Matt Taibbi - On Populist Uprising, Elon Musk & UK Files
Joining me today is independent journalist Matt Taibbi.He was one of the leading publishers of the Twitter Files and you can find his work on Substack at https://www.racket.news We will be talking about the UK Files, Media Matters’ case with Elon Musk & New Twitter Files exposing the “Election Integrity Partnership”. Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportListen as a podcast: https://podfollow.com/1648125917Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's a very special episode.
It's Matt Taibbi talking about new revelations from the Twitter Files, or X-Files as it now has to be called.
It's a brilliant conversation.
You can follow Matt Taibbi on Substack or at Racket News.
Both of those links are in the description.
You can hear us Talking about the UK files, which shows how there's all sorts of spying, discrediting and dissenting going on, how there's a formula emerging for setting up these things called NGOs, non-government organisations, that are essentially sock puppets for power that legitimise it.
We talk about Elon Musk and his latest case, and we talk about the Election Integrity Partnership, and with a name like that, you know they're stealing elections.
This is the kind of conversation that's going to make you feel better educated.
You know all the time when you're sort of talking to people and they go, no, no, the system's fine.
The legacy media can be trusted.
Why don't you vote for the other party if you're not happy with things?
Matt Taibbi is going to educate you and make you feel better.
Time for us to have a conversation with a genuine, legitimate, fantastic journalist, a man with integrity, authenticity, a man whose spirit will inspire you and help you to recognize that No matter how disempowered you feel, no matter how far from truth you may feel, no matter how hard it may be to maintain optimism, there is always hope because there are men like my next guest out there fighting for freedom by acknowledging the complexity of truth.
Please welcome to the show Matt Taibbi.
Matt, thanks for joining us, mate.
Thanks for having me back, Russell.
I appreciate it.
So what is the significance of the UK files, Matt?
How are we going to make an American media audience concerned with the UK files?
What's the function of them and why are they globally significant?
Well, we've only released a piece of them so far.
Actually, some of these documents came out some time ago in A couple of Al Jazeera pieces, but for the most part, there's an enormous quantity of Labor Party internal email communications that a whistleblower got hold of, and now an investigative journalist named Paul Holden has, and he's been writing for us.
These documents are really important because of an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Which has become one of the most influential, quote-unquote, anti-disinformation organizations in the world.
They have been tremendously successful in getting people taken off the internet by accusing them of hate speech, disinformation, and other offenses.
And they've always claimed to be independent.
These documents show that they were actually a Labour Party operation.
And they're pretty damning, I would say.
Why are they damning?
Who do they target?
Are there recognisable establishment figures from within the British political establishment and even the American political establishment?
And would you say that knowing that they are not neutral and unfunded, that an agenda can be discerned based on the individuals targeted?
So, this group, this Center for Countering Digital Hate, its origins trace back to a faction within the Labour Party that you're probably familiar with called Labour Together, that is most directly aligned with Keir Starmer, right, so who's, you know, your likely next Prime Minister over there.
And yes, they have targeted individual politicians, most notably Jeremy Corbyn in Britain,
but also going even further back than that, or farther, I always get that wrong.
There was a sort of controversy involving Grant Schapps, remember the Tory MP who was accused
of editing his own Wikipedia pages.
These documents show that that story came from this group.
It was later recanted.
Uh, and so it's, it's a group that's dedicated to stopping fake news, but they themselves appear to have trafficked in fake news.
So that's that we think is significant in the United States.
We saw them all over the Twitter files because among other things, they were really, really, um, intense and trying to get the so-called disinformation dozen removed, which included Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Uh, And they've been recently sued by X slash Twitter because they've been involved in accusations that X or Twitter or Elon Musk are all trafficking in hate speech.
They're a pretty significant organisation.
This new classification of hate speech appears to really be a weapon for control and a successful
one because the category of hate speech is clearly one that exists.
But it's difficult to believe that the sudden interest in protecting people's feelings is
motivated by compassion.
And if it is, why are these opaquely funded organisations, like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, that don't explicitly declare what their interests are and what their funding is and what their agenda is, and why do they have discernible connections to the political establishment?
This is happening, it seems, more and more broadly.
Ireland appears to be a piloting nation for these practices, with particularly draconian legislation being introduced and being demanded all the more immediately as a result of the recent riots in Dublin.
How do you think we're going to see this category of hate speech Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
I think you hit the nail on the head there.
that is a position that can be defended?
Why is it not becoming clear that hate speech is not a legitimate concern?
Not that hate speech doesn't exist, but that it's being mobilized in this way?
Yeah, that it's been appropriated for the wrong ends.
Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
It's one thing when a bunch of college lefties come up to me and they say we're really concerned
about the proliferation of hate speech online.
It's another thing when I see an organization quoting the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff and taking money from the Department of Defense and they're worried about hate speech.
Like, I don't think so.
You know, the sudden concern with defense and intelligence agencies with this topic and It is very hard to believe.
And why is it so significant that they're involved?
Well, Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU, he's the person who's famous for defending the Nazis who marched at Skokie.
He once talked about why he was against hate speech codes on campuses.
And he told students, and even minority students, he says, The issue isn't the speech.
The issue isn't the hate speech.
The issue is who's going to decide what is hate speech, and who do you think that is, right?
If you get these hate speech codes, it's not going to be you deciding what's hate speech.
It's going to be the trustees at the university.
And, you know, this was 30 years ago when he was saying that.
Even then he was saying, it's not going to be you deciding.
Now it's even worse.
Now it's going to be some conglomeration of executive branch groups, defense, intelligence.
Do you really want them deciding what hate speech is and using that as a way to get things
off line?
I think that's very suspicious.
Before you answer the next question, Matt, I'm going to stop you there.
Stop right now.
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There was a moment after 2008 where a bunch of, you might call them, leftist populist figures and movements emerged.
You know, Occupy, really obviously, Occupy Wall Street.
And in Greece there was the Syriza movement and Podemos in Spain.
And although Jeremy Corbyn was a lot later, I still feel that this kind of sentiment of anti-establishmentism was fueling that movement after an attempt to make the Labour Party, which is our Democrat party, more of a centrist and neutered organisation.
You know, which obviously began with Tony Blair and then there was a kind of a backlash against that.
Jeremy Corbyn was a significant figure because it felt for a moment, particularly in 2017, that there was a possibility that there was a genuine anti-establishment populist running for one of the major parties in the UK and it was someone from the left, not from the right.
So the disparaging and smearing of Jeremy Corbyn was interesting and there are people now that just Believe that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite and used extraordinary attacks and is a homophobe and stuff.
Was Jeremy Corbyn someone that was especially and particularly targeted?
And if so, what does that tell us about the agenda of groups like the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and hate speech more broadly?
Yeah, exactly.
function of hate speech. I like what you just said, it's not, you know, the control of hate
speech, it's who decides what hate speech is. So can you tell me how Jeremy Corbyn,
who to most people seems like, you know, even if you don't agree with him, a pretty authentic
figure.
Authentic, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think you, again, that question is directly
When we started working on the Twitter files, one of the things that we didn't understand at first was, how come there are so many people who come from the military and sort of counterterrorism suddenly involved in content moderation in Silicon Valley?
And when we finally started drilling down into organizations like the Global Engagement Center in the United States, The Department of Homeland Security had agencies against disinformation.
I had one person from one of those agencies telling me that, look, basically, originally these anti-disinformation groups were built to combat Propaganda from ISIS and Al Qaeda.
But after the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Tea Party, as you mentioned, Podemos, Syriza, you know, Viktor Orban's Fidesz Party, right, like the Australian far-right movements, and then even Bernie Sanders, Trump, Brexit, and then Jeremy Corbyn, I think, is a really important example.
That whole mission just shifted home, right?
They had this huge, basically illegal operation directed overseas at terrorist groups and they just, they just turned it inward.
And these people, the switch was described to me as CT to CP.
So it's counter-terrorism to counter-populism.
And I think that fully describes what happened here.
Like during the entire war on terror, we just told all these military and intelligence groups, Do whatever you need to do, including droning people to death, if that's necessary, to stop propaganda reaching, you know, the UK and, and, you know, Southern California suburbs.
And then those same people got moved on to this other mission.
I don't think they can really distinguish between terrorists and legitimate political movements that people like people who vote, they see threats in the same way.
And that's what's happened, is that they've turned the war on terror machinery inward.
It seems almost too deliciously simple to say that counter-terrorism became counter-populism, but there might be observable symptoms even in the rhetoric of a figure like Hillary Clinton saying we need to deprogram these MAGA extremists, that the language around it might be revealing.
And I suppose that what it seems like is You know, probably post 2008, but certainly with the advent of the kind of communication that's become subsequently available, it became necessary to invent and utilise counter-populist tools, because anti-establishmentism is, I suppose, always present, but very difficult to mobilise and organise when it is, you know, when it's not geographical or it's not single-issue related.
But I suppose now, genuine anti-establishment movement could form. And indeed
they are forming, with more success plainly on the right, I suppose because if you have
nationalism as the defining ideal around which the movement coalesces, whether that's Goethe,
Wilders or your man Javier over there in Argentina, and if indeed there is a broad
anti-migration sentiment and we can debate the legitimacy of those feelings and the impact
of migration as opposed to something like global corporatism, but I suppose it's
harder to counter a movement that has nationalism and even ethno-nationalism around which to
formulate itself. And I think that Ireland becomes an interesting example for two reasons. One,
Matt, the legislation there seems more overt and frightening than elsewhere, with the
police being granted powers, as I understand to sort of invade people's homes and seize tech,
but also because there are these riots there and also because Ireland is not a
colonial superpower. Ireland is an oppressed nation that for years suffered under the kind of
tyranny of the British Empire, obviously, that would be, you know, they should be the
beneficiaries of this kind of compassionate and, to use a rather lazy word, woke discourse that often
undergirds the demand for the implementation of hate legislature. So I suppose what I'm asking them,
Matt, is how you think ethno-nationalism and nationalism might oppose these, what seem to me to be
ultimately globalist and establishment measures and whether or not the anti-establishment movement
can handle some of the nuances that are overridden by making it a sort of nostalgic and
nationalist movement to oppose globalism, I mean.
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Yeah I mean I think first of all all these movements A lot of them are beginning to realize that they have something in common in that they're all being targeted by these same structures.
You know, the sort of Five Eyes intelligence partners, they're monitoring the Sanders movement and the DSA in America and Free Palestine movements in the same way that they're following Trump The Boogaloo Boys, you know, we have a new document story coming out this week that shows, you know, a sort of DHS connected organization using phony accounts to infiltrate the Boogaloo Boys.
And so I think a lot of these sort of groups that are on the populist right and populist left, they have to realize, and I think they are realizing, that they're being lumped together Uh, as similarly as some threats to the, um, established order.
And, you know, they, they, they will be targets of technologies and policies and, um, strategies that are not probably not legal in a lot of countries.
Uh, and you know, they're, they're going to have to find their own ways to communicate.
Um, because they're going to be shut out of, uh, you know, The bigger platforms, they will be de-amplified if they happen to get into mainstream news.
So I think that's important for these groups.
They have to first show that they're legitimate.
They have legitimate political grievances.
And secondly, they have to broadcast those as loudly as possible and not be dismayed by what's going to happen to them.
With these NGOs like CCDH being, it seems, used as tools for various globalist agenda, I wonder if it takes figures with the kind of almost unprecedented power of Elon Musk to oppose them, whether that's through his case against Media Matters, which are themselves an interesting organisation with an interesting history and an interesting funding model, and indeed Musk's pretty unique decision to open up Twitter after his acquisition of it to journalists such as yourself.
What does it indicate to us, Matt, that it seems to take Elon Musk?
What does that tell us about how global power is moving?
And is that cause for optimism or pessimism?
Does it mean that ordinary people aligning is becoming less and less relevant?
You almost have to be a tech titan and the world's richest man to be able to stand up against this insidious and invisible power.
Yeah, to dent this thing, right?
Like that, you know, at minimum, you need a couple of hundred billion dollars, basically.
That's, that's a little bit depressing.
You know, the overall narrative of this is so interesting, I think, Russell, because when the, when the internet arrived, Most people viewed it as this amazing, like, revolutionary tool that was going to bring together all kinds of people all over the world.
Like-minded people from, you know, different countries were going to be able to communicate for the first time easily.
Political movements could coalesce more easily.
But also, like, academic ideas, right?
Like, people were going to innovate more.
They were going to do more interesting research.
I mean, it was this beautiful, liberating thing.
And also, the internet made it almost impossible for authoritarian countries to have the internet and continue to, you know, to lock down their citizenry.
So we looked at it as an inherently democratizing tool that had some characteristics that lean towards, you know, anarchy a little bit, right?
You saw that with the Arab Spring, you know, at the drop of a hat, You know, movements could coalesce and like within a matter of days, you could have four big governments toppled.
And I think that was the moment when the authorities realized, wow, we have to really get a lockdown on this thing, because we just can't allow this to happen.
We are too much at risk if the internet is free.
And there's a moment in time Where that narrative of the unfettered free internet started to roll back and the internet became a tool of social control, which is, I think, where it is right now.
And, you know, one of the symptoms of that is that the only, you know, you basically have to be Elon Musk in order to break through the, you know, homogenous environment, political environment that's been created on the internet.
And even Elon is relatively small potatoes compared to the entire rest of the universe.
But the reaction against him is really significant because the whole information sort of cartel doesn't work if there's like one link in the chain missing.
I think that's one of the big reasons why there's been such an intense campaign against him because If there's one opt-out, then there's a place for all kinds of information to still be moving around, and they can't have that.
Yes, I see.
There is so much potential.
So in his legal battle against Media Matters, is it possible that a victory could be achieved that's so significant that it could have positive repercussions for the rest of us?
What is the, what, who is David Brock and why is his history important?
You know, in particular, his connections to the Clintons and his involvement maybe in like, you know, some of the stuff that went on in 2016.
Some of the Russiagate stuff I'm guessing is involved in that.
And also with media matters, George Soros.
Is he some sort of international supervillain?
What's going on with these figures that appear to be organizing around this battle between Musk and Media Matters?
Well, Soros I'm not really an expert in, but David Brock, I've been in media a long time.
I've covered some really loathsome people.
I've shook the hands of some really loathsome people in my life.
I'm not easily shocked.
He's one of the more breathtakingly off-putting human beings I've ever encountered.
I mean, I've never met the man, but just his record is astonishing.
If you go back to the 90s, and he gleefully wrote about all this in books that he published, he was basically the hitman for the Republican Party.
Uh, in the United States, he was behind media campaigns against everyone, uh, from Anita Hill to the Clintons.
Uh, he basically organized a lot of the, uh, campaigns to highlight things like the Lewinsky scandal.
Um, and then allegedly he had some kind of religious conversion or politically religious conversion.
He admitted all of this.
In books like Confessions of a Political Hitman, I think it was what it was called.
And then, switch sides.
He became the hitman for the blue team.
And I'm not exactly sure when that happened, but he created Media Matters pretty early, I guess that was in 2004.
But Media Matters didn't become an important political force, I don't think, until the Trump years.
Like a really important one.
And what they're accused of here, And I have to stress that it's an accusation, right?
Like, you know, for the purpose of the lawsuit, you have to assume that these things are true, you know, just to get past the first part of the suit.
But we don't know if it's true, right?
But they're accused basically of faking the creation of fringe hate speech and making it look like major advertisers were appearing next to those accounts.
So that they could then report on that and then tell other organizations that it had happened, which led to boycotts of the platform.
Now, without commenting on that specific case, I can tell you that that's something that we've seen on the Internet.
We saw on the Twitter files more than once.
It's sort of fake news is created.
The same people who are behind the fake news write about it.
Then they get somebody else to react to it.
It's sort of the opposite of media, right?
Like media is designed to tell you the truth.
This is designed to like throw a bunch of crap into the internet and impact politics that way.
And the only defense against that is a free press, but they want to lock that down too.
So these people are very dangerous.
Yeah, that sounds frightening.
There's some interesting and, well I don't know about nefarious, figures emerging and that practice of being able to, in this instance, create what seems like a visual affiliation between advertisers and fringe groups, extremist groups, right-wing groups.
It's an interesting attack.
But it seems, yeah, from the moment Elon Musk--
I remember that Elon Musk was seen for a while as a kind of techno-eccentric Willy Wonka of the cosmos
colonizing Mars.
I can make cars run on hiccups.
Like, he was like, oh, this guy's going to be great.
Then suddenly, he acquired a social media platform.
And it's weird.
I've had this sense for a long time, as Mexican folk used to say in California,
I didn't cross the line, the line crossed us.
That there's just been this sort of creeping line of what's sayable and permissible now.
And suddenly, I found myself in alliance with groups I never thought I would be in alliance with,
just because to be anti-establishment now requires all sorts of new affinities.
Like, at one time, I never thought I would find myself having--
I didn't think I'd find myself.
Getting on with Tucker Carlson and now like with the escalation of events in the Middle East there are new fractures, new fissures, new fragmentation.
It really feels like a time of annihilation.
Matt, can you tell us a little bit about the new Twitter files and the election integrity partnership that sounds so sort of bureaucratic and has the word integrity in it and normally a sort of diagnostic tool that I've learned in my own short Time in journalism is if something's calling itself the trusted news initiative or the friendly cuddly bunny party You should probably get yourself a bunker And get and start stocking up and getting ready to survive.
Oh Yeah, no As soon as soon now as soon as I see the word trust, I just assume the person's lying like I Which is not a healthy reaction, but it's kind of an evidence of the Orwellian world we live in.
Yeah, Michael Schellenberger at Public, with whom I testified in Congress earlier this year and then also again this week, will be doing the same thing.
We got hold of a large new trove of documents involving something called the Cyber Threat Initiative League.
Or CTI League, and this is like the precursor organization to that Election Integrity Partnership.
It involves people from the Pentagon, from DHS, from the FBI.
There's a woman from the UK who was central in creating this group, but it really lays out In tremendous detail what the thinking and strategy of all these anti-disinformation people are.
They're talking about creating fake sock puppet accounts to infiltrate groups they don't like.
They're saying we're going to be doing the same things that the bad guys are doing.
They're openly talking about describing Republicans as needing reprogramming.
There's just all kinds of stuff in these documents that I think are, when people see them, you know, the Twitter files were important because they showed, they proved a link between this kind of stuff and official agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security.
This, I mean, there are like whole quotes about, well, we need to do this in a quasi private way because the Department of Defense can't do it legally.
And, You know, Department of Homeland Security doesn't have the capability, and the Global Engagement Center only has $250 million.
So they're not going to be very capable either.
So it needs to be done by people like us who aren't officially, you know, attached to anybody.
And that's kind of the model for how these things work.
You see these NGOs that look independent.
Behind the scenes, they're working with, you know, intelligence groups and enforcement agencies, and they believe They really believe that domestic political movements, like whether it's Trump in America or Corbyn in the UK, that those things are threats in the same way that the terrorists are, and we see that in these documents, and it's pretty shocking.
Yes, it's interesting how often there are apparently independent organisations that are advocating for ending hate speech or for a fairer and more just world that are actually merely a conduit for power and that becomes discernible through their funding.
And then you find sock puppet accounts that are supposed to be legitimate independent individuals but they too are a conduit for the same power.
And it seems like whether or not a popular or anti-establishment figure emerges from the left-wing space using left-wing rhetoric or the opposing space using the appropriate rhetoric there, that they will be opposed.
And it seems now that whatever language is required to legitimise the foreclosure of those groups, Can immediately be accessed and defined.
In our time, it seems to be, I suppose, the power of identity politics, and I mention that only because of how it might relate to hate speech, is that it's by its nature divisive.
It's divisive not only in terms of ethnographics, but also in terms of time.
It indicates that the culture moves at a pace where it's pretty clear, I would say, and this is the guess that generally I would imagine, America is a less racist place than it was 50 years ago, and the UK is a less racist place than it was 50, 60 years ago, and I would say that of most Western countries, and yet there is this feeling that the tension is being amplified.
And I suppose it's going to... I watched the British, I guess, right wing, certainly nationalist, populist figure Tommy Robinson yesterday being arrested for his attendance of a essentially a pro-Israel march, I guess is what it was.
And I thought, wow, that's, you know, in the end, we're going to have to... The only way, I think, to form the kind of alliances that are going to be required in order to oppose centralised authoritarianism is by accepting that you know like ideas that you sort of simply don't agree with that there would be communities that are like we are a ethnically defined community whether that's you know like an ethnic community of african americans somewhere in america or
Communities that are organised around religion or culture or sexual identity or progressivism.
Seems like, how else is this tension ever going to be diffused without the alternative otherwise is to yield to some centralised authority that's going to, as you said earlier, determine What hate speech is unpersonal practitioners of it.
I don't see how that the same way as they enter into these wars without giving you a vision of and this is how we beat
Russia eventually and Ukraine joins a NATO and it doesn't need to lead to a nuclear war or this is how we involve
Iran in This conflict and it doesn't call some massive terrible
apocalypse in the Middle East. There's no vision. Is there Matt?
There's only sort of attempts to manage control can just shut down curtail a store of a desperate attempt
To continually oppose what seems to be organically happening just as a result of one total lack of trust in
authority whether it's state or media or corporate to the ability to organize differently as
As you as demonstrated by the Arab Spring and even you know in terms of the corporate space
Napster, you know, there were examples how the online space was going to collapse existing power centers independent
media Collapsing existing media power centers and to oppose that
these new categories have to be invented to sort of roll back
what appears to be the natural if you can say natural trajectory of a
more accessibility to comms So these new ideologies have to be legitimised through, yeah, I suppose a number of measures, but it seems the one at the moment that's important, certainly when you watch coverage of that riot in Dublin, you hear the sort of Garda, the Irish police say,
There's a far-right extremist faction in Ireland that we have to shut down.
That doesn't make sense in terms of Irish politics or Irish history.
Or a figure like Tommy... They've been oppressed their whole history.
Or a figure like Tommy Robinson, with whom I'm sure I would disagree on religion and gender and all sorts of stuff, I'm sure, but getting arrested as he arrives at a protest.
Yeah, and you even see it actually, Matt, sorry to go on, but in normal legacy media reporting, you say, like I saw a pundit say the other day on MSNBC, in order to prevent fascism, you have to vote for the Democrats in this election cycle.
You can't vote for Cornel West or you're voting for Trump.
So they're sort of, in a sense, fashioning a kind of tyranny with the aesthetics of progressivism.
Right, yeah.
That's exactly what they're doing.
They're leaving you with one acceptable choice.
Everything else is outside the sort of trust tree, and you should be afraid to be seen in those circles.
There might be consequences for you to be in those places.
And in order to get there, in order to get people to accept Those ideas, they have to, as you say, they have to radically change how Western people think, because we're not, if you're old enough especially, we're not conditioned to think that, thinking that way.
Like, I certainly would, will never be able to accept total curtailment of speech rights, or you know, this idea that I can only think a certain way, or only vote for a certain person, or otherwise I'm You know, a threat or an enemy?
Like, that's not how we've been raised to think.
We see this in these documents, by the way.
There's like a Pentagon official who's talking sort of admiringly about the Chinese information landscape, saying that, you know, you have to change the narratives for people way before you get to the point of removing content.
The average Chinese citizen does not think that he or she is being censored, because they've been conditioned for so long to accept the environment that they're in, that for them it's just, oh, government's making good or bad decisions for us, you know, let's just go along with it.
Well, you see, in America, especially, that line you talked about has already moved pretty significantly.
Like, once upon a time, we would never have even We would never have read news like, you know, certain kinds of marches have been declared illegal, like in France, like, you know, the pro-Palestine marches, you know, or that certain kinds of speech has been declared illegal.
We would have thought, regarded that with shock, not even that long ago.
Now, they've slowly conditioned us to this idea that yes, some things can be illegal.
Some things can be taken down from the Internet without due process.
We don't even need to have a criminal case against somebody to accuse them of incitement or anything like that.
We can take off even the President of the United States without a trial or a lawsuit
or anything.
And that's just the way it is and you're going to accept it and people do accept it.
And that's what's so scary about this is that it's not even just the thing that they're
doing.
It's that they've been so successful in changing the way people think about all this stuff
their relentless attention to these issues.
And that's really scary.
It's curious that the pandemic provided a window, I think, into the ordinary format of powers, movements and functioning.
For example, I suppose the point of origin for Yielding civil liberties at the advent of the pandemic was human life is sacred and collectively we have a value that means that individually I should give up my individual freedom and I should be willing to take certain medications, you know, basically without question for the common good.
This idea of the common good, bringing that to the forefront in the pandemic era, I felt Intuitively, it was a risky idea because it's an idea that is mostly removed from common understanding and common discourse.
Mostly, we live in an atomized society.
You live as an individual.
The pursuit of your individual pleasure is your primary goal in life.
You live through the consuming of products.
That's where you get your identity from.
We've gone quite far down that road.
And economically, those are going to be, I think, untenable ideas as we experience the kind of economic decline That seems to be accelerating and the sort of infrastructural disruption that's taking place in your country and mine.
But throughout that period, with that idea in mind, the sanctity of human life, we very quickly, except they were very quickly, and I say they, the establishment, the media, were very quickly able to normalise measures that in a country like China can just be implemented because of years of comparable social control.
But as people learned that there were a good deal of discrepancies and downright lies throughout it, from the origin of the virus, to the efficacy of the medications, to the consequences of taking those medications, to the reliability of the media, countermeasures dismissed and the efficacy of them denied, I think what we're seeing now is a in some quarters at least, a willingness to disobey. So I
suppose the function of the media now has to be to continue to create a climate of crisis,
even if it's just through the manipulation of semantics that suddenly hate speech, oh my god there's
hate speech, we have to do something about hate speech, that it's a... yeah.
Do you see where I'm sort of going with it, Matt?
That you have to turn that into a kind of ever-present crisis in order to legitimise whatever measures it requires.
And I know that something that I've seen sort of in my notes here is you were talking about the CTI League.
I don't know if you've touched upon that Yeah, I think it's part of the revelations that you've just made and maybe forthcoming revelations that you and Schellenberger are making.
What is the CTI League and how does it relate to what I was just saying?
The normalisation of measures that would otherwise be seen as egregious.
Like you said, certain protests being banned or certain speech being banned is not something we would have tolerated 10 years ago.
Yeah, I mean again, the CTI League is this group that was formed You know, officially to address COVID misinformation and disinformation.
But we see in the internal documents that they were actually involved in anything related to current events, especially the elections.
And you're right, they absolutely like their raison d'etre was the health emergency.
But internally, they were doing everything from following followers of Trump to following Free Gaza protests to following the Democratic Socialists of America.
And yes, it's the climate of emergency is central to this whole concept.
Because, you know, if you're raised in a Western liberal democracy grounded in Enlightenment values.
The whole idea is that human history had shown us that when power is concentrated too much, the individual's rights are constantly violated.
And in order to protect against that, we have to make sure that power is diffuse, that people
have self-determination, that they have participation in their own political destiny.
I mean, that's the entire idea behind the American system, for instance, right?
But these people want to reverse that.
They openly want to change how we think about that particular issue.
They think that focusing on individual rights at the expense of the collective is dangerous.
And therefore, we have to change how people think, even about everything from hate speech
to threat to informed consent in medicine.
You know, once doctors cared intensely about informed consent, after World War II, after what we found out about happened in the concentration camps, you know, the Nuremberg Accords made it mandatory, like, for every civilized country to have informed consent with medicines.
But when the COVID vaccine came along, there was a strong public relations campaign like, no, just take the shot.
And, you know, you don't need to know exactly what the results are, whether there have been side effects or not.
Your concern.
That's our concern.
Right.
And that's totally antithetical to how we think in free societies.
But they want to change that.
That's a necessity for them to change that.
And they will, you know, unless there's significant opposition.
Bloody hell, yeah, it's not, um, it isn't, um, what do I want to say, hyperbolic then to refer to it as kind of social engineering, that our behaviour is being altered, and you can see how that can be done quite easily just through the very obvious introduction of new technology.
It just would have been It's unthinkable that we would have tagged ourselves in the way we do through tech, hand over information in the way we do through our phones and stuff.
So when you start adding ideological tags to that, that's fascinating.
I've got a few questions and comments to pass on from our community.
One is from Jim Earthsea in our community.
Does Matt think the silver lining of COVID could be the starting of a revolution as it's awakened previously idle people?
Then this is from Testimony.
This is like a comment rather than a question.
The internet was a CIA project.
It's literally designed to conduct surveillance and distribute propaganda.
I'd like you to tell me if that's true from Testimony or it's just a sort of a rumor from the dark edges of the internet.
And what did you think about the comment about this COVID silver lining as well as that CIA internet comment?
Um, you know, on the CIA internet front, I mean, obviously the internet had defense roots.
I don't know that it was necessarily exactly created specifically with social control in mind.
I think it was a Initially created as a means for factions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines to communicate with one another efficiently, and once they figured out how to do that, they realized it had all sorts of other applications.
I don't know a whole lot about that history, though, so I probably shouldn't comment on it.
I will say, though, that when it was introduced, it did have, for a while, you know, a very liberating Uh, impact on a lot of places around the world.
I mean, I saw this in Russia.
I was there when it was Soviet.
And then I was there when it was, uh, you know, post Soviet and the internet was really important in teaching Russians, um, all these new values.
So, um, as for COVID being the start of a revolution, I think you did see that there were an awful lot of people, um, around the world who became angry at the system in new ways because of
What happened during the pandemic, they became mistrustful of authority.
And we're talking about like ordinary small town, like old ladies and moms who don't care about politics.
Now they do, right?
And that's interesting.
I hope that energy, you know, goes somewhere because I, I frankly find this terrifying.
Like one of the things we see in these documents, there's a ton of these sort of corporate marketing Types who are involved in these projects, and they're applying technologies that they use to monitor how people feel about their products.
Like does this, they use algorithms to analyze, does this social media post make people feel good or bad about software X, right?
Now they're applying that to how people feel about their governments, how people feel about government policies, and they're dividing everything into These binary categories, friend, foe, positive, negative, you know, with us, against us.
Again, that's totally antithetical to what we think of in a traditionally democratic society.
We think, well, there's a lot of us with lots of different ideas and collectively we all get somewhere really cool together.
They do not think that way at all.
They think there's one North Star truth.
And everybody who's on the other side of that is wrong and needs to be suppressed.
And that's, to me, that's the beginning of, like, authoritarianism for real, and that's scary as hell.
Yeah, authoritarianism and sort of at least one definition of fascism, you know, the state corporations and media coming together.
In Lee Fang's piece about Moderna, which I obviously paid a special interest to because I was in it, it showed, like, how yet another NGO, I think they were called something like the PGA, have
been set up and how Moderna have been employing former FBI agents or at least FBI operatives and
how Moderna are spending a lot of money observing online dissent and are looking to
control shadow back. I can't believe that a company that didn't exist a couple of years ago are
targeting dissenters online and have the compliance of the government, have the compliance of social
media sites. That again, and obviously something that's affected me personally, is an indication
that this is escalating, I suppose because it has the capacity to escalate, into inconceivable
territory now, doesn't it Matt?
Oh absolutely and one of the scary things about that sort of Moderna piece is, look...
The people who do this kind of work, the anti-disinformation work, a lot of them don't know anything about anything except what they do.
But they have no problem whatsoever deciding that PhD X is wrong about the vaccine or wrong about the side effect, while health official Y is absolutely right.
And So they have these sort of pre-packaged ideas about things.
They have no specific expertise in anything, but they rely entirely on this idea that, well, Moderna is, let's just say, they're an officially sanctioned partner in the vaccination effort, so they're right, and critics of them are wrong.
Again, it's just that they're creating these dichotomies.
And life isn't like that.
Like in journalism, we're always trained to think of things as well.
Typically, there's a little bit of right on all sides of the equation, right?
Like people, we never really, we rarely see pure 100% right and pure 100% wrong.
It's always like a mishmash of things.
And they don't see it that way.
It's just a whole bunch of people who don't have any, Any real knowledge except about this technology and about this sort of expertise.
Deciding all kinds of questions.
They have no business deciding for people.
That's the thing that's terrifying to me.
Power, even energy, requires polarity.
And you talked about the need for diffuse power models in order to have democracy, autonomy, individual freedom.
So I can see how these emergent dichotomies are ways to centralise power.
That it's beneficial to create oppositionism in order to centralise power, almost on the level of physics.
Got another question here for you from Jamie Jam in our community.
With all of the censorship laws being enacted, DSA and others, including in Australia, how far do you think things will go until there's a pushback from people?
Will masses of people be charged, tried, imprisoned for years until people push back against it?
Do you think it's going to play out like the McCarthy era?
That's from Jamie Jam, Matt.
That's a great question, Jamie.
I don't know.
I mean, I would hope that if there's going to be a confrontation like that, I would think it would be in the United States, because we have a very unique tradition with speech in this country, and it's something that was taught to all of us at a very young age.
Nobody's allowed to tell you what to think or do, like you have the right to your own opinions.
That's the very first thing, right, you're guaranteed as an American citizen.
The right not only to have an opinion, but to petition the government for a redress of whatever your complaints are.
So if it's going to happen, I would think it would happen here.
But what I'm seeing recently, especially, is that there's this incredible apathy and pessimism And, you know, I don't know where that comes from, but it's really frightening.
But I don't think, I always feel optimistic about people in general.
I just, I think that even in the worst situations, they just will not put up with things endlessly.
I don't know how you feel about this, Russell, but like even my experience watching Russians, they put up with an awful lot for an awful long time.
And eventually they just said, you know, screw this.
And I think that's going to happen with this stuff eventually, but whether that's going to be now or in 30 years, that's the question.
Sometimes I feel even when there are protests that spill into riots, there is an indication that there's a sublimated energy that's just waiting to be released.
I first noticed it When in the, you know, I'd always gone to protests when I was, like, younger for, like, the Dockers Union in Liverpool.
I ended up there by mistake, actually, just because I was out and it was happening.
I was like, oh my god, this is so exciting!
And then May Day, sort of socialist protests in the UK, and I used to enjoy that kind of stuff.
And then, Like in like I think it was 2011 in the UK a man was murdered in police custody in London and it sparked first local riots then riots across London that led of course to sort of looting and stuff and then across the whole nation there were riots in sort of disparate riots across cities.
I thought what is this underlying energy that's been released by the the ignition Of this event.
And of course, its expression was diffuse and of course, you know, people were stealing, you know, sneakers and phones and stuff like that.
But I felt that what was underneath it was a kind of anger and a dissatisfaction and even the nihilistic expression of it was an indication of a culture and a society that had lost its way.
And once again, Matt, and this is, you know, getting on for 15 years ago, that What was interesting is the way the judiciary, then under soon-to-be Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just responded.
Then people were on trial, like, the next day.
They were arresting people en masse.
They had courts running through the night.
There were people getting, like, long prison sentences for sort of stealing, like, bottles of water.
It was like the system just fired up.
To go, we do not do this.
We do not have spontaneous uprising.
Because it's, yeah, like, what we all know is, you know, to sort of semi-quote Gandhi, is like, you know, a few million British people cannot control a billion Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.
And because we are so disparate, distracted, and like you say, the apathy that's engendered, I think, By losing tradition, losing connection to family, losing connection to God or highest ideal or whatever you want to call God, the God principle.
People don't have it in them anymore.
But you're right, it can lay dormant even for decades, like your example in Russia.
And once it goes, that's it.
Then it cannot be stopped.
And then the negotiation starts.
How do we get these people back in line?
How do we get them back in some sort of paddock?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a point at which they can't just put everybody in jail, right?
They can't punish everybody.
When it gets to the point where people just will not go to work, or they will not go along, that's when you have what happened in the late 80s with the collapse of the wall.
That's when you had, you know, the Arab Spring happened pretty quickly, and that's because those countries, there was an enormous amount of discontent that was simmering.
Didn't take much, right?
I think what people missed about episodes like Brexit, you know, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Corbyn, also in the UK, but also all those populist moments that you mentioned, movements in Europe, you know, Syriza, Podemos.
Those are all symptoms of people being deeply pissed off and sometimes they don't even know why.
I mean, I remember interviewing people at Trump events and I would ask them, like, why?
So why?
Why this guy?
Why?
Why would you vote for this guy?
I'm like, I don't know.
He's not a politician.
Like, what do you want out of this?
And they're just like, I just want them all to suffer.
You know what I mean?
They would say crazy things like that, but that's, that's out there.
That's out there in big numbers.
Right.
No amount of covering it up is going to make it go away.
So, yeah, I think it'll eventually find its expression, hopefully in a positive way.
Cool.
Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for answering questions from our community as well as from me.
I always feel better educated and more optimistic after I speak to you.
Thank you very much.
Excellent.
Thank you, Russell.
Thank you very much, Matt Taibbi, as always.
And of course, if you want to ask questions to our guests, become an awakened wonder.
You can find Matt's work on Substack at racket dot, well, www dot.
Do we still say that in 2023?
www dot.
Racket.News.
Next week, we've got Steve Kirsch coming on the show talking to us about vaccines, sudden death, Fauci.
He's even willing to put $100,000 on the line for a debate about COVID vaccine safety.
And I'll find out what MIT means by then as well.
Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
