not a violation of the criminal code to provide.
I try to, you know, convey that to them in the past and they're just not, they're really not sympathetic to that.
And, you know, in the past I would have been willing to jump through the hoops to get it because it's not necessarily as time sensitive, but realizing the significance of that UN Palestinian statehood vote, I thought, gosh, I have to do everything I can to try to get this through.
So I make a big stink about it.
And not everyone on the, you know, I'm very critical of the business side of the intercept in this resignation letter, but not everyone there's bad.
And so I had one sympathetic person who understood the stakes of the story and how important it was to get out.
So we just ram it through.
And fortunately, the day before the vote, end up getting it out.
Obviously, it leads to a lot of outrage and debate.
And the Ecuadorians actually end up not voting with the United States.
And it's a really exciting disposition to this story.
But then when the security and legal side finds out that we put it through without addressing
this litany of concerns they have, they go apoplectic and start complaining about all of the issues that we had
to do.
So what you have is this bureaucracy that I think, unique to The Intercept, emerged in response to the number of whistleblower indictments that their sources had suffered in the past, which caused them enormous embarrassment.
And in the context of You know, a nonprofit that relies on philanthropy just as much, you know, frankly more than they do small donors.
There's a lot of concerns about optics and appearances and how they look.
And so, you know, it was frequently conveyed to me that we can't have another reality winner.
We can't have another case like this, which again, I don't want one of those.
I mean, you know, these are my sources as well.
I care about them too.
And the reason I wasn't worried about it is because it's literally impossible for that to happen with an unclassified document.
You can't be prosecuted for it.
That's not how it works.
But they weren't willing to hear that, and so that was just another reminder of how broken and dysfunctional the bureaucracy that had emerged in response to real problems, you know, the prosecutor's source is never something that you want to see happen, but you can't, you know, go so overboard the other direction that you're just not running articles in response to it.
I mean, unfortunately, the safest way to avoid sources getting in trouble is just to not publish journalism, and to some extent it feels like that's That was a decision that was made whether or not they intended it.
I mean, yeah, that's really frustrating to hear because I feel like at most reputable news outlets, what really makes these credible news outlets credible is a bureaucracy.
You know, when I read something that's been published in a proper news outlet, I can at least have some confidence that it's been looked at by an editor and a fact checker and a lawyer.
There are people who are looking out, well, you know, for their own personal interests, but also the Brand of the news outlets.
So I know it's not statistically it was probably not going to be something.
I was just casually published, you know, there's some something very serious that was going on.
There was a process that vetted it.
There's some debate.
There's some shaping to make it very precise in order to make it as accurate as possible before I finally reaches my eyeballs.
But it sounds like, you know, you're discussing the really the downsides of that bureaucracy, which is that it neuters these stories and it makes it so that, you know, very worthwhile information isn't published at all.
Yeah, I suppose in the case of The Intercept, you have people going outside their lanes.
And as we discussed, legal commenting on things that weren't legal, security talking about things that weren't security.
Franklin felt like security theater, like when you go to the airport.
I mean, a lot of rigmarole to make it feel like you're taking... I mean, again, I'm not against any of these things, against legal overview and security overview, as long as it makes sense.
And unfortunately, the structure of The Intercept over the past several months under a new CEO and the appointment of you know, a very top-heavy, I think, business side. I mean,
literally, I posted a document showing the organizational structure of the Intercept. It's
a one-to-one ratio of newsroom staff to business staff, which again, the Intercept needs
to raise money. That makes sense, have, you know, have business staff, but one-to-one? And,
you know, I haven't seen strong evidence that the business situation is significantly improving. So, you
know, all of these just created a kind of reality that it was just like, I can't stay here long-term.
I don't want to speak for the other people there because they still do good work and there are still good people there.
And there are good people at, you know, all sorts of, you know, traditional institutions that maybe are better than me at fighting the bureaucracy.
But that's just not my temperament.
It's not something I could continue doing and, you know, remain an effective reporter.
And so that was kind of my thought process for leaving.
This has been in the works for a little while.
Can you talk a little bit about the appointment of Bill Arkin as your editor and the subsequent treatment that he received?
Yeah.
So under the new CEO, there was a kind of a massacre of the newsroom staff.
And I don't use that term lightly, but fired was the editor in chief, multiple senior editors, copy social media editor, managing editor, deputy editor left in response to all this.
So they literally have like two editors left for a staff of like Over a dozen reporters and a dozen freelancers.
And so, you know, that made the situation, again, really, something I didn't really have space to explore in the piece was how much I tried to make it work because I'm not an individualist.
I really do like being part of a team and working together with other people because you can't do it all on your own.
And so, you know, I went to the executive side and said, look, I can't get my story through because we just don't have capacity.
Can we get a contract editor that can help me with this?
And so we kind of negotiated it.
And I explained, you know, I can't stay here if I can't have something like this. So we picked this fantastic
national security editor, who's just a legend in his own right. And the fact that he doesn't do
any self-promotion, I think is why people might not recognize his name. I could give you some
examples of huge stories he's been behind.
He published information about the top secret plan to invade Iraq in 2002, code name Polo Step,
was the first one to report that for the Washington Post, I think it was, reported on the
SEAL operation that got a Navy SEAL killed in Yemen under the Trump administration in 2017,
and got a, I think it was like a 12 year old girl, I think it was a US Yemeni citizen killed as well.
I think it was like a 12 year old girl.
I think it was a us Yemeni citizen killed as well.
Huge scandal for Trump administration in his first week or so of office. You know, he revealed the
Huge scandal for Trump administration. His first week or so of office,
you know, he revealed the location of nuclear weapons around the
location of nuclear weapons around the world during the Cold War, all sorts of like amazing,
world during the cold war, all sorts of like amazing,
just a really steady hand that I thought was much needed at Yemen under the Trump administration in 2017 and got a,
just a really steady hand that I thought was much needed at the time that the
intercept had, you know, undergone this hollowing out and kind of didn't seem to
have clear direction.
And so they ended up hiring him and, you know, I was excited cause I mean, I just want to get back to the
work.
I'm not really, there's so much politics and things around the situation.
Like the intercepts where you have all these laughs.
I really just want to get back to the writing. And so we did initially,
but as soon as he came on, he was siloed.
He wasn't given access to the company's Slack.
He wasn't invited to meetings.
It was like he didn't exist.
And it quickly became clear to me that they had just given me the bare minimum of what they needed in order to keep me from quitting, which, you know, I appreciate that they did something, but this wasn't anything like what they had promised.
And then he also ended up being, you know, frequently blocked or overruled or questioned by the general counsel that I described before, again, for non-legal reasons, which I had never experienced before under any other editor.
He might give his legal thoughts on things, which were appreciated.
You know, he's an expert on defamation law and things of that nature.
I'd find that helpful.
But as soon as he swerved out of that lane into editorial, it became way harder to get
stuff through in a timely fashion.
So that was kind of the situation we found ourselves in, where, you know, I was very
excited to work with this enterprising and effective editor, but under a bureaucracy
that seemed to want it to fail, particularly after that Bezos story where my editor literally
told him to, you know, "Fuck yourself.
I'm running this story or I'm going to quit."
And then he backed off.
And that was ultimately, that's why the Bezos story came to pass.
But after that point, things became extremely dicey with the intercept bureaucracy, it seemed.
So there seems to be like two kind of concurrent issues here.
There's the fear that sources are not being protected properly, but it does sometimes seem like that's a kind of excuse to not run stories that might piss off essentially elite interests.
I mean, how do you think that balance is now playing out among the more bureaucratic side?
Um, I don't really know.
One of the difficulties was I report so frequently on leaked documents that I think I probably experience tension with them more than some of the other writers do, who maybe will write about money and politics and things that you could substantiate without leaked records.
So I'm not sure, but I know that the organizational structure has not changed.
And the new editor-in-chief that they just brought on a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in Intercept history, reports directly to the CEO instead of to the board of directors.
So I think there's serious editorial independence issues under the leadership of the new CEO.
And I know for a fact that that is a concern shared by other members of the newsroom and that they're raising it with the union right now.
So tell us a bit more about McRaven and Longoria.
What is up with them receiving $50 million each?
What's the point there?
So the story was pretty straightforward.
I just went over McRaven's enormous wealth in financial holdings, you know, it's multiple homes worth millions of dollars, is on the board of directors of all sorts of companies, which, by the way, isn't particularly unusual for top military brass.
I mean, the revolving door in that field is like nothing you've ever seen.
They have these guys coming on TV to provide their opinions on the geopolitical significance
of events at the same time that they're sitting on the boards of directorships of these companies
that stand to benefit from a picture of foreign policy that they're trying to advance.
Almost never disclosed, I hardly ever, I don't think I've ever seen it on cable news, these
potential conflicts.
So anyways, McRaven is another example of this kind of celebrity general that's just
feeded in the media, it's like, "Oh my God, he was the head of JSOC, we've got to listen
to him."
And I'm not particularly commenting on whether he's smart or not, I leave people to look
at the war on terror and decide for themselves if he was effective or not.
But the fact that he owns all these financial interests and financial stakes and things,
did this guy really need, if he wanted to, I mean, one way you could look at this and
say, "Okay, well, he's just giving money for charity, what's the big deal?"
Does a guy with all this money need more money in order to participate in charity?
I don't, I don't think so.
I think you could probably find all kinds of people in the human rights or NGO world that want to do, that need resources to do serious humanitarian work.
And so that was kind of the critique that I, and this actress.
you know, who I don't know a whole lot about, besides that she was on some, I think,
reality show or something.
And it just seemed like this kind of representation of these are the people and these decisions
and the way that resources are allocated in the society.
It's just, and the war just cracked me up.
It was called the, I think it was called the Civility Award and it was supposed to reward people
for being civil with one another, which is just like, is that really the problem
in the society?
That's your primary concern?
So anyways, that was kind of the crux of the story, which again, I thought was fairly straightforward.
I mean, I didn't really get any angry responses to it.
I mean, people will seem angry at Bezos, but nobody seemed frustrated at the tenor of the article.
So these donations are just a pat on the back, or are there any requirements that these donations go to help people?
Well, it has to be given to charity, but all that means is a 501c3.
I always say this, charity is just a tax status.
It doesn't necessarily mean good or that it's not being given to your friends.
In the case of McRaven, what we found was that his wife was actually on the board of charity connected to Bezos.
So there's all kinds of problems with this kind of glad-handing Philanthropy world of which The Intercept is a part.
And I ended up tumbling into this story and becoming a part of it.
I mean, they're extremely just from having worked there and talked to people, you know, they're very image conscious, they have to worry about how they appear to, you know, philanthropy is not small dollar donors.
These are kind of rich people that You know, at its worst are kind of, I think of it as like the old Catholic indulgences.
They want to, they feel guilty about, you know, their position in society and the extraordinary privilege that they enjoy.
And so they want to kind of do things that make them feel a little bit better about themselves, which isn't so wrong in itself, but at its worst, it ends up becoming just, okay, well, we have to present ourselves as something that's pure and so that they can feel, feel good that they're, you know, giving us money.
And that doesn't always comport with the full reality of, of what is happening.
So it kind of, And so what does, like, the rise of someone like McRaven say about talking heads on these kind of flagship outlets?
I know that I've seen former CIA directors and all of this.
I mean, what does it mean to use these people as sources or pundits, you know, I mean, when they so clearly, you know, are It's a very serious conflict of interest, which is not disclosed to the reader at any point.
machinery, I suppose, that these outlets are supposed to critique and kind of cover.
It's a very serious conflict of interest, which is not disclosed to the reader at any point.
I mean, it's one thing if you want to have somebody—I mean, it's so institutionalized,
these generals and admirals leaving the military and becoming filthy, filthy rich.
They even have a word for it.
I heard a senior officer describe it to me.
He says, I'm retiring.
I'm going to get rich.
I said, what do you mean?
He's like cashing out, baby.
Or cashing in, rather.
It's a phrase that people in the military use because general salary is capped.
It might sound high, but relative to how much they make in the private sector, it's actually pretty low.
It's about $200,000 is what their government salary is capped at.
And then as soon as they retire, literally, this happened to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.
I did a story on this with that editor.
It was like two weeks after he left, he starts giving paid speeches to investment banks, same kind of stuff Hillary Clinton got criticized for in 2016.
He gets appointed to the board of director of various Pentagon contractors, think tank appointments.
I mean, you can only imagine.
I mean, this has to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Book deal.
Yeah.
You know, talking head, you know, show appearances, becoming a commentator on, you know, a corporate news network show.
I mean, yeah, it's like that's where the real money is.
A lot of it we don't even know.
When I went to the Washington Speakers Bureau, which represented Mark Milley, and I only found out about these paid speeches to a big investment bank called Mobus or something.
I can't remember exactly what it's called.
And I noticed that there was a review that he was trying to advertise his speaking services to, and that was the only reference to this investment bank that he gave a speech to hundreds of CEOs from across the country.
The only reason I found out about this was just because he was dumb enough to put it as an advertisement on his page.
never reported it anywhere until I put it up. And as soon as I reported that, they removed
all reference to it from the Washington Speakers Bureau. So we really have no idea who these
guys are getting paid by at the same time that they purport to be these objective purveyors
of, you know, foreign policy and national security wisdom on television.
And in terms of, you know, these people being architects of things like the war on terror
and these companies profiting from that, whether it's like selling weapons or being a contractor
for some of these like highly lucrative foreign interventions, why would they be best positioned
to comment on or frame or help the public understand the very conflicts that they are
kind of profiting off of?
Well, I guess the idea is, well, look, he's a four-star general.
He's, I mean, a lot of it speaks, it's a problem with the society, which is that we apportion so much respect, you know, oh my God, the troops, which is like, of course I want troops to be, have dignity and a decent life, just like anybody else.
But when you elevate them, To this position of almost like a clergy or something.
It's really unhealthy and it's endemic to cable news, particularly post-Trump to the liberal outlets that are like, oh my God, the former CIA director said it.
The former, you know, Director of National Intelligence said this.
And it's like, guys, they're regular people just like everyone else.
I mean, yes, they had access to more information than the rest of us did, but they resembled ordinary people in basically every other way.
And so I really think that that's at the heart of a lot of the confusion about these things.
You know, I was reminded a little bit about the trouble that Michael Flynn got into after he retired.
He, for example, became an agent of Turkey and started doing some lobbying work.
And also he was involved in a plan to build nuclear power plants across the Middle East.
He was really looking to cash in past his retirement.
And, you know, this is a part of what led to his downfall and part of the reason why he was forced to turn to QAnon supporters to raise money for his legal funds once he started getting in serious trouble.
You see this tendency a lot.
I mean, Malcolm Nance is another one.
People who used to have their feet planted on the ground a little bit more.
And then you see them responding to the incentives that I'm describing of going on these shows and telling them, you know, what they're going to be rewarded for saying.
And then they end up drifting in this direction that's almost unrecognizable from what they what they used to believe when they were in public service.
Well, I also have to wonder if there's some incentive to sort of tow the company line while you are in office or you are, you know, you are still working within the government so that you do have access to these connections once you, you know, quote-unquote graduate.
Like, hey, you know, play by the rules here, and when you get out, you've got a book deal waiting for you, we're going to hook you up with
this person.
We've got a CNN is going to hire you as a, as a contributor and all of that stuff.
But Hey, you know, you go against the grain, a lot of those connections sort of disappear.
I mean, it's not all that conspiratorial, just knowing how entertainment works,
knowing how, you know, corporate media works, like there's gotta be some
incentive to, you know, want to make sure that those connections are sort of
waiting for you, like once you are back into the private sector, I mean, look
what happened with, um, what's her name?
Uh, Jen Psaki.
You know, you have somebody who is a presidential spokesperson.
Uh, who then is directly offered a job as a news commentator afterwards.
There's this like direct pipeline of like government official to media, you know, to media talking head, which is like kind of troubling, I think.
Yeah.
I think that's a really astute point because what I'm struck by when I, um, I tried, I tried to read every one of these interviews that I could, uh, these, uh, former four-star generals in a, in a story that I did on, The fact that their conflicts of interest are not disclosed.
At NBC, I think it was.
What I was struck by was how vanilla a lot of their analysis is.
They never criticize each other or the sitting administration, unless it's Trump.
And that says to me, this is all just one big glad-handing networking opportunity, isn't it?
I literally couldn't find an example of them being like, this general got it wrong or the Pentagon got this wrong.
It's overwhelmingly just like, yep, what we're doing is great, and what we're gonna do is gonna be good.
Like, I can hardly find any critique anywhere.
And it's driving people crazy, because they, you know, people aren't as stupid as they think they are, and when you see problems, you know, that are fairly obvious, either within, you know, a particular government structure or whatever, and zero critique of it whatsoever, you know, and lots of critique, like you said, for a particular individual, It drives people crazy because they don't feel like things are fair.
And when people don't feel like things are fair, then they're going to start assuming wild conspiracy theory.
You know what I mean?
It's like I see this just in my own personal life of people around me, my friends, news consumers who follow politics.
You know, a lot of them have lost their minds, you know, just because there is this unwillingness to be critical of, you know, your sort of the party that I guess you have allegiance to.
And, you know, the problem is that, like, when bad information then does come out, let's say, you know, you publish a story that proves, hey, there's some really bad stuff going on here, or there's some, you know, there's some lies coming through, or they're saying one thing to the public and doing something private.
All of a sudden, people aren't used to having to criticize their own, and so it's very uncomfortable, and it becomes much easier to latch on to a particular narrative that isn't true, instead of having to navigate the discomfort of, oh, the people I like are doing something that I disagree with.
Yeah, these former military officers, you can find a lot of them are willing to criticize Trump on the conservative outlets.
Some of them are willing to criticize Biden.
But what you don't find is a critique of the national security state, of the bureaucracy, of the systemic problems.
You'll find almost no criticism of that because they're all benefiting from it.
They're on the boards of these companies that are contracting for the Pentagon.
And that's really where the public loses out, is not so much a partisan thing, but losing out of any sort of critique of how the system is structured.
Yeah, there's a critique of, you know, other countries where it's like, well, this is state-run media or like the, you know, the state controls the media.
And then it's like, well, what's the difference between that and a spokesperson going directly into punditry?
And I guess the other thing that I, that I wanted to, to bring up a little bit is, is that, yeah, there's all this talk about disinformation and conspiracy theories and why are these people drifting into like paranoia and yet we're making it easier than ever.
I mean, it's, every single time I see a tweet that has insane information
in it, like that students are chanting "Death to America," which we'll touch
on in a bit, you'll have someone in the response saying, "This is how much money APAC
has given this person." And so it's like you're making it
incredibly easy to put together a shitty JPEG, and you're basically giving ammo to
conspiracy theorists, and blurring the line between things that are
obviously outrageous and things that should have been disclosed at
the very least, if not avoided altogether by just not hiring people with obvious
conflicts of interest, or not hiring people that used to work for the entity
that you're meant to impartially critique, or impartially be a thorn in
the side of as a journalist.
The great irony is that these same legacy media institutions are the ones at the forefront of, you know, sermonizing about objectivity and neutrality and everything.
And they don't even pretend to have disclosures about any of these sorts of things for the generals, for the national security experts and things.
I mean, these guys should be the ones that take that stuff the most seriously because they're always going on about the importance of objectivity.
How are we supposed to argue with the conspiracy theorists that our media isn't corrupt or isn't a kind of circle jerk or that they don't have it out for someone like Trump, but in general will praise someone like Biden?
You know, it's like, how are we supposed to have a good argument with these people and consider them just dead wrong or kind of just sideline their opinions if this is the reality of things?
It feels like we're setting them up for a slam dunk.
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
And like, I, you know, just from personal experience when we, you know, go undercover or, you know, just out in the world when you run into, you know, when I run into somebody who is red-pilled, you know, usually the conversation can stay civil because we do find the common ground that the media is a major problem, or corporate media at least.
And then, you know, conversely, I did say there's a grain of truth to conspiracist thinking earlier, but there's also a grain of truth to the liberal argument that journalism is under attack, but not in the way that they often think.
It's often that if there is finally someone who is inconvenient to the machine or who's
going to take away the payday of all these people who are expecting that revolving door
to reward them at the end of their careers, whether they were like lifelong intelligence
operatives or lifelong generals, those people do get crushed.
Those people do get kind of sidelined or critiqued or accused of essentially either like, you
know, helping to elect someone like Trump or, you know, helping to sow discord in American
society and all of this.
So it's kind of a sad situation.
And you know, it's like we were the last people in the world who'd want to, you know, hand
it to the conspiracy theorists.
But as long, I think, as we keep this kind of sclerotic interbred system of kind of information,
we're not going to have a lot of a lot of ammo to fight against people who are just
claiming absurd things.
And it also allows good information to be thrown out, you know, in the same kind of
vein as throwing out conspiracy theories, because then it's like, well, yeah, if you
if you criticize the establishment, if you criticize media, you know, whether it's a
commentator like McRaven and others or a claim that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, it's
just like, oh, so you're like Alex Jones, basically, if you're doing any of the kind
of investigative work or whatever.
And it also opens the door for conspiracy theorists posing as journalists to really create a niche.
Guys like, you know, Seth Abramson, where he'll give you the exact answer of what is going on behind the door and why it's happening in like a hundred point thread.
And, you know, most of it is bullshit.
I mean, most of it, you know, hinges on him reading the minds of, you know, what's going on in the people that he covers.
But what he is giving is what people feel like is some kind of transparency that they're not getting from somewhere else.
And so I think that, yeah, when you have this kind of corporatized, you know, business-driven idea of news, it opens the doors for, you know, a bunch of people who are going to kind of stealthily get people to sort of normalize conspiratorial thinking to become wildly, wildly popular and, dare I say, you know, almost mainstream.
You mentioned Malcolm Nance, you know, who's like a kind of ex, like, War on Terror guy, who's now, like, writing these threads that read, like, bizarre Q-drops, like, oh, it's gonna be really bad for these students on the campus.
Believe me, you have no idea how hard the feds are gonna be coming for these kids, and stuff like that.
And it's like, this stuff does not actually end up, in general, manifesting.
And they never have to answer for that.
Yet we are like reading Snopes and fucking PolitiFact about, you know, even the most minute claims made by others.
This was the chief terrorism analyst for MSNBC for years and only left because he decided to quit to join, I think, the Ukrainian Legion to fight the Russians in like two years ago or so.
And he has these threats that are just Off the wall.
I mean, I encourage people to read the story I wrote about him because it's going to sound crazy, my trying to paraphrase it.
He's talking about the FBI is going to be doing biometric assessments and then the hammer is going to come down hard.
It's almost like you're right.
It's almost like Hugh, like the arrests are going to come and then freedom will prevail.
Oh, yeah.
Never happens.
But the thing is, I don't think I've seen any major media kind of be like, yeah, this guy sort of fell off a little bit.
Like, I don't think I've seen a single thing questioning him because he's in the club or was.
And he's one of many.
There are people who are making careers off essentially doing soft QAnon or dressed up, you know, higher educated QAnon.
That never comes under fire because the promised justice has the right targets in their aim, unlike QAnon, where it was the wrong targets and so therefore it's laughable, therefore it's this, that, or the other thing, and it's kind of become commonplace.
I see it more often since Biden got elected than I did beforehand, which also parallels Q in a way, which is that Q, you know, surfaced after Trump won and people were unhappy with the amount of justice that he was doling out.
And so QAnon came in to explain why, you know, things were moving slowly.
And we are seeing that in liberal spheres.
I mean, we're even seeing it down to the memes that they're sharing.
They've incorporated Pepe into You know, into their PFPs, and they're doing memes, they're doing Dark Brandon, it's so, you know, and for people who didn't watch QAnon as it sort of grew and became, you know, this national or international movement, I think people don't see the similarities, even if the content, you know, is different, the conspiratorial thinking and this promise of justice.
There's something I wanted to mention.
corner is still very much at the center of a lot of these narratives. And as we all know,
if you're promised justice and it never comes, it tends to radicalize people a little bit
further.
Soterios Johnson There's something I wanted to mention. I mean,
even if, let's say, Bezos took that $100 million and he gave it to The Washington Post so The
Washington Post didn't have to fire anybody and got through another year, we're still
talking about big news outlets being funded by billionaires who oftentimes have defense
contracts and are profoundly interwoven into the security state itself.
So in your article, you kind of write a little bit about what you call Journalism 2.0.
So first of all, could you kind of comment on what I just said, but then also explain what you mean by this Journalism 2.0 that you intend on partaking in?
Yeah, so I think conventional journalism is kind of trapped in a straitjacket of norms, of conventions, of rules.
And to give you guys a few examples, one of them that I listed in the resignation letter, which I hope people read because I explore this at length, one of them is hiding behind expertise.
And I'm not saying that it's not worthwhile to talk to experts on, you know, technical matters that you don't understand, like a computer scientist is going to explain computer things to me, or a legal expert is going to explain the law, which I don't understand.
But when it's harmful is when the media hides behind it and editorializes and pretends like this is the objective opinion of these experts that just exist in the ether that can tell you something.
And so very often when major media wants to tilt a story in a certain direction, they don't want their name on it.
So they'll handpick.
And I know how this works because, you know, I've been in the business.
If editors want somebody that's going to push the story in a certain direction, they basically get you to use an expert like a ventriloquist dummy.
And you tell them, you essentially cue up what they're going to say, and they basically say what you said back to them, and then you write it down, expert said.
It's kind of like, well, okay, the expert technically said that, but you basically made them say that.
Isn't it like you saying it?
And so I think there's a fundamental lack of honesty about this kind of authorial voice of God that exists in a lot of the prestige outlets where you pretend you don't exist.
It's just this omniscient narrator that is like perfectly neutral.
I think there's a lot more honesty if you just come to your readers and say, look, here are my priors.
This is what I think.
Decide for yourself, but this is where I'm coming from, rather than this is exactly what expertise has has offered up, because nobody believes any of that.
And that explains a lot of the disdain that people have for press, because they know media are just people like them trying, you know, just trying and, you know, often failing, but trying and that they're not on some pedestal and above the, you know, biases that any ordinary person experiences.
And so that's what I mean about moving away from it.
I'm not this is not a call for, you know, I think the distinction between opinion and hard journalism is kind of misleading.
Because it's always going to be imbued with the assumptions that you have about the world.
The question to me is if the writer is honest about that or not.
So it's a call for honesty about the limited data set we're working with, our limited faculties, and the fact that we're just trying to do our best.
So, what's up with the Intercept blocking the publication of a list of the Bohemian Grove members?
What happened there, and you got any names for us, Ken?
Yeah, is Drake on that list?
You will know the names eventually, because that story will come out, but that was actually obtained by a colleague of mine, Daniel Bogoslaw, a very good reporter, who got this pages and pages long document.
It's several years old, so I think it's maybe like five years old or so at this point, but it was just this exhaustive Membership role for the people on it.
And I wish I could tell you who's on it.
I don't want to step on his toes because it's his story.
It's not my story.
He let me look at it.
And I will say the names on it.
These are very powerful people.
You know, these are four star, retired four star military generals.
These are business executives, things like that.
But it's like a lot more mundane than you would think.
You know what I mean?
Like another interesting facet of this I learned while looking at this story was that even so it's a gentleman's only club.
So not just the membership, even the waiters are only men.
So it's a very weird, like, vibe to the entire thing.
And he'll come up with the story eventually, I'm sure.
But that's the only thing in a way of a kind of teaser that I can give you about it at this point.
I mean, yeah, I guess we'll wait for the story to come out.
But I always figure it's like the sort of mystique of the Bohemian Crove kind of got away from it is probably a lot of, like, I don't know, no-name owners of a string of car dealerships and stuff like that who are on it.
I would say it's more blue blood than that, but not the interesting blue blood.
The kind of people that are going to be, you know, writing books on leadership that nobody reads at an airport after they retire from the State Department or whatever, that kind of thing.
It's like Bohemian Grove was like really awesome, you know, 15 or 20 years ago, you know, it had, you know, past presidents, all sorts of like really high, and now it's just sort of, it's not as cool anymore.
It's like when your parents got on Facebook sort of like after You sort of deleted your account and moved on to Instagram or Twitter or whatever And so there it's like they they finally got enough money to you know to join the club But like it's it's not as prestigious as it used to be and you know, maybe there's a yeah I could it almost feels like a glorified like Elks Club or something was the vibe that we got from talking to people
Get a couple of drinks in them.
It's just these really old, I mean, I think it would be more like Senate-aged,
kind of like people with one foot in the grave sort of thing.
Like, I don't know how much range of motion they have to be doing
conspiratorial type shit.
Like, well, get a couple of, get a couple of drinks in them.
I'm sure they have a bit more range of motion.
When Deanna got...
document we were like so excited like alright let's see this is gonna all
it's exciting like Epstein kind of stuff and there was just again it was people
at death's door. It was like a summer camp for old guys.
Yeah. Well they want to get one last prayer in to Moloch. Anybody with a last name
Graham or any references to like a Drake or something on the list? Not
necessarily on that list but I would encourage you to talk to that reporter Dan Bogaslaw.
He's a very good kind of, he's almost like a PI in his approach.
He's very good at looking through financials, and he was able to find that Drake owns a bunch of shell companies with really intriguing names, like Omerta Incorporated, or another one was like Secrecy Inc.
or something.
Yeah, I saw that too.
It was like Silence Proposition or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
It was shady.
Hush Money LLC.
So I wanted to move on.
You have an article in which you wrote that regarding the campus protests against Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, you wrote, the feds are watching.
So can you explain what you mean by that?
Yeah.
So really what I want to do with the subset and what I did with the story is, again, sketch out that bureaucracy, that system that exists, which people are not given information about, when all anyone wants to obsess about is the reality show of government, which is, what did Trump do?
What was Biden's, you know, flub?
What did Kamala say?
Kind of thing.
And what that really misses is the national security state that exists and is kind of running on autopilot.
And I don't want to say against the wishes of the president, but more without the knowledge of the White House, because the White House is busy with all sorts of other things.
And so to some extent, these agencies have to run themselves.
And so what I found, I thought was a classic example of The pervasive role that these national security agencies play in our day-to-day life, which gets no attention because, again, it doesn't fit into that reality show big personalities framework.
And so what I immediately found, just with a little bit of research, was the FBI director himself acknowledged that they're sharing intelligence related to potential violent threats on the campuses.
The White House acknowledges the FBI and the Justice Department's involvement.
And in addition to that, the Department of Homeland Security and several of its sub-agencies have been involved in monitoring the protests, including a couple of agencies that I think most people have never heard of.
Which themselves are significant agencies with, you know, sizable budgets and personnel, but which gets hardly any reporting.
I'll tell you those names now.
One is called Homeland Security Investigations.
That's the investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
And then the other one is called the Federal Protective Service.
I don't know if you guys remember, but in 2020, there was an unmarked car with federal agents that were snatching protesters off the streets.
And there was a lot of agita about who the heck are these people?
Even Congress ended up saying, you have to identify who these federal agents are.
That was the Federal Protective Service, which has a unique authority to basically deputize local law enforcement into turning them into feds.
And so their role is to protect federal property and federal assets.
But in so doing, they can go outside of the location of the federal property if it's advancing that goal of protecting the federal property.
And so these guys, during the George Floyd protests in 2020, there were Border Patrol agents that were seconded to the Federal Protective Service.
And these were the guys that were snatching protesters off the streets.
And just yesterday, I think it was, or maybe even today, they saw that there were Border Patrol agents involved responding to the college protests.
And I would bet you that they've been seconded to this Federal Protective Service agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a very great way to stay under the radar, is to have an agency with the acronym FPS, because it's just going to be Call of Duty and other results when people look for them.
Yeah, right.
So I did want to, you know, related to this, I wanted to read this tweet by Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee.
Jake, could you do the honors here?
Chants of, quote, we are Hamas and, quote, death to America by students on college campuses are national security threats.
Put any student who promotes terrorism on behalf of Hamas on the terrorist watch list.
So the claims in Blackburn's tweets have been echoed on Fox News by political pundit Bill Maher and even in The Atlantic.
Five congresspeople from Michigan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for an investigation into students chanting these things.
So you looked into this, right Ken?
Does this check out?
Yeah, there's one small problem.
Students never chanted that.
There's absolutely no evidence for that.
And the evidence that existed was there was one, the only case tangentially connected I could find was that in one of the encampments, can't remember which university it was, there was one anonymously authored like pamphlet that said something like freedom for Palestine means death to America in a just like library full of books and pamphlets and things.
Nobody knows who put it there.
Nobody knows who wrote it.
There's no evidence that any of the students participating were reading it or agreeing with it.
But that's what the entire thing amounts to.
That one thing is the reason that you can go on Fox News and find, I think the headline said, that students across the country are chanting death to America.
That one example.
That's so cool.
And we love that they might be put on the terrorist watch list.
Blackburn is on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the FBI and has the power to try to direct them to these kind of things.
So, you know, it's not a joke when someone like her is saying that, like that's something that's definitely going to be run up the flagpole to the headquarters at FBI and that they're going to consider.
This reminds me of the urban legend that certain schools were putting out kitty litter to assist students who were identifying as cats.
Except in this instance, someone may not be able to fly on a plane forever.
Yeah, well, I think that the people that are freaking pooping in litter boxes at the school should also not be able to fly.
What's wrong with those people?
Yeah, there's related.
And, you know, I mean, this again is like huge fuel for conspiracy theorists, which is, you know, the government and the deep state are trying to censor social media because, you know, we're out there telling the truth.
There's a current movement right now in the United States from the political class to ban TikTok.
So I wanted to read from this Axios article.
In a forum Friday at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona, Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S.
have, quote, been so ineffective at communicating justifications for the war in Gaza, adding, quote, typically the Israelis are good at PR.
Blinken said, you have social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.
Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down,
potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok
and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites,
it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
So here we have a case of essentially Romney being a bit of an idiot maybe and like admitting that
the national security threats are maybe not the prime reason why they would want to get rid of
It's that TikTok, which of course skews Young, has a lot of people supporting Palestinians and even Blinken's words, the impact of images.
Oh, no.
What if the impact of the image of a starving child or a destroyed, bombed out city, you know, might make people believe that a genocide is currently happening?
So, I mean, what do you make of this?
And like, do you think that they're going to actually figure out how to get rid of TikTok and feed another generation of conspiracy theorists?
I think it looks that way.
And you know, I did a story on exactly this because I was curious what the evidence was for the Chinese Communist Party using the app.
And what was interesting is if you read carefully the statements of the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the CIA Director William Burns, they don't actually say a lot of what people think.
I think they're saying.
A lot of what the press kind of paraphrases them as saying.
What they say is there are potentialities, there are concerns, there are things that could happen that the Chinese government could do.
I did a story on this maybe a month ago, and to my astonishment, between the three of those people, they didn't produce a single example of the Chinese government actually interfering with TikTok and using it for all these malign ways that they said they could.
Now that's not to say that they can't.
Of course they can.
But that's a very different allegation than I think what is kind of lazily bandied about, which is the Chinese are in your phone and they're grabbing everything.
There's no evidence that they've done that at this point.
I mean, just recently, the rapper Macklemore came out, you know, for Palestine and Palestinian rights and against the Israeli genocide over there.
And YouTube age restricted the video, which is a really good way to make the reach go less far.
So it's like, how are we doing exactly the kinds of things so that a new generation of people believe in a type of QAnon-like conspiracy theory that, I mean, is real?
That there's censorship that is run by the government or the deep state, or at least pressure on these private companies to censor in a direction that is favorable to, you know, whatever, like the geopolitical strategies of this elite.
When I did that TikTok story I mentioned, I interviewed a cryptographer, Bruce Schneier, who made the point that what they're so worried about the Chinese government doing illicitly, anyone can do in the open market by just buying bulk data from these companies.
So he said, like, why do all this espionage and stuff when you can just purchase it from data brokers?
And as he called it, that's surveillance capitalism.
That's the system we currently have in which any nation state can do, not just China.
Yeah, anytime I boot up a Ubisoft game, I have to agree to like three different things before it lets me get in and start collecting weapons and gear.
I'm assuming that what I'm agreeing to is that they can harvest my data.
And I'm not allowed to play the game, by the way, if I don't allow them to do that.
I've seen what happens when you hit B to decline these things, and it just boots you back to the menu screen where you have to read the things again.
It's like... No toy for you?
Yeah, no toy.
Damn it.
Can we talk about Macklemore for a sec?
What'd you guys think of his song?
I haven't listened to it, but good for him, you know?
I think people are needlessly hard on him.
He seems to be getting it right pretty consistently for a little while now.
Yes!
Dude, the song is pretty hard, and even Tom Morello tweeted the video and was like, this is the most Rage Against the Machine thing that's been put out since Rage Against the Machine.
And I was thinking about this, I'm like, everybody makes fun of this guy, but like if you look at
his big singles, you know, Thrift Shop he was telling people not to buy overpriced
clothes and you know it helps with the environment to recycle and reuse and you can
get like cool style and stuff. Everybody made fun of that even though it
was a massive hit.
Then he puts out Same Love which is you know him being like well you know I'm
definitely not gay but gay people should have right like there should be which you know
he's not wrong, you know he's not wrong about and now he's like the only artist
really that is putting out a very specific.
It's not subtle at all and the video absolutely shows the carnage taking
place in Gaza.
He is very upfront.
He basically says fuck Joe Biden.
I'm not voting for you.
I mean it is a very clear stand and so like Macklemore three for three honestly
like you know and yet he gets so much hate.
I don't know.
I wonder if maybe this will sort of, maybe people will finally come around on our old friend Ben.
You know, at least you're not defending Drake, I suppose.
No, I've always been a Drake hater for whatever, maybe because our names rhyme.
Drake and Jake, right, okay.
Yeah, the moment Drake, I'll be, you know, while we're on the topic, I mean, we've got a couple minutes to kill, you know.
Well, Julian was like, Hey, make sure to prepare some questions for Ken.
Well, here you go.
It's just, it's actually not a question.
It's, um, it's my feelings about Drake.
You know, when he first came into the game, I liked him.
Um, I thought that he was like fresh and, and it was like an interesting voice.
You know, he wasn't, he wasn't doing like gangster rap.
It was, you know, he had the singing.
Stuff too, and it was cool It was poppy
Yeah.
But the problem the moment he started trying to become a gangster was when I sort of lost it for him because it didn't
really Feel didn't feel believable. It didn't feel authentic
And so ever since that shift happened where he was always talking about how bad he was gonna body you and he's got
people out In the streets and he'll put a hit on your head and all
this stuff and I was like, dude I watched you in Degrassi like I you know, I've been an
actor in my past as well Like I know I know us as a people. I know us theater kids.
We are not putting money out into the street For a hit this is you know
We are waiting for Sondheim to give us a hit.
There's a cognitive dissonance there.
And ever since he sort of traveled down that path is when I really sort of lost an appetite for Drake's music.
Travis's head is like hung low and he had his finger like pressed into his eyeball.
He's slowly losing it.
I did want to talk a little bit about this.
There seems to be this kind of move among liberals now where it's like, well, yeah, the problem is social media.
And one example of this that I saw is Aaron Sorkin spoke recently on a podcast blaming Facebook for January 6th and explaining that he's going to make a movie about it.
So here's the quote.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is writing a film about the January 6th insurrection and how he believes Facebook's divisive material influenced the attack on the nation's capital.
Sorkin, the writer famous for The West Wing, The Social Network, and the HBO series The Newsroom, put it bluntly in a podcast episode of The Town with Matthew Baloney.
I blame Facebook for January 6th.
When asked to explain why, he responded, you're gonna need to buy a movie ticket.
What?
So are we.
You got to pay $18.50 to find out why I'm wrong about this.
I'm not a fan of Facebook.
I'm not a fan of TikTok.
I'm not a fan of social media in general.
And I do think that there are like, you know, shitty algorithms that are like surfacing the worst kind of content just for clicks and outrage bait and all of this stuff.
But I mean, are we really going to say that January 6th happened because of Facebook?
That seems a little bit of a stretch.
It reminds me of, it's like in the 90s when there was a shooting and they would blame it on a video game.
It's just the elites scapegoating things because they know that the society they've created is causing this stuff.
And so it's like, well, what can I point to that's not some, you know what I mean?
Absolutely.
I think that's a really good point.
Like, my take on this has always been that it's like, I really, I do think that social media is a problem.
And in fact, poor social media moderation creates problems, it amplifies problems, certainly.
I often say that, like, you know, I point out that back in September of 2018, Reddit, they stomped down QAnon content.
They banned it.
I always thought that, like, you know, if the rest of the social media platforms followed suit, we would not have as big of a podcast because QAnon would not be as popular.
It would still be a thing, you know, it would still be interesting.
I feel like this problem is, at the very least, exacerbated by poor social media platforms.
But they didn't cause the problem.
And it's not the root of the problem.
And there are much deeper issues that allow these things to fester, regardless of what social media companies do.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure a bunch of, like, people day-drinking at a Trump rally and then marching to the Capitol could have happened without Facebook.
But I guess Travis is coming out pro-censorship and also doesn't want to have this job.
Well, I mean, also, you know, it's not like people on Facebook were posting, you know, the election has been stolen, like, we need to fight back for our country.
And all of the GOP politicians were like, this is incorrect.
No, but unfortunately for us, Biden did win fair and square.
The theories that are going around on Facebook are not true.
I think it's the other way around.
Where, you know, you have a majority of Republicans and Republican-adjacent figures basically saying that the election was stolen.
Here's all of our made-up proof.
And then people on Facebook sharing that information and potentially radicalizing others.
So, yeah, I mean, I agree with Travis that social media can exasperate, you know, a lot of this stuff.
You mean exacerbate?
What did I say?
Exasperate.
You mean exacerbate.
I meant masturbate.
Okay.
It can exacerbate a lot of this stuff, but it's not the driving force.
It's not where the theories are being created and then filtered out into politics.
That's reserved for 4chan, 8chan.
Those are the guys who get their stuff to the top, not your average ant posting on the book.
Yeah, I totally agree.
It's amplifying the problems.
I guess it's just when someone like Sorkin does this, it's so frustrating because it's almost like technocrat brain, where you're going to focus on the features of the system instead of the core political problem, which they don't want to address.
They want to kind of pick around the edges of these issues.
Yeah, I have one last question for you, a real easy one.
It seems like you want to fix journalism.
Do you think we can fix journalism if we live in a capitalist society where profit incentives are kind of at the root of any outlet?
No, of course not.
But I do think you can staunch the bleeding, you know?
I don't think it has to be as bad as—this is my point I always make—I don't think things have to be as bad as they are right now.
That's right.
Ken has shown up with some nice bandages.
He's got a tourniquet and he's going to staunch the bleeding, folks.
Yeah, he's crafting some bandages.
He's crafting a splint.
He's applying it to his body.
So tell us a little bit about, you know, what's next for you and where people can find and support your work, Ken.
Yeah, so the first part of this interview was kind of heavy, and I am sad to leave the place that I worked at for several years and to see my friends there less than I used to, but I'm also excited about doing what I can on Substack, and you can find me at kenclippensine.com.
That's where I'll post all my articles now, and hopefully I can do so faster than I have been able to experience at the Interceptor over the last several months.
Go and support Ken and subscribe and pay for his substacks so that he can continue working with his great editor and a team, right?
You want to kind of work with a team of people.
Yeah, so, I mean, I said before, the reason I never wanted to join initially was because I really am not an individualist.
I like being a part of a team.
And, you know, over time I realized, well, we can recreate that.
And so I'm splitting, at this point in time, half the money with the editor that I described before, the experienced national security editor that I'd worked with at The Intercept.
And our hope is to bring on Beth Borden, my FOIA lawyer, to help us with FOIA stuff and other writers as well, so that we can have more of an effect than just one person working alone in a room.
So that's kind of the dream.
Ken, recently you tweeted that you no longer had to worry about pissing off people above you at the Intercept, you know, through your tweets.
Are you going to be posting any nudes?
I posted a picture of Bolsonaro.
He looked like a little baby in the NICU.
You see this picture?
I put him next to the picture of E.T.
in that little tent.
That was an example of something that maybe I could have done before.
He has fetal alcohol syndrome.
It's very sad.
I have one last question, and I don't know if it's a good question or not, but, you know, worth mentioning, I think, given some of the, you know, our prior discussion, you know, when you talk about News 2.0, you know, I know you're going to do it right.
I know you're not going to be like one of these, you know, guys online with a hundred threads, you know, because you have no oversight, you're just sort of baking.
Why is that?
Why, you know, what separates?
Because you see a lot of those guys say, this is the new media, this is new news, this is what you're not going to get.
Because you see now liberals are even saying, you know, Screw CNN, screw MSNBC, you know, they're turning against corporate media in a way as well.
And I guess, you know, my question is, what is it do you think that separates the work that you're going to be doing from somebody like that?
Is it a lack of bias or is it a feeling to not be so, you know, Red V Blue, Red Team Blue Team?
Like, what is it that separates that kind of reporting from somebody that would describe themselves as new media that is essentially just doing opinion-baking conspiracy theories?
It's about who I'll be reporting for, which I hope is for ordinary people.
I think that the essential problem with media is not necessarily partisanship or any of the other things that you mentioned.
It's that they're writing for other media.
They're writing for their sources in Washington in order to maintain access.
They're writing for industry.
You know, open up a magazine, go to a website.
Look, I always tell people, if you want to know who they're writing for, take a look at the ads.
Can you afford what they're advertising?
If you can't, they're probably not writing for you.
I remember as a kid seeing ads, not just for products that my family couldn't afford, but for products that no individual would buy, like financial instruments.
I remember there was an ad for Charles Schwab or something.
I remember as a kid, I asked my dad, I said, why are they advertising Charles Schwab?
You don't go to the store and buy Charles Schwab.
And he's like, oh, well that's for businesses to buy.
And then it dawned on me, it's like, Oh, that's the audience for this stuff, for businesses.
So I want to write for just regular people, which sounds, you know, easy and simple, and it should be, and I think it is, but a lot of the press doesn't do that.
And it's not necessarily this nefarious thing of that they're only trying to, you know, hook up rich people.
It's that that's the world that they inhabit.
They live in a bubble.
They're not aware that there are people outside of that world.
So much of the reporting is designed for these small subsets of individuals in New York City and Washington, for congressional staffers, for people in the White House to watch.
Trump watched Fox News.
Everybody laughed at the rush of conservatives to try to get on these shows to entertain him and to try to grab his attention.
But that's essentially what the press is doing all the time with these other officials.
It's just that it's not Trump.
And so that's what I want to move away from.
And when I talk about dropping some of these ridiculous conventions that experts say and pretending like you don't have a point of view and not disclosing that to the audience, that's what I'm trying to bring.
Things more in line with stuff that people actually want, because people know that the way that they're doing it isn't in line with what they're interested in.
It's like half the news you turn on cable news.
It feels like Johnny Carson.
It's just so dated.
This isn't what nobody, people don't believe it.
I don't even have to explain.
I didn't even really go into much depth in my resignation letter explaining what's broken because people know it already.
Yeah, exactly.
They're ready for something.
So I don't want to endlessly litigate what's wrong.
Let's just do something better.
And I think it's possible.
I guess the other difference is that Seth Abramson doesn't have Bill Arkin as an editor.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the point that I try to make to people.
Yeah, holding yourself accountable, even in an independent setting.
I think a lot of these people don't want to take that extra step, whether it's because
of ego or whatever it is.
But I think that, yeah, I think even in an independent setting, putting roadblocks in
place to keep the group accountable, I think is a really great step.
And I really think that you're going to be successful in this, and I wish you the best,
man.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Ken.
Thanks, guys.
It's really nice talking to you.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA, where you can sub for five bucks a month.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
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Hi gang, well someone sent me this video the other day.
U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, I don't know a lot about U.S.
politics but he's quite a senior politician, did a mega guitar jam the other day apparently.
He said, Secretary of State Blinken plays guitar at the launch of Global Music Diplomacy Initiative.
And there's an official video and everything.
So I thought I'd See how much he can rip it up.
I think he boldly tries to do some Muddy Waters, so let's check it out and see how it goes.
So, from the great Muddy Waters, and if this doesn't clear the house... Oh, there's a backup guitar player, I like that.
It's the dude in the background who probably does play guitar all the time.
Is his guitar plugged in?
Because he's in A. I haven't turned the volume up like him.
So he's a lefty, which I'm noticing first of all, and he's playing his A chord like this.
But what I'm not hearing is any sound coming out of his guitar.
