“THEY LIED TO YOU!” Matt Taibbi On Fauci, RFK Jr & New Censorship Laws
Russell chats to journalist Matt Taibbi about Anthony Fauci’s role in censoring during the pandemic and his alleged collusion with the deep state. Plus, his past experiences with Crystia Freeland and Canada’s new laws for podcasters, the death of legacy media and RFK Jr running for independent.Follow Matt Taibbi’s work: https://www.racket.news/Our FULL conversation is only available on Locals: https://bit.ly/224-Matt-Taibbi-FULLListen as a podcast: https://podfollow.com/1648125917Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
I am now honoured to introduce so-called journalist, that's the words of Congress, writer of Racket News and America This Week on Substack and author of Griftopia.
It's Matt Taibbi.
Matt, thanks for coming on, mate.
Of course.
How are you doing, Russell?
You know, just very good and just very positive about life, enjoying life.
A lot of trust in our institutions, legacy media, got a lot of trust in that.
Government, a lot of trust in that.
Trust at a record high, I would say.
Yeah, faultless.
Not a fully immersive omnicrisis, geopolitical nightmares everywhere you look, corruption, censorship everywhere.
I mean, there's so much for us to discuss, but given that we've just done an item using your journalism, can we talk a little more, Matt, about Fauci's role in censoring the potential origins of the last pandemic?
And I suppose significantly that CIA whistleblower and like Fauci's agency tour to shut down investigation.
Yeah, so this is a story that grew out of the Twitter files a little bit.
Because a lot of the focus of the Twitter files was about suppression of COVID-related topics, a number of people came forward.
And Michael Schellenberger and I, about six months ago, we started to hear about a whistleblower in the CIA who was coming forward with a story that Anthony Fauci had, at least on a couple of occasions, come to the CIA's Weapons and Counter-Proliferation Center, I forget exactly what the acronym is, but it was what they were using to study the origins of COVID and gave a presentation pushing the idea of zoonotic origin on the CIA analysts.
Later on, six of the seven analysts at the CIA who were leaning towards lab origin changed
their minds before the issuance of a final report.
They were given financial incentives by the agency to do that.
There are a number of other stories that came out as a result of all this, but he also went
to the State Department and the White House, was pushing this proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2
paper that we also had reported on that he was heavily involved with drafting, probably
never disclosed it to any of those agencies.
It looks like a pretty sophisticated, energetic campaign to go through the intelligence agencies and executive branch agencies and try to convince them to not look at the lab origin theory.
If this is true, it seems to be the kind of corruption and hypocrisy that people that were judged to be conspiracy theorists very early in this process were offering.
I feel like pretty early on people were saying, how is the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded?
It was not even possible, as obviously you know, to even talk about lab leak theory at the beginning.
I feel like I know that you are, from when we spoke, particularly at that censorship industrial complex event that we did, able to look at this somewhat objectively?
Or do you find yourself recoiling in disgust?
Or are you excited as an investigative journalist?
Like, oh my God, this is actual information.
Oh my God, it makes sense.
What does this do to you?
Emotionally, I ask because this would seem to be the type of story that an investigative journalist would be excited by.
This is something that you can show an unravelling of, almost a complete reversal of someone that's been presented as a hero, celebrated to an almost galling degree, an uncustomary degree, a degree that's actually Bloody obvious that something was going on when you look at it now that he was on the talk shows and the dancing syringes and all those kind of things.
Makes you think this isn't a normal thing to happen.
When the media does something that extreme, whether it's pro someone or against someone, possibly there's another agenda at play.
So there's a few questions I want to ask you.
Does it excite you as an investigative journalist?
Why don't we see that kind of investigative journalism taking place within the legacy media?
And what was your emotional reaction to it?
And finally, within this little bunch of questions, can you envisage that this will lead to any kind of criminal judicial consequences for Fauci?
That's a good question.
Well, just quickly to go in order, I should admit that I was very taken in initially by a lot of the propaganda about COVID.
And I was reluctant to go anywhere near the topic because I didn't, I was a little bit afraid of aligning myself with sort of anti-vaccine activists.
Even if I was saying something true, I didn't want that impression out there.
And when we started doing the Twitter files, Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger were much, much more interested in the COVID aspect than I was.
I was trying to focus on the FBI intelligence aspect of it, mainly because I, you know, I wasn't sure what was true about the COVID question.
But we came to realize by the end of the project that the COVID messaging thing was central to the worst corruption that we were looking at in the documents.
Mainly because what they were doing wasn't taking things that were false and eliminating them.
They were taking things that were true and intentionally removing them and actually coming up with a reason to remove true content.
And that I think was terrible.
And this led to this series of stories, which I was excited about because You know, I didn't have any particular feelings about Anthony Fauci.
I was a little annoyed by his imperious demeanor and his lecturing.
You know, just as an outside observer, he seemed obnoxious to me.
But when we got the documents showing his emails back and forth with the scientists who did the original paper, Concluding that the virus had a natural origin and saw how aggressively he was suppressing their natural reaction that this probably came from a lab, or at least that they couldn't rule that out.
Seeing that in paper was very exciting, because we're not asserting it, we're just saying, Look at what he said.
Look at what they were doing.
They lied to you about what they thought.
And that's always exciting as an investigative reporter is when you get proof of something, as opposed to having to rely on an anonymous source or something like that.
This latest thing with the whistleblower suggests something a little bit more sinister, which is an active cover-up of investigations into this question, and then ask the
question of whether this will lead to criminal probes. I think it's possible because there is
more to come out about America's relationship to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the
sharing of scientific research, the possibility that some American scientists may have actually provided
the technology to help create this virus.
None of that is proven, but I think it's out there and there's, you know, from what we hear, there's more stuff that's kind of come out.
If it does, I think, yes, I think there will be probes.
Oh, that's pretty, that's interesting and somewhat exciting.
So then if there's a legitimate story and there's somewhat reliable evidence and sources available, part of my question there was why does the legacy media not spend any money, time, resources, investigative endeavor on stories like this?
What does that tell us?
I mean, it continues to astonish me that they're uninterested or disinterested.
I forget what the right word is in this situation.
But, you know, from the very beginning, COVID was a story that was reported in a very particular way.
I think a lot of reporters decided what they felt or what they believed about certain topics based on what Donald Trump's reaction was.
If Donald Trump suspected that there might have been lab origin, Or if you blame China, then the response was to go all the way in the other direction.
If Donald Trump said he took hydroxychloroquine, then hydroxychloroquine absolutely had to be snake oil.
There was no other way of reporting this because Anthony Fauci was presented as the kind of human counterpart to Donald Trump at the time as the alternative authority figure.
He's been embraced, and I think there's an unwillingness to go near that topic because they feel that that's implicitly encouraging People towards Trump ism, but it's not the two things are totally unrelated.
The question we still have an unresolved question about where this virus came from.
They haven't.
Answer that question.
So until they do, don't we have to keep looking for it?
I think we do, don't we?
Seems that it's being maneuvered out of the agenda.
And I feel that there's, and I'm obviously not the first to make the remark, that there's an emergent template where crises enter, a very strong narrative accompanies the origin of the crisis.
Anyone that dissents is maligned and it becomes very difficult.
Well, the thing you described about to be sort of inquisitive or to oppose a narrative is become aligned with Trumpism.
It's almost, I feel that they are creating that dynamic.
Myself, over the last few years, I've come from a position of thinking like, oh, Donald Trump, man, seriously?
And like then recognizing that there's a lot of people who see him as a sort of a real solution because of the berserker component, because he is an anomaly in the political space.
Then like for me, as it becomes slightly more sophisticated, I think, hang on a minute, if they don't like him as much as they don't like him, that at least is something, whatever's going on with this guy, the establishment don't want him in there.
Up to all the way where I start thinking he's alright.
Because in a sense you're maligned and marginalised and excluded from space.
Like the thing that you said about how they defaulted to Fauci as a counterpoint because of some rolling eyes and because they had a sort of a neocon stooge as he's starting to appear sort of up there on the podium.
We've now reached the point where You have the kind of, the space is becoming so fissured and fractured that new alliances were going to happen and at that moment I thought, oh well that's the fault of the people that are reporting in this manner and refusing to investigate as a result of those assumptions, the ones that you just outlined.
But perhaps it's a, perhaps it's broader than that.
Perhaps this is just, these alliances are just going to occur because it is authoritarianism versus the periphery and anti-authoritarianism and you're going to find yourself in new alliances.
What do you think it is?
Which one of those?
Well, I very much think it's the latter.
I mean, I'm working on a book now and looking into the origins of this anti-disinformation censorship complex.
And part of it comes from this political theory that was derived by He was a Nazi jurist, actually, named Carl Schmitt.
One of his core political theories is that all politics, liberal democracy, is just window dressing.
All politics is really about sorting friends from foes.
And it's all about the binary.
It's who's on our side and who's on the other side.
This came very much into play after 9-11.
Are you with the terrorists or against them?
And now it's sort of reflexively how we do everything.
It's are you on our side or are you on Putin's side?
Are you on our side or are you on the side of the anti-vaxxers?
Are you on our side or the side of the insurrectionists?
They're trying to eliminate those middle spaces, those shades of gray, and that's been very effective.
And it's also convinced people to turn the blinders on when it comes to looking at somebody like Anthony Fauci.
In retrospect, we should have wondered right away about a guy who tells us that he lied to us about something like masks for our own good.
That's something that no journalist or scientist should ever be caught doing, saying, yeah, I told you a wrong fact, but I had to, like, we shouldn't let people off the hook for that.
But we did, because he coded as somebody who was a friend and not a foe.
And that's how the media treated him.
I think that's the core authoritarian distinction is between his authority and everybody else.
Yes you're right and you can see how authoritarianism is advanced by this false oppositional perspective.
You're either with the terrorists or you're against the terrorists.
In a way what that creates is a conversational framing that is in its nature opposed to something that I think might be quite fundamental The decentralization of power, the demonopolization of powerful big tech entities, the prohibition of the overreach of the state, the foreclosure of the state's right to intervene in matters like how you raise your children or how you earn your money.
By creating that sort of polarity, in the end a sort of a relatively balanced polarity Would almost on a mathematical level lead to two spaces?
For or against?
Yes?
No?
You know like it is in it by its nature binary so I can see why that has prevailed and how it serves authority and also how we've experienced even in this time that I've been you know intellectually should we say engaged in these spaces we've witnessed the Inversion of meaning, like free speech is bad, free speech is hate speech, that talking about peace or advocating for peace is bad and disloyal, and how we've seen parties that were typically associated with advocacy for civil rights and liberal attitudes becoming authoritarian.
I suppose it's precisely because of this The phenomenon you're describing.
So yeah, that book's going to be good, I reckon, because you can see how that would dynamically create that kind of fissure.
Yeah, I'm sure it'll work.
Yeah, thanks.
I get that.
Yeah, and that's how the algorithms work in this censorship space.
They're all designed to kind of reduce everybody to Which side of the line are you on?
You know, what they're analyzing is how do you respond to stimuli if somebody comes out with a crazy opinion
about X, are you on this side of that opinion or that side of the opinion?
They're always analyzing the machines, the machine learning version of content moderation.
That's what it does.
It's designed to score you on a spectrum of opinions.
And that's why things like this Digital Services Act that you've got in Europe now are so scary, because it's just creating an intellectual dragnet Over vast territories and separating people according to their opinions and, you know, and telling us that some opinions are just illegal, you know, and others are, you know, everything else is okay.
And that's a terrible, dangerous way of looking at things.
And it's totally contrary to my understanding of what Enlightenment government is.
From a free market perspective, it seems that what was and has been emerging in online spaces is the potential for global audiences to accrue topically or via subject, i.e.
Substack is an example, Rumble, the phenomenon of Joe Rogan to take the most evident figure, that you can create new markets bypassing institutions.
And I would say that that trend Unchecked would continue and have connotations and could be extrapolated beyond media space and I would say into the administering of power ultimately.
Why wouldn't it?
Why would you not if you recognize, oh I'm part of a community, we can intercommunicate, we can Establish democracies.
Oh, I wonder how that would work if it was geographically localised.
I wonder that there was a tendency and a trend that had to be arrested and has been arrested and is being arrested.
I wanted to ask you about the EU's Digital Services Act, the recent labelling of Ex Biteri Breton as a hub of disinformation and the numerous comparable pieces of legislature, whether it's Canada's podcast bill, whatever they're calling that, The UK's online safety bill that sort of coincided with events that affected me personally of course and I wonder what you feel this is in effect and of course I wonder in particular how you feel about the fact that they're often mobilized by things that almost anyone would agree with.
Hate speech, child pornography, nobody wants that.
Yes, but often there are matters for which there are already laws that don't require additional legislation or the foreclosure of free speech.
Right.
And that's always how they propagandize repressive or authoritarian measures.
They start with something that everybody agrees with for whatever reason.
That's why in America, I think the first A figure to be removed from the internet in a coordinated way, Alex Jones, was somebody who was really unpopular in many quarters, so people didn't protest the underlying issue, which is switching out one way of regulating speech, which was always litigation based, and doing it by this other means, which was
Corporate behind closed doors didn't involve courts or juries or anything like that That's scary, but all the laws that you're talking about Have tremendous Implications for the ability of ordinary people to conduct democracy I mean these sort of top-down measures are They imply that speech is dangerous.
And we found out, I mean, I think COVID is the primary example of why these kinds of laws can be abused, right?
So with COVID, one of the things that happened was you saw early on there were scientists
like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and Martin Kaldor from Harvard, Sunetra Guptra from Oxford,
who were suppressing the internet, not because they got anything wrong, not because they
were inciting people or committing libel or doing anything that you would traditionally
consider a crime, right?
Or a speech offense.
But because they were opposing a government policy, they were saying that they thought lockdowns were ineffective.
They thought that lockdowns were not scientifically indicated.
The people who run the trust and safety departments or the censorship departments in these companies classified that as disinformation because it was information that produced the wrong behavior in people.
It aroused the wrong political response.
So even though it's factually true, it's narratively incorrect.
And that's what's so dangerous is that you have people with that kind of power deciding what is and is not appropriate content and they
will lie, you know, they'll abuse those powers. It's already been proven. That's what's so scary, I
think. In a way, it's already happening, Because sometimes when I'm talking about what I believe to be an attempt to create systems of authority that are able to, because true authority I suppose by its nature, would bypass democracy and some of the stories that we track and also that you track and investigate appear to be targeted and motivated towards the creation of systems that mean
That regardless of what country you're in, or regardless of whether or not what you're saying is true, there are new methods and modes of control being introduced, often under the auspices of safety, because the alternative would just be to announce that it's about control.
We've been talking about what's been happening with banking in Canada, and appears to be being legislated for, and certainly is increasing.
And I wondered actually, because you know Chrystia Freeland, the sarcastically named Deputy PM of Canada.
What was your personal experience of her, if that's not a rude question?
So Chrystia Freeland was a reporter.
She wrote for the New Statesman, I believe the Financial Times, a few other papers.
She's obviously Canadian, but she was reporting from Russia.
At the same time I was.
There was a very small community of expats in Moscow in the 90s.
And so we all knew one another.
We were all familiar with one another.
And Christia was somebody with whom I disagreed a lot during the Yeltsin period.
She had very positive views, for instance, about the figures that we now call oligarchs.
Sometimes she did.
And, you know, there were some columns that she wrote that even at the time I remember raising an eyebrow about.
When Putin first came to power, you can go back and look at this, there was a column that she wrote talking about how the West is falling in love with Russia again.
You know, the implication being that Putin was, you know, he was a more respectable face.
He was someone with whom we can do business.
And, you know, she had a reputation as somebody who kind of He toted the establishment line, the American foreign policy line on Russia, which we didn't always agree with because there were pretty dramatic consequences for people in Russia at the time.
There was a gutting of the freedom of the press, there were elimination of all kinds of public services, and a lot of the Americans were cool with that.
And, you know, when she reappeared in this role in Canada, all of my old friends from Russia, we've been all texting each other about this.
It's unbelievable.
This stuff is, you know, the use of denying banking services, this invitation of Yaroslav The Canadian Parliament.
It's hard for me to believe that Krystia, who has a Ukrainian background and started her career out writing for Ukrainian papers, didn't know what was going on there.
So the excuse that this all caught them unawares, I'm just not sure about that.
But yeah, no, and she seems very aggressive.
In promoting this very aggressive use of, you know, denial of services to people who are on the wrong side of the informational landscape.
And that's very concerning, you know, and it's totally contrary again to what traditional Western liberal democratic values.
You said earlier that it was using the ideas of Carl Schmitt that democracy itself could be regarded as a kind of liberal window dressing for binary systems, for dividing friends.
And one of the things I've been most struck by is how the aesthetic of liberalism, the rhetoric of liberalism is so closely allied to authoritarianism.
And Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau and figures that I feel like, you know, I don't know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I would have just thought, they seem nice, like the kind of people that you'd want run in a country, sort of modern looking.
and sounding. And before long, they're literally applauding Nazis.
Now, when we'd spoken about that, I mean, on our channel, we assumed that that was just an innocent mistake.
And the idea that it--
that potentially-- But I do know that her own grandfather was part of a-- also a-- I guess an amateur.
Nazi battalion out there and that her grandfather's, part of her grandfather's role was seizing
printing presses from Jewish organizations and stuff.
So what, you think it's, I mean, that's just speculative, is it?
I mean, it does seem like a pretty mad accident.
I assumed it was like a Jungian kind of deep unconscious accident brought forth from the
collective psyche that Canada, in all its liberal posing, somehow like a fart, just
revealed, "Oh no, we're applauding a Nazi!"
But you think it's sort of like almost potentially deliberate.
Well, yeah, if it was a fart, that's one of the all-time loud ones, I would say.
First of all, it's impossible to believe that they were not aware that this guy fought on the other side of a war where 42,000 Canadians died.
Most people are pretty, I understand it was a long time ago and not everybody's read their World War II history, but if your country fought in a war, you tend to know who was on the other side of that conflict.
Yes, there are some legitimate reasons, there of course were legitimate reasons to fight against the Soviets, among other things because they had previously done a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, they're not exactly Great actors.
But in World War II, by 1941, they were on our side.
And this figure, Jaroslav Honka, it was in the Waffen-SS.
I mean, they had to have done some research on this.
And it's impossible for me to imagine that they weren't at least aware that they were asking Parliament to cheer somebody who was fighting on the other side of So, the Nazi element aside, but you add the Nazi element to that, and that scene, it looks like what my podcast partner Walter Curran and I called a soft opening for asking people to accept certain fascistic values.
I don't know how else to interpret that scene.
It's a difficult phenomenon or at least event to interpret at all.
A few things I'd love to run through with you.
Firstly, the emergence or at least announcement that RFK is going to run independently and the fact that a significant number of Americans say they would consider voting for an independent candidate.
Do you think that this is possible?
Do you think it will alter the trajectory of the election?
Do you think it could even alter the candidate that runs for either the Democrat or Republican party?
Do you think it will change the This course during this election, do you think that he's going to get like super attacked from both sides now?
What do you think will be the broad impact of RFK's candidacy, Matt?
I think the candidacies of both RFK and Cornel West are going to have a significant impact on the election.
At least I think that's very possible.
Cornel West doesn't have to get that much support before he becomes a major factor in the race for a variety of reasons.
It's the same thing with our RFK with he starts getting even pulling the same numbers that he has been, you know, between 10 and 20 percent of even the Democratic electorate.
If you start adding the people who are among independents and Republicans who would consider voting for him, then we're getting into serious numbers.
Now, the question is, will his candidacy hurt?
Trump, who's the presumptive nominee more than Joe Biden, who's the presumptive Democratic nominee.
I don't know.
But, you know, there's a reason why the Democratic Party, actually both of the two established parties, hate these kinds of candidates, because especially at a moment like this one, when, you know, the incumbent is so totally unappealing.
I mean, he's clinically dead, basically.
Right.
If given the option of voting for somebody who's still alive and breathing and able to speak in his own language, people will do that.
And I think both RFK and West are going to become real factors.
That I suppose at least is cause for some optimism.
Another subject I wanted to of course touch upon is the escalating violence in the Middle East.
I've noticed already that it's entering into an already difficult, divided, communicative space and this is almost the ultimate divisive Issue even prior to cancel culture, even prior to the kind of online tribalism that we see these days and the kind of self-censure and the censure of others.
This was an issue that was almost, I don't know, it appears to divide people like nothing else I can really think of.
What do you think is going to be the impact just in terms of journalism and discussing it and the cause for nuance and cause for peace when it comes to this horrific and brutal and difficult issue?
First of all, I mean, it's just awful.
Obviously, it's a terrible story and it breaks your heart.
But one of the things that's really troubling about this era of journalism and even social media communication Is that there's relentless pressure on people to have visible external symbols of compliance or support.
So anything from wearing masks to the Ukraine flag emojis to even for some people the American flag emojis or the black square or whatever it is.
There's always this pressure to kind of reduce things to, I'm on this side or I'm on that side, and I hate you because you're on the other side of this, and let's come to those conclusions right away.
Let's do that in the initial hours of the event, whereas in my experience, It can take years before you really can have strong opinions about a thing, because issues can be so complicated.
But you're right, of all the issues that there are in the world, this is the one that people feel most... they feel less tolerant of the shades of grey in between.
And I think that's dangerous because this is an immensely complicated issue, and people on both sides of it would gain from learning the perspective of the other side, and they're not going to do that.
They're going to wall up.
I mean, don't you think they're going to move to one side or the other and just pour invective and venom on one another, and that's only going to worsen the situation?
When the only way out is to kind of reach some kind of mutual understanding or, um, and I don't know.
I don't, do you see that happening?
I'm not, I'm not sure, not sure that I do.
Matt, I think it's been heavily exploited already.
We looked at sort of the number of people in Congress because someone posted it on, on X that have already like during this period invested in weapons manufacturers and energy companies.
There's been rhetoric from Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham that sort of escalatory and Allies this issue with increasing budgetary aid for Ukraine be Russia and prolonging that conflict and what I feel is that the world is not in a state to handle this.
This is the world cannot accommodate this now and it's happening and I've just felt personally, you know, particularly I suppose because I've I'm hardly in a position myself at the moment to try to sort of walk across a razor wire across shark infested waters like oh my god like what are we this is not what the world needed because it seems designed to defy any talk of
solution, collusion, like it's that's how the charge is so high.
And obviously you can appreciate people that are directly involved or ideologically involved or affiliated by some
religious or national in terms of their deep identity.
And But elsewhere it seems when you see people in positions of power exploiting it, I suppose I feel at least that thematically is consistent with what's been happening.
exploitation of crisis is perhaps at least one area of this that we could safely discuss,
amend and look for consensus. I wonder too, Matt, what you think about CNN's ongoing observable
decline and the legacy media's decline generally. And what do you think about the Trusted News
Initiative, a kind of organization that have explicitly stated that their main goal now is
to align with one another and oppose independent media, that there is explicit enmity towards
independent media. And it appears also that much of this legislation that we're discussing is
advantageous to the media.
to big tech, it's advantageous to big tech to comply because of the potential penalties of
non-compliance, of course. It's advantageous to government as a means to assert control.
It's advantageous to the legacy media who don't explore the kind of ideas that independent media
can. Well, I mean, things like the Trusted News Initiative, I mean, the irony that they put the
word trust in there.
Why do companies like CNN, why?
Well, the New York Times doesn't have this problem exactly, but a lot of other legacy news outlets are experiencing catastrophic drops in audience while at the same time shows like yours and Joe Rogan's and lots of people on Substack are going the other direction.
Why is that?
And I think it's very simple, especially in journalism, it's a trust business.
When audiences see that they've been betrayed, and just take a classic example of that, the WMD affair years ago, when there's a mistake and legacy media doesn't own up to the mistake, doesn't go back and have a reckoning for The mistake that they made, well, then people don't trust that outlet anymore, and that's when you see loss of audience.
We've seen it go way down in recent years because there's been this sort of endless parade of stories where they've been wrong about huge things, and not only that, they don't go back and fix it, right?
Like, it's one thing to screw things up, but it's another thing to sit there and say, You know, we didn't get that wrong, you know, and try to just deliver the news again.
People see right through that, and so they're looking everywhere for alternative sources of information.
When they find somebody like you, they trust you.
You will admit when you get something wrong that that builds a lot of trust with people.
And so what they're going to try to do now is they're going to try to legislate.
They're gonna try to force people to trust these these institutions, but you cannot force trust.
It's a human thing.
There's only one way to do it, and you have to build it up over time.
It's like trying to force somebody to love you.
You can't do that.
There's no way to do it by fiat.
It's a relationship, and they've never understood that.
It's a continual source of fascination to me that they don't understand those dynamics, because it's so obvious, isn't it?
It seems to me.
Yeah, because you talked earlier about the imperiousness of Anthony Fauci and this assumption of authority, a kind of parental attitude.
The whole idea of censorship indicates how we are broadly regarded.
The inability to make decisions for yourself, even as they frame the arguments themselves, this is for your safety.
That requires a particular dynamic that I think it's possible to significantly address now.
I feel that much of the tension that's emerging now is because It's almost as if, whether it's technology, whether it's culture, whether it's something akin to evolution, there is a flow towards the potential to decentralize.
As much as the world is becoming one space because of the miracle of communications and the immediacy of of certain types of physical travel, there is also the
possibility for something a little more arcane.
It's possible now, I envisage, to live more closely to how we lived for tens of thousands
of years, whether that's some new instantiation of smaller tribes that are tolerant of one
another, that live federally, democratically.
It's possible now.
You no longer need to aggregate to the scale that you did in the agricultural revolution
or the industrial revolution or the technological revolution.
Now the potential, once you remove the top strata, the potential for a fairer, better, more open, transparent democratic society, with of course some kind of centralised government by consensus as transparent as possible, is beginning to be a realistic possibility.
And I feel that the machine is just marshalling every conceivable resource to resist the flow.
And to do that, yeah, I suppose you do have, you can't do that with trust and with love.
And it's almost, even to hear a journalist as credible as yourself use those terms,
we're just sort of, that's been delegitimized and extracted from the conversation.
We're supposed to just respond to authority now.
We're supposed to, how many times have we seen the bafflement of CNN?
You shouldn't be listening to them, you should be listening to us.
Stop listening to them.
And the lengths that they will go to to just remove opponents, it's, yeah, it's amazing to me.
You can't trust them.
They've got a dog in the fight.
They're funded in an extraordinary way.
They're allied.
Their function is to normalize and amplify the agenda of the powerful.
They can't do anything else.
Their economic model won't sustain any other version for them.
That's all exactly right.
And they tell you openly, we don't trust you.
How is anybody supposed to respond to that?
To go back to the Fauci example, oh yeah, I lied to you about the mask thing, or I lied to you about how many people need to be vaccinated to get herd immunity because it was for your own good, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten the shot.
You're telling me that you don't trust me with the true information.
When CNN or whoever it is does a headline that says, Trump falsely says false thing in false news conference, what they're telling you is like, we don't trust you to draw the correct conclusion that this is false, right?
And that used to be how the media operates, like the whole ethos of journalism.
And again, I grew up around journalists my entire life.
The ethos was, We get the stuff, we gather it up, we satisfy ourselves that it's true, we put it out there, and we trust you to do the right thing with it.
It's not our problem, and it's a two-way street.
And it was actually liberating for the journalists, because it's a great thing to be able to say, We're done.
Our job is done here.
We did the thing that we're charged with doing.
Now you do your thing.
You make your decisions as citizens.
And that's how democracy works, is we trust each other.
We work with each other.
And I was always very inspired by that model.
I thought that was a beautiful thing.
And they've taken that away.
They've said, we don't trust audiences anymore.
We have to tell them what to think, in addition to telling them Facts, but they're now they're not even really doing that
anymore. So I don't know how I think people can only respond to that
That approach in one way which is to recoil from it and that's that explains the drop in audience and empowered
citizenry is Dangerous.
And that dynamic that you outlined, the dynamic where the media says, hey, we've done this research, you know, you make your own choices, assumes power of the citizenry rather than that they are subjugated, docile children.
And even the sort of style or manner of journalism that you described, I see how that organically happens in independent media space, just really basically observing, oh yeah, that's how it's worked for us.
We've gone, I remember there was a story once where a Facebook whistleblower came forward.
So I was like, oh, this is brave, this Facebook whistleblower has come forward and look, she's revealing these kinds of practices within Facebook or whatever.
And then all of the comments were like, You idiot!
They're using me!
They're going to use this to say we should censor people on Facebook.
And then when I revised that, I looked at it and thought, oh my God, of course, of course, that's what this is.
And we said, of course, sorry about that.
We sort of believed that for what it was.
And we grew and we, as you say, gained their trust by being involved in a discourse and even the tone, the tone.
And I think that there is something cultural and economic happening here that you still feel that The voice of the legacy media is either absent and anodyne, in the case of much TV news, or in print media, presumptuously condescending and prescriptive.
Independent media don't have that, even if it's people that very avowedly say, I'm not a journalist like Joe Rogan or whatever.
it's conversational or it's comedic or it's human or it's flawed or it's how you might see things
differently. And I can see how when I went to bloody Florida to visit Rumble and stuff, I was
like, "Oh, I see now how the kind of libertarian right is more equipped to deal with these new
sets of competing values." Because unless I'm being duped again, and it's God, it's not beyond
me to be double duped, it seems like they're like, "Oh, you believe that, do you? Yeah, well,
Well we don't care, we believe this.
It sort of seems somehow more.
Suitable than this kind of centralizing, controlling, not even the kind of liberalism worthy of the name where it's like we're just going to oppose other interests on your behalf.
Note that you work for those other interests.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're so right about the tone, the tone change.
I think that explains a lot of it by itself.
People don't like to be instructed, you know?
They don't like that Sergeant Shultz, like, you must do this, you know?
And the tone was once very different.
We were trained the prose style of sort of ordinary mainstream journalism.
If we were not completely sure about something, we always threw in allegedly, reportedly, we always tried to refer back to, this person said that, this is coming from them, right?
And the whole idea there was, We didn't want to make representations to the audience that this is what you should think, this is what we think, and you should think this too.
It's, here's the information, sometimes we're absolutely sure about it, sometimes we're not, but you make of it what you will.
It's putting it in their hands.
And even from a tone standpoint, It's that sort of gentler presentation that I think people are very receptive to.
I mean, that's been shown.
It's starting to come back a little bit in these independent media spaces.
As you say, sometimes it's comedy, sometimes it's conversation, but there's always this kind of respectful thing.
It's not people being preached to.
And it's just, you know, as a performer, if you went out as a comedian and just went up there and said, hey, everybody laugh.
That's not going to work, you know?
You've got to convince people.
It's rhetoric.
Yes.
You have to persuade.
You have to persuade people.
This is the proposal.
There's no force involved.
It's a matter of, like, this is the invitation.
This is the offering.
Do you want it?
Yes or no?
It's up to you.
It's your decision.
It's your decision.
A consensus.
That's all that matters.
That's the only thing that matters.
It's absurd how it's gotten this much out of control, man.
What was the other thing that I was thinking when you were saying that?
You were saying about the independent media, you were saying how out of control that it's got.
Forgive me, Matt, because there was something in there that I really wanted to pick up on.
One second.
The tone?
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Libertarianism?
Oh, no.
I can go back through.
the uh, the allegedly, you know, reportedly.
Oh yeah, that's what it is.
It's almost like they want online space to only be about commerce and control.
But an inadvertent side effect of online spaces is that there was this utopian vision of the internet when it first came about.
Oh my god, we can communicate, we can organise!
Oh my god, the Arab Spring!
Jesus, this could be done by old Napster!
Holy shit, this is a tool of revolution!
And quickly it's like, oh my god, this has to be colonised and tiled over, fast, because it's a machine for chaos.
It makes me realise that what was previously expected of the citizenry was that we're meant
to be pacified, we're meant to be docile, we're meant to be just consumers. That's how we're
spoken to. That's what our relationship is with the state and the state and its relationship to
its own commercial and corporate partners. The idea that we might become animated and awakened
participants and say, "Well, I don't agree with that. What about this?" It's like that book,
Here Comes Everyone. The possibility for everyone to have an opinion, that you're going to hear
things you don't agree with. That's so terrifying that you're going to hear opinions that you don't
agree with, that the state has to step in and along with their partners in this new space of
gargantuan entities, unprecedented power, unprecedented reach, which revealed from
2004, whenever it was, that Edward Snowden made them revelations along with Julian Assange.
Whatever happened to that guy?
Ever since then, it's become evident That you can't rely on them to have that amount of power and as it sort of incrementally grown and the potential of it has grown it's like it's now having to be sort of counterbalanced so that people cannot use this to become awakened and connected.
And empowered, right?
Yeah.
I mean, like, if you go back to the 80s, when Noam Chomsky was writing about this, his whole theory was, it was enough back then, because the sources of media were sparse enough that you could just define the acceptable boundaries of thought.
So, to the extreme left, there was, you know, Maybe we shouldn't have gone into Vietnam because ultimately it didn't help.
Our motives were good, but ultimately it didn't help.
The extreme right was we should have kept fighting forever and whatever.
That's a pretty narrow range of thinking.
There was no America committed war crimes, there was none of that stuff.
As long as you define the boundaries that way, people tended to stay in there and they didn't, you know, stray into all these places.
The internet comes along, suddenly people are able to go and investigate all this stuff, and now things are completely out of control.
There's no defined, you know, sort of narrow highway of thinking anymore, and that eventually expresses itself in things like Donald Trump getting elected or Brexit or things that are totally out of the realm of what they would consider acceptable.
So now they're responding with, yeah, sorry, that whole thing where you have freedom to go like reading stuff and all that.
No, we're not going to have that.
We're going to massively surveil this entire space.
And if you have one wrong thought, you're going to end up on a list somewhere and maybe you won't get to use a credit card in a year or whatever.
You know, it's going to be that kind of a thing.
And it's going to work, unfortunately.
Because ethnographically, anthropologically, and indeed according to their own discourse, diversity is a kind of inevitability of human beings.
You will find new cultures emerging, new groups emerging.
And it's extraordinary that the only sort of extremes that they're able to entertain pertain to individualism and individual identity and that in itself prevents further organisation and tends to, it looks like so far, facilitate further censorship.
Fervor authoritarianism used to weaponize more control because hate speech is always one of the... Matt Schellenberger talks about a lot in his stuff around censorship.
Do you think, generally speaking, people are more tolerant?
Or do you think, generally speaking, people are living together more harmoniously?
Aside from the obvious geopolitical challenges of right now, people Do have an opportunity to chime along pretty well.
People don't care about sexuality, people don't care about race and yet somehow this is getting charged to a degree that it's not going to improve the situation and I don't believe they care about that.
I don't believe that that's their motive.
There's no demonstration of it anywhere else.
No, and even good news, they don't want to report.
I mean, there is so much good.
We've made a ton of progress in the West on all kinds of issues.
We're much more tolerant of all sorts of things that we needed to get better on, whether it's race, understanding, being sympathetic to class issues, trying to be more forgiving of people who You know have fallen behind understanding that certain people need attention and you know from the health bureaucracy like people are better about that stuff than they ever were in the past and we're being told on the country no.
There's more hate than ever.
We're saturated with this malevolence and negativity.
And as a result, you should accept this top-down sort of expert class.
Picking and choosing what you can see, because that's going to make sure that this wave of destructive thinking that's out there in the great shark-like beast that is the general public, that has to be restrained, and we're the only ones able to do it.
I think it's just miserable.
I'm always struck at how Americans can get along.
In almost any circumstance, when you're actually out there in real life, I've seen this over and over and over again in bad situations, from Hurricane Katrina to even being in Iraq.
People who have different views on things, when times get tough, they don't wall up and fight each other.
They cooperate, as people tend to do.
And we're told the opposite, which is sad.
Matt, thank you so much for coming on.
Stay free today.
Thank you for making me feel optimistic, sometimes in spite of the evidence, sometimes using the evidence to show me that things can improve, that new alliances can be made, that we can surmount significant obstacles, that we are still very much in this fight.
Matt Toiby, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks a lot, Russell. Take care.
You can follow Matt's work with Racket News on Substack and follow him on X at MTIEB.
Well, that would be Matt Tieby. M Tieby.
We'll post it in the thing. He's not MTIEB.
That's not his name. I mean, we know his name.
We've just been speaking to him all this time.
And what a tonic it is to speak to a genuine journalist.
That's what investigative journalism looks like.
And that's what investigative journalism does.
It looks at something that everyone assumes to be true.
Wait a minute, Andy Fauci's a great guy.
Hold on a second!
And suddenly revelations and suddenly reality is different.
How interesting what the legacy media investigate and what they don't investigate.
How revealing.
Whose side are they on?
Is it their job to investigate or is it their job to amplify and normalize the agenda of the powerful?
You let us know in the chat and the comments.
Remember, Tomorrow, we're being joined by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who said that Wikipedia even, that sort of trusted resource of all of us, who among us doesn't write their entire show based on Wikipedia entries?
I know we don't anymore because, as Larry Sanger says, it's propagandist and biased.
If you want to be part of this movement, and we are going way, way, way beyond anything we imagine now, here on Rumble, we will describe to you the nature of the problem.
There, On Stay Free with Russell Brown, we talk about the numerous ways that the world has gone awry, the corruption of the military-industrial complex, the inefficacy of the state, the corruption of the legacy media.
On Locals, what's it going to be like next?
How are we going to reorganise?
How are we going to get out of this?
As well as meditations, biblical readings, looking at scripture, religion, all the tools available to us, the five ways that are going to change the world, whether it's cryptocurrency, new biomechanical technology, simply Alkane philosophy revivified and I want to thank the people that are supporting us on Locals and I want to urge you to join our community.
Become an Awakened Wonder if you can and man we'll find new ways of getting everybody on board.
It's so important for you to support us now.
Once the government gets involved and Big Tech demonetizes you, it's us now.
This is it.
You've seen from Matt Taibbi how important your support is and I want to thank Benita 08, thank you for being an Awaken Wonder.
Marnie Howe, Mad Nick, Kay Kinsley 1, Del Boy W12, you are all so welcome here.
Thank you for becoming an Awaken Wonder.
Thank you for supporting our movement.
Who knows what we can achieve together.
Let's remain optimistic.
Let's remain powerful.
Let's remain above and beyond fear.
But more important than that, let us remain free.
Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
