Matt Taibbi traces his journey from a skeptical outsider in post-Soviet Russia—where he witnessed Western media’s blind spots on Yeltsin’s corruption and Putin’s rise—to a whistleblower exposing the FBI’s collusion with tech giants to censor dissent via the "Twitter Files." His 15-year tenure at Rolling Stone ended after clashing with Russiagate hysteria, where questioning narratives cost careers while false accusations went unchallenged. Now, he warns of a U.S. mirroring Russia’s authoritarian drift: CIA-funded election war games, IRS intimidation tactics, and a press that polices speech instead of holding power accountable—all while elites dismiss populist voters as threats. The result? A democracy hollowed out from within, where the Fourth Estate has traded truth for compliance. [Automatically generated summary]
People are like, you know, maybe a child molester can be fixed.
We don't need to execute them, but NBC News, okay?
So that's bewildering, I'm sure, for you.
But for those of us who are having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in like 1990, when you're finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism?
What did you think you were getting into when you started?
Local affiliate news, as portrayed in Anchorman, the bad facial hair, all that stuff.
So I used to hang around the newsroom all the time.
And my father is sort of a reporter's reporter.
He's very gifted at striking up conversations with people.
He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is, I would say, probably the most important thing, which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective.
He would be able to go to...
Any scene of fire or murder or whatever, instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him.
You come to the United States, if you have no choice and you have to speak English, you learn it pretty quickly.
So, I studied in St. Petersburg, but then I briefly went to Uzbekistan because I had this idea that there weren't that many stringers in Uzbekistan, so I would get more work.
When I got thrown out of the country, I got a visit by these people who were, I guess their word for it was the SNB, the Slujbe Nazionale in Besopasnosti, which is just their version of the KGB. And they asked me.
For my papers, I had the wrong papers.
I was there on a student visa that I'd kind of, you know, was kind of phony.
But I had to send a telegram telling my parents that I'd been kicked out of the country.
So I wrote, KGB kicking me out will call from Moscow.
But she got, KGB kicking me gut will call when I get to Moscow.
I've been beaten to death by the KGB. So she was worried.
Yeah, I think he thought the whole adventure thing was interesting.
And then when he finally visited Russia in the mid-90s and saw what the place was like at the time, he thought it was a paradise for journalists, which it was, because there was so much crazy stuff going on.
And it was a great place to learn the profession, really.
There was a very vibrant community of really hardcore, great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Because remember, the press had been suppressed almost completely for 80 years, right?
And as soon as there was a little bit of an opening to do real reporting...
There were suddenly these very brave reporters who showed up and, you know, they were risking their lives every time they wrote because the way the system was set up was that every newspaper was basically owned by a different gangster.
And you would get material.
They called it selling jeans over there, right?
So somebody would give you a packet of information.
You would write it up about the rival gangline figure or politician.
But if they wanted you to pay the price, you might get shot in a doorway or something like that.
So there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases.
For instance, there was a guy named Dima Holodov who worked for Moskosy-Komsomolets when I was there who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister.
He got blown up in a train station.
But, you know, the Russians, those guys were my heroes.
I tagged on.
To a bunch of those people really early.
And that's where I kind of really learned the whole investigative journalism thing was from those people.
You know, not all of whom stayed in the business for very long.
And this was, you know, I had already become disillusioned with American journalism before that because they had misreported a lot of things about post-communist Russia.
But that was kind of the last straw for me, I think.
Traditionally, think tanks do a lot of thinking, and the Heritage Foundation still does that, but it also, thankfully, has begun doing.
Heritage has built a massive investigative and litigation operation out of its headquarters to save this country from the corruption that is taking it over, both actual, literal corruption, financial corruption, there's a lot of that, but also ideological and moral corruption.
And to fight back, Heritage is engaging in almost 50 separate lawsuits against various government entities to try and pry out information to bring a little sunlight to the process that even Congress can't get.
And it's been working.
They produce documents exposing the Biden crime family to the rest of the world.
You've read those stories.
And help kill the sweetheart deal that Biden's DOJ tried to make with his son, Hunter Biden.
Heritage has also developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the deep state, the swamp.
By staffing the next administration with people who know what they're doing.
Thousands of Americans who on day one can start to make this country better.
So it's important work.
Again, it's not just thinking, it's doing.
And if you want to support it, go to heritage.org slash Tucker.
So they would send somebody out to some provincial town like Samara where they And with an assignment, find the thriving, emerging middle class, right?
And so you'd go out to a place where there's like a barter economy, right?
And people are doing subsistence farming, you know?
And they would ask around until they found somebody who had, you know, a VCR or who had been on a vacation to Ibiza once or something like that.
And then they would do a whole story like, you know.
Transition to capitalism, you know, flourishing, you know, the emerging middle class is, you know, everything's happening right on schedule.
And meanwhile, the country was really, in the Yeltsin years, was really doing very badly, right?
In contrast to now, you know, Russia was experiencing sort of record levels of early deaths.
Because the expat community, and I don't really know exactly how this works, but there was a monoculture about the reporting there that is very similar to what it's like now in America.
But there, it was sort of cartoonized.
It's a very small community.
Everybody knew everybody else.
And whatever the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote about, pretty much everybody else followed their lead.
There was almost nobody among the reporters who even spoke Russian, right?
So the way it was explained to us was that this was something that was a hangover from the American diplomatic experience in China before the Maoist Revolution, where the diplomats were deemed to have been too close to the local population, didn't warn the people back home what was happening.
So, they made a habit out of cycling people from spot to spot so that they wouldn't become too accustomed to the culture or too acculturated, right?
Which I can maybe see the rationale for a diplomat, maybe, but for a journalist, it makes no sense at all, right?
So, to not understand the place that you're reporting on.
So it was a strange activity that a lot of them were involved in where they mostly interviewed the English-speaking officials in the Yeltsin government.
A lot of them had gone to Harvard and they were getting one very specific version of what What Russia was going through, what its challenges were.
By then, I had already branched off.
I had left the expat paper of the Moscow Times.
I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide.
I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places.
While I was in Russia, I became disillusioned both with the format of it, you know, the kind of neutral third-person version of reporting where we pretend we're not having a point of view.
I didn't like that.
You know, like, for instance, I would get sent out when I was at the Moscow Times, which was a paper I loved.
But they would send me to all these events where funny things would happen.
I would come back and write it up with humor, and they would tell me to take out the humor and write it in some other way that was, like, more serious.
And I think that's a lie, right?
right?
Go to a scene that's funny.
Like, for instance, I had to cover this ridiculous press conference where Prince Philip appeared for, I think, the World Wildlife Fund or something like that.
And he's giving a speech to all these Russians about, you know, their backward attitudes about conservation and everything.
And in the middle of the speech, the hotel brings the spread, which includes booze.
And all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself while they just eat all the food and drink all the booze.
And to me, that's the story, right?
So I went home and I wrote that up and they kind of wanted me to do something else.
I mean, if you go back and look at the coverage of, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you know, some other organizations, you know, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, was...
Sort of a colleague at the time.
She was part of that whole crew of Western journalists there.
The basic line was that there was a new group of robber-bearing capitalists who had appeared.
And yes, it was messy.
It was a messy transition to capitalism, was the word they used for it.
Now, actually, it was just pure gangsterism.
And most of the people who got rich...
Did so through absolutely corrupt privatization schemes where, like, for instance, there was a thing called loans for shares, but the government was literally lending the money to cronies so that they could buy companies like Exxon for pennies on the dollar, you know?
I mean, like Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth.
They bought it for nothing, basically, for a pittance, because they were pals of the people in government.
So they created an instant billionaire class, and that was completely passed over.
Nobody reported on that.
Then, once these people had money, they were treated as sort of legitimate wealth creators.
They weren't even the robber barons who at least built railroads.
Exactly.
These guys didn't do anything except steal.
They were wealth extractors.
And it was amazing watching the hype of these figures, the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, right?
I mean, there was a ton of that going on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office and became infamous for it.
Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed.
This started from the very beginning they were doing this.
I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase, that was 1994 when that happened.
You know, there were a lot.
I had a friend.
Not exactly a friend.
Somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinchstein, who also worked for a newspaper there.
He got thrown in a mental institution in the Yeltsin years.
There were all sorts of reporters shot.
If you go in and shot, killed, beaten.
I had another friend named Leonid Krutakov.
Who was not only fired every time he did an expose, but he would be attacked.
He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly.
So it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office.
Now, obviously, it went to a new level once he came in.
And there were people I knew who died in the years after he became president.
It wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists.
The difference was that Putin concentrated government authority in a way that had not been done previously.
Before, it was more of like a gangland free-for-all.
Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station and TV. He had one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gusinsky.
You know, the owner of Bank Manatep, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, famously put in jail.
You know, they were sponsors of media as well.
But the only thing that was different is that the government was exerting sort of overt control over media, and they were stamping out the individual pockets of opposition.
So during the Elsin years, it was very dangerous.
You did still have some freedom to do really good work, and that's why.
Those people were amazing.
They were risking everything every time they did a story, and they were still doing it.
You come in, you don't speak the language, it's a temporary assignment, you're hanging around with a bunch of other Westerners, and so you don't see, right?
Like, that was a very typical thing.
The few reporters who, you know, spoke the language or, you know, married Russian women, right, or were Russian men, They were better, right?
Because they were at least in tune to what was going on in the country.
But Moscow and St. Petersburg were like a different country compared to what was going on in the rest of Russia.
You know, you could be in Moscow and it would seem like a more or less functional place.
You go 40 miles outside the city.
And again, there's subsistence farming, you know, or there's...
Whole stretches where there's no government and people are just setting up toll roads.
They're putting on camera fatigues and creating their own toll booths.
So this winter, I'm standing in the kitchen with my dogs and my wife comes in.
She's just come back from a long walk and she has this look on her face.
This look of tranquility and joy and peace.
And I said, what have you been doing?
And she said, I was praying.
And I said, where?
She said, on my walk for an hour and a half.
And it turns out she was listening to something I'd never heard of before, which is an app called Hallow.
Hallow, H-A-L-L-O-W. Hallow, like hallowed.
And a friend of hers gave it to her.
And this set off a chain reaction in my family, where pretty much everyone in my family started to listen to Hallow every day.
It's a prayer app.
And it's the best way, as you know, to find peace.
And this makes it very easy to set aside the time to deeply pray every single day.
And I'm so impressed by Hallow that I tracked down the number of the CEO and I called him and I said, I want to advertise this on our podcast because it's something that I really believe in and I think you do an amazing job.
And it's basically non-denominational Christian.
You don't have to be Catholic or Protestant.
You can be any kind of Christian.
But Hallow will help you focus your prayer in a way That'll be very obvious to your husband when you walk into the kitchen.
I can promise you that.
It's an amazing, amazing resource.
They've got like 10,000 audio-guided prayers, meditations, Bible studies.
And I was thinking about this just the other day because, you know, I think a lot now about kind of America's slide toward...
Autocracy.
Because I had this vision the whole time I was there.
Watching the Russian government in action was getting this incredible advanced education into autocratic methods and how things work.
The jailing of political opponents on trumped-up charges or blackmail and how things are leaked by the intelligence services.
That stuff just happens out in the open there, right?
And I always had this image that, well, in America, that doesn't go on.
And then I come home to post-9-11 America, and the whole vibe is, well, we have to start throwing all of our democratic guarantees overboard because, I think as Dick Cheney put it, we have to start exploring the dark side because the Bill of Rights is inadequate to keep us safe.
We need to start doing, you know, all these things that I thought were crazy, you know, the Patriot Act, the authorization to use military force, right?
So, moving the authority to declare war out of Congress, basically to the White House, mass surveillance, you know.
Guantanamo Bay.
All these things were really shocking to me.
I thought it was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation.
I took all of my sort of fellow political liberals seriously when they said they were...
You know, ardently opposed to this secretive revolution, right?
And the spy state and drone warfare and all these other things.
And when Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer, came along and there was this belief that he would usher in a transformative presidency that would undo this Cheney vision, which scared me, you know?
Which I thought was...
We're sort of going to undo the schoolhouse rock version of America that I grew up believing in.
And I believed it.
I'm kind of embarrassed now.
I actually thought that was going to happen, that when Barack Obama got elected at all, that would turn back.
But in hindsight, they never had any intention, it seems, of changing anything.
If you go back and look at the statements...
They were saying things like, we might not change the status quo right away.
I had been very positive about Barack Obama.
I covered him on the campaign trail.
My job, by the way, when I came back, I lucked into getting the greatest job in journalism, which is covering campaigns for Rolling Stone.
And I was very impressed by Barack Obama.
I thought he was incredible.
But it was disillusioning to see what happened afterwards.
So, right after he got elected, I got assigned to cover the causes of the financial crisis.
Which was funny because I had no background in finance.
I didn't have any clue what a mortgage-backed security was or how any of that worked.
But one of the first things that happened was that, you know, I got calls from people in the Democratic Party who said, you should look at the president's relationship to Citigroup and, you know, how the Citigroup bailout happened.
You know, he put a Citigroup executive who had been a college buddy of his in charge of his economic transition, during which they gave a very, you know, sweetheart bailout deal to Citigroup.
And this was an early indication that, you know, this president was maybe not exactly what I thought he was.
It basically said that Obama had run as an economic populist and had talked a lot about reforming certain things that had gone on Wall Street that had allowed the excesses of the mortgage bubble to happen.
And then as soon as he got elected, he brought in all these acolytes of, sorry, Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, Rubin, Bob Rubin.
So there were all these, Rubin was at Citigroup.
Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government.
These were the same kind of people who had caused the crash, right?
So to me, I wrote it as kind of a bait and switch.
He ran as somebody who was going to change the system.
He brought in people who were the system.
And in addition, there was this bailout deal with Citigroup in particular that was kind of malodorous.
There were people who ended up paying fines in that situation.
It was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy.
And the idea was he had run as one thing and he was really another thing.
So that was one of the first stories of that type.
If you go back and look, there's an interview with Obama.
They did an official Rolling Stone interview with him years later.
Where he sort of brought up the fact that even your magazine talked about how I didn't do enough.
And this was like years after the fact.
And by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him while he was running, right?
So of all the things that had been written about him, what he remembered was this one slight, you know, which I thought was a very telling sign of his character, you know.
But at the time, I wasn't paying attention to the other things, like about the continued prosecution of the war on terror, the drone assassination thing, the kill list, Terror Tuesdays, all that stuff.
And the whole idea that we even have something called lethal action, that it might apply to an American citizen, that you can do that without due process.
And, you know, if you go back and look, they basically invented, I mean, I don't know how disillusioning this was for you, but they just made up on the fly legal justifications for what they were doing that weren't grounded in any law that was passed or any court case.
They just sort of wrote themselves white papers, giving themselves permission to do this stuff.
So, I mean, I remember he gave a speech, I was looking at this just the other day, where he talked about, among other things, they said that...
Al-Awlaki had been tied to the coal bombing.
And I remember reading that and thinking, okay, well, he's saying that this is punishment for a crime, but there's no trial, right?
We're pronouncing him guilty and just executing the guy for something that we say he did.
That seemed crazy to me, you know?
And I remember there was another white paper, I believe Leon Panetta was involved, where the concept was, yes, due process is required, but it doesn't have to involve the defendant.
So we were talking about this at dinner last night.
I mean, obviously you're coming from different poles, I guess.
Probably.
Well, it turns out not.
But in 1995, we would have been on exactly opposite sides.
But I think we both, given our similar age, had the same sort of gut-level belief, which is whatever the U.S. does abroad is in a completely different category.
Right, right, And I guess what I didn't realize because I was morally deficient and young and dumb was that once you start doing really evil things abroad, you're going to do them at home, actually.
And, you know, this whole switch, I was, I think, like most Americans, I was like you, we all knew that America, the United States was...
Wacking people all over the world, right?
I mean, even though the church committee hearings came along and we basically said we weren't going to do that anymore, of course we were doing it, right?
We were doing all kinds of horrible things.
We were probably fixing elections, you know, in half the places on earth, but not here, right?
Like, that was a bright line for Americans.
Now, maybe that's chauvinistic to believe in that.
But I was like you.
I didn't think they would ever cross that line and bring these ideas home.
But this is what we're finding out now.
I mean, this is the big theme of the Twitter files.
So in late 2022, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter...
You know, there started to be rumors that he was going to open up the internal communications of old Twitter and sort of give them to the world, right?
And it turned out to be true.
I got a call one day, or I got a note sort of summoning me to San Francisco.
And so I was the first person who was put on this project of rummaging through old Twitter's correspondence.
And I think he said that, Elon said that his idea was that he wanted to restore trust in the platform by telling people about the different kinds of censorship techniques that were going on.
It's not clear exactly what...
What he was up to.
But, you know, he seemed sincere at the time.
He brought in me.
He brought in Barry Weiss.
Barry brought in a couple of other people like Michael Schellenberger.
Lee Fang ended up being involved.
Another reporter.
Really good young investigative reporter.
Maybe the last one, right?
Probably.
You know, he appeared.
And so there was a group of us.
And for about three months, we got to look through.
The internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest communications companies.
And the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the internet platforms.
And they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways.
When we started to try to figure out, first of all, this was shocking to us, seeing all these documents that said flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS. Just because that's a crime.
I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it looked bad to me, right?
Certainly, it looked like a story.
No question, right?
But we had to figure out.
Where did this come from?
How did this start?
And when we started asking questions, it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas counterterrorism messaging programs.
So the State Department, for instance, has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now...
Very much interested in speech, both abroad and at home.
But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS platform.
In fact, they had a different name back then.
They were called the CSCC. But in 2016, Obama rechristened them the Global Engagement Center, and they started to look inward.
And when I asked people who, I managed to talk to a couple of sources who worked.
At that agency, one phrase really stuck out.
It was CT to CP. So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism.
And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
Contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up, right?
Because those threats had been somewhat neutralized.
But populism was viewed as a very serious threat.
After Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring was something that maybe they didn't see as a bad thing, but they certainly saw the transformative power of the internet platforms.
Yeah, you would think, you know, and that's, you know, for me, it's been...
And I think probably for you too, this new theme of this sudden explosion of illiberal tactics in politics, that even if they're directed at somebody that liberals hate, like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, how can you not be freaked out by stuff like that?
We haven't used contempt of Congress to jail people since the Un-American Affairs Committee.
1947, right?
This is like third world kind of stuff that we're seeing.
You know, accusing the front runner in a presidential campaign of a hundred different felonies.
Is that happening if he's not running for president?
You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists, right, left.
The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.
It's between good and evil.
It's between honesty and falsehood.
And we hope we are on the former side.
That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.
And we invite you to subscribe to it.
Go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast.
Our entire archive is there, a lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running.
TuckerCarlson.com slash podcast.
You will not regret it.
So, I mean, it raises so many questions, but most obviously then, if uncovering the abuse of power by the powerful, particularly by government, isn't the point of journalism, it's clearly not the point of journalism anymore, what is the point?
It's the largest man-made emission of CO2 in history.
And if you think CO2 is driving the greatest threat that we face, the existential threat of climate change, then you kind of want to know how that happened.
So why wouldn't, I mean, it is, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because, you know, I was like the only person in mainstream news to point out that, no, Russia did not blow up Nord Stream and was attacked for it.
But I was wondering, like, if I'm at the New York Times, like a lot of people I know, why would I just, like, try to report that story out?
You know, I mean, obviously, you're getting a signal from down on high that, You know, that's not wanted.
But it's different, okay?
So in the early 2000s, yes, there were high-profile instances where people like Jesse Ventura were unhired from MSNBC because they mistakenly thought he was pro-war when they hired him, right?
Phil Donahue is getting good ratings, but he's bounced, right?
Chris Hedges, you know, and Chris was sort of a classic example of a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky once wrote about in Manufacturing Consent, which is that they don't fire you necessarily, but like you just don't get promoted if you're considered the wrong kind of personality, which is weird because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right?
Okay, so before you, I want, let's put you at the center of this.
Because you were, one of the reasons we're having this conversation, is you were one of the only liberals in all media who, and you speak Russian, you live there for 10 years, you have credibility on this question, I would say.
And you were the only ones who said, you know, I don't like Trump.
But it was crazy because this was so early in the process and everybody had already predetermined that this thing was true, this extraordinary complicated thesis.
They had somehow already arrived at the conclusion that it was proven.
Donald Trump, he went and told me he's involved in some mob deal to build a casino in Atlantic City or something like that, right?
I believe that.
I believe that.
Donald Trump being James Bond and involved in a five-year conspiracy with...
The Russian government, you know, what did Steele call it?
A well-developed conspiracy of five years.
That's ridiculous.
This is a guy who, if you've been to any of his campaign speeches, he can't get through the first sentence of one of his scripts.
Like, his brain is already off in another direction.
How is that guy going to keep a secret?
It didn't make any sense.
And nobody had any evidence.
Fatal to the story, like when it finally came out in October of 2017 that the Clinton campaign had funded the Steele dossier, I thought, well, it's over now, right?
And at one point I went, Oh, because, you know, I don't like to be told what to do.
I don't like to be told that I got to ignore something, right?
You know, I'm one of those difficult personalities in journalism, right?
Like, you know, it just happens that way.
But I went to Rolling Stone at one point.
I had really good editors there for the most part.
But I went to them and I said, Look, this story's wrong, right?
And it's going to come out that it's wrong.
Give me eight weeks to chase this down and let's be the first mainstream organization to get it right and put it to bed and it'll be a coup for us, right?
Let me do my thing on this.
And they said no.
The first time they ever said no to me on an investigative project.
I mean, we put Putin in the cover of our newspaper, like in drag, carrying a dominatrix whip, you know?
We lampooned him constantly.
And I actually did some journalism in Russian for another paper that was very critical of him and talked about the apartment bombings and some other stuff.
So, I was no friend of Vladimir Putin's, but that became a common thing in journalism, and it was just so shocking.
I knew at that point that my time was limited at Rolling Stone, which I loved.
I really loved that place, and it's a great gig, too.
But there was no way I was going to be able to stay under those circumstances.
So when it became clear that the claim that Putin had installed Trump as the American president, when it became clear that was malicious fantasy, it was a total lie, did any of the people who attacked you and called you a Russian agent Apologize or change their mind?
No, but it's a little different because by that point I was such an outlaw that I had no expectation of being treated fairly by anyone ever other than my wife.
No, I'm serious.
I was just like, your head changes.
But you were very much like everyone liked you.
And, I mean...
You were not an outlaw, but you became an outlaw kind of overnight.
Now, my name is sort of synonymous with reactionary, troll, that kind of thing.
And that happened basically overnight.
It was a little tough to take for a few years there, but...
I got over it relatively quickly.
I moved to Substack, which turned out to be a great thing, which is an independent platform.
I was one of the first people who left big mainstream media to do the self-publishing thing and discovered that there was actually A functioning business model there.
I mean, I had been in journalism for 30 years and had never seen it as anything but a dying business, right?
There was never any money that you were actually going to make, right?
First of all, being in institutional journalism is a little bit overrated, right?
Because I came from alternative journalism.
I had financed my own newspaper in Moscow, and I did everything from printing to running the plates to the printing press and selling ads, everything.
You know, the business is something that I've always been familiar with and suddenly being involved with a big organization.
It's nice, but I don't see it as a prerequisite.
I thought it was really funny at the beginning of Trump's reign when a couple of the reporters were complaining about losing their White House press credentials.
I always wonder what Jim Acosta, who I don't know, but I always wonder, Jim Acosta was always telling me what a journalist he was, and a lot of guys were like this.
Including some I've worked with.
But I'm a journalist.
Okay.
Tornado comes to a trailer park.
Give me 750 words on that.
Like, I don't think they're capable of writing a story.
Do you ever think that?
Like, could Jim Acosta actually just write, like, a news story or even an expository essay?
Well, I wonder about that because are they even, you know, once, not that long, not to be all back in the day about it, but you wouldn't have gotten a job in the White House press corps if you hadn't come through.
You know, covering town meetings and all that stuff.
I mean, you know, I did that.
I covered aldermen.
I covered, you know, the police beat fires, stuff like that.
You have to be able to do that stuff.
And that's the basics of the job is, you know, showing up.
Talking to people on the street, talking to this person, that person, you have to be able to do crime reporting, you know?
And you got to talk to people who are on the other side of the law, all that stuff.
I don't think they can do that.
I mean, I remember seeing somebody, I forget what organization it was, but somebody, one of the kind of mainstream sort of web-only sites, one of their columnists was talking about how much he hated the telephone.
And I thought, What journalist hates the telephone?
How can you do this show if you hate the telephone?
And it's because the new thing is they decide what they think, they find links that support their ideas, and then they just type the thing, whereas what you're supposed to do is talk to everybody, then figure out what the story is.
So one of the things was that Twitter heading into the 2020 election had worked out a system with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whereby they had what they called an industry meeting where once it started off once a month, then it was once a week where these intelligence officials were meeting with Twitter and about two dozen other people.
Internet platforms and briefing them on things that they might expect in the information landscape.
And then there was a system by which basically Twitter was receiving recommendations about content.
From the federal government through the FBI and then from the states through the Department of Homeland Security.
It was that organized.
They had worked it out that if it comes from a local police department, it's going to come from the DHS. If it comes from the HHS, it's going to come through the FBI, right?
So they had a very organized system of flags where you would see the FBI say, you know, for your...
Consideration.
Here are some accounts that may violate your terms of service.
And there'd be an attached spreadsheet with, you know, 400 account names on it.
And that was just happening constantly.
It was an industrial process that they had worked out.
I thought that's a huge story, right?
Like, here's the FBI. That's devoting resources to looking at social media accounts of ordinary people and worrying about terms of service violations.
Like, what is that?
Why are they not looking for child predators and stuff like that?
Well, it's part of this sort of spiraling, sprawling thing where a whole series of government agencies are very intensely interested in what's online and who's reading what.
And in developing new ways of, you know, suppressing content, de-amplifying other things.
And with COVID, there was a really, really intense effort to create rules about what could and could not be seen.
You know, they would decide that things were one of the key concepts that I thought was really, really disturbing.
Was this whole idea that anything that promotes vaccine hesitancy is a kind of disinformation, even if it's not factually incorrect.
So if somebody dies after they get the shot, that may be true, but internally at the company...
So disinformation is like the intentional spreading of lies, right?
But even misinformation, Homeland Security has something they called the...
MDM, or they had it, the MDM committee, which is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation committee.
And malinformation is, it's just material, it's true, but kind of politically wrong, right?
Or inconvenient.
And that could be something that, you know, promotes vaccine hesitancy.
Or, you know, we have the Supreme Court case now in Missouri that's partly related to the Twitter files.
And the plaintiffs, three of the plaintiffs in that case, are doctors who had published true research about COVID, but were suppressed, were de-amplified.
They were put on, you know, in Twitter, they were put on trends blacklists because, you know, their research tended to go against federal policies about lockdowns and vaccination and all kinds of things.
To me, that's what the First Amendment is there for, right?
We do not want the government in a role of deciding what's true and untrue because once you do that, the government has a monopoly on misinformation.
The only protection against that happening is absolutely unfettered free speech.
And they're messing with that, you know?
Because I think there's just this...
Gradual moving away from belief that all the concepts in the Bill of Rights work.
And so what we looked at in terms of the censorship, it's very much in evidence there.
They just don't believe that the First Amendment works, I don't think.
And they were making a lot of the big decisions about content, too.
In fact, one of the biggest emails that we found, there was a debate about whether or not Twitter had the ability to say no to, in this case, it was a State Department request about content.
And the former CIA employee says, you know, our window on that is closing as our government partners become more aggressive in their attributions, right?
So what they were basically saying is...
Our ability to push back is evaporating.
And that, I think, has turned out to be true with these platforms.
They're increasingly just sort of intertwined with the state.
And this is another continuation of the war on terror thing because they began by demanding that these companies fork over information about geolocation of users in other places around the world, even in the United States.
But now they're venturing into content, content domestically that people see.
So Google is the biggest, of course, of all these companies and by far the most influential as a monopoly on search, which is your window into all information.
I think we would find that they have massively changed the formula for search returns.
I mean, they even talked about this in 2017 and 2018 when they had this thing called Project OWL, which was designed to change the parameters of the search.
And authority was basically, the way it was explained to me when I talked to somebody at Google, it was like, if you search for baseball five years ago, you might have seen your local little league team.
Now you'll see MLB.com come up first, right?
And, you know, you've probably noticed this when you do a Google search, you know, the first 40 or 50 results will all be of a certain type and you'll have to, it's much, much harder to find.
Kind of this counter-narrative version of reality now.
Even if you know exactly what you're looking for or type in the title of the story, it's made reporting harder.
So, I mean, the potential for mind control, or in fact, the reality of mind control by the state, Yeah, I mean, if most people are getting their information through these searches, and through social media exchanges, and those things are heavily, heavily, you know, managed.
And originally, the lower courts ruled that the federal government can't be You know, doing that back and forth with all these platforms.
And from what I understood, there was a little bit of a backing off point, right?
Where they weren't so intimately involved.
But just about a month ago, Senator Mark Warner had a talk and he said that essentially the companies have begun talking to.
This was after the Supreme Court held the hearing on that case, and it didn't look so good for the free speech advocates afterwards.
That tells me that they're already thinking of coming up with another program.
I know for a fact, for stories that I'm working on, that there are a couple of different contracting ideas for new Sort of content review programs that would be partnerships with government in the same way that there were the last time around.
Like the last time around, we had this thing called the Election Integrity Partnership.
It was run out of Stanford, but it was done in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, which is at the State Department, and the University of Washington and some other partners.
But that was a...
You know, a thing where there was a big organized content flagging operation that involved the government.
They're going to do something like that.
Again, it's just a question of, like, who's going to do it, what the method is going to be.
And my understanding is that they're, you know, it's going to be more aggressive this time around.
So you may have noticed in the news lately that there have been a lot of stories warning about AI deepfakes.
This is the new, if Russia was the excuse for getting involved in content moderation in 2020 or even in 2018, AI and deepfakes are the new buzzword in Washington.
Swing states appear safe on the national electoral map in early polling.
Later, it emerges that AI-driven election forecasts were wrong because the data scientists overlook significant partisan differences that make swing states highly competitive.
Discuss your response plan, then draw two injects.
Real-world harm, it says at the bottom, misinformation slash social bias, heightened stress, anxiety, and depression.
I'm actually, I have no idea, but that certainly sounds to me like they're asking the game players to come up with a plan for some kind of reaction to election results that don't necessarily...
Square with what the polls were indicating, right?
I mean, that's basically what they're saying in that scenario.
Here's another one, MindGames.
An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia.
Suggesting.
Discuss your response plan and draw two injects.
So it's just full of stuff like this.
We started to hear about this idea that there were people in this information management slash censorship slash content moderation space that were deeply involved with finding new ways to manage information that people see.
Back in 2010, the army actually...
Got rid of the term PSYOP because they thought it had negative connotations.
They brought it back in 2017 because there was a widespread belief that we have to engage in influence operations.
That because Russia is already doing it, because China is already doing it, we need to do it.
But the problem is that they see, for instance, Donald Trump...
And, you know, the Trump movement as an extension of what they might call the Russian information ecosystem.
The Global Engagement Center, the State Department, has this concept of information ecosystem.
So if you're too in alignment with Russian foreign policy views on, say, Ukraine or something like that, you can be part of the ecosystem even if you have nothing to do with that country.
So, the idea that, you know, the first head of the Global Engagement Center is a former editor of Time Magazine, Rick Stengel.
He wrote a book called Information Wars that we all had to read when we were doing the Twitter files because we didn't know about this organization.
You know, talked openly about how he thought the Trump campaign...
In it, he recognized the same techniques that he saw from ISIS and from Russia.
So they see all this as all part of a piece, you know?
And that is what I think is dangerous, is that we're sort of bringing the ethos of military counter-messaging from the war on terror.
We're bringing that home, and the enemy is now the domestic voter.
So Russia's central to all of this in the minds of the people doing it?
And from my perspective, as someone who's never been that interested in Russia the country, you sort of wake up one day and, you know, 25 years after the end of the Cold War and realize you're required to hate Russia.
And I just refuse to go along with that on principle, not because I love Russia.
I do kind of like Russia, actually, having been there, but I didn't have any feelings about it a year ago.
And, you know, when Gorbachev came on the scene, I remember very distinctly people saying, you know, that we have to find a way to get along with these people, like that we're spending too much money on defense and that this is costing both of our societies.
But that's not where we're at now.
And oddly enough, The current American government, it feels a lot like the Soviet government of the early 80s, right?
Where, you know, Joe Biden would have fit in perfectly in the Politburo of the early...
So I hear these people, including the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and but many others, just sort of blithely announced that, well, we're going to take Crimea.
And that, again, I don't have strong feelings about Crimea.
I've never been there.
But I think I know as a factual matter that that is a trigger for nuclear war right there.
You know, like, there's got to be some endgame that they're going for.
And the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think, because there's something darker going on in the culture of people who run this country that it's inaccessible if you're trying to assign motives to it.
They could easily, just take the problem with Donald Trump, they could easily defeat Donald Trump as a political entity if they just...
If they were thinking as political consultants did in the 90s or 80s, right?
Like they would just make some subtle adjustments.
They would throw a bone to working people and, you know, they would put forward a candidate who isn't, you know, physically dead and they would win, right?
But no, for them, I think it's a principle that a certain kind of voter not have a say in things.
We cannot legitimize the negative feelings of those voters, is how they think.
It's incredibly obvious if you go out in the campaign trail and talk to people who vote for Trump that they do it for a million different reasons ranging from the town that I live in used to be a booming economic center and now it's dead.
It looks like a third world country.
There isn't a functioning hospital within 300 miles of where I live.
The Walmart is now the only place where you can buy anything for 50 miles.
There's a million reasons.
And then there's some social issues too.
But once upon a time, I remember not so long ago, even Bill Clinton talking about trying to reclaim some of those working class voters.
I mean, they go in there with this scolding attitude, like, learn to code.
Like, what's wrong with you?
Like, there's this punitive attitude about it, which is, as you know, if you've covered campaigns, you cannot win if you have hostility towards the voters.
Yeah, I mean, Jimmy Kimmel does this whole anti-vax Barbie thing where it's just, you know, it's the worst kind of, you know, cosmopolitan looking down at the hick kind of a thing.
Part of the reason that I'm so spun up about a lot of the stuff that's happening is because I watched what happened when speech freedoms, even limited ones like the ones in Russia, they disappear, they don't come back.
And, you know, in the United States, there was a reverence once for the First Amendment, for the whole Bill of Rights, that it just doesn't exist anymore.
There's this kind of, like, defeatist or unbelieving attitude about it.
And that's been another revelation of, you know, working on...
Stories like the Twitter files is finding out that people don't really, they don't have the same feeling about the First Amendment that people did in the 80s and 90s or even the early 2000s.
I mean, even Rob Reiner does the American president, right?
And it's all about how, you know, the ACLU and, you know, being allowed to burn the flag and he's, you know.
He's on the other side of this thing now, right?
And so, what happened to all those people?
What happened to that belief in the system?
I mean, for all of them, you know, you mentioned that you and I came from probably from different political places at one point in time.
I think we probably both share a belief that America on some level worked, right?
It had all kinds of flaws.
But, you know, immigrants came here from all over the world.
They built good lives, and they chose to stay here.
I mean, my family, you know, came from different parts of the world.
And this country is screwed up.
I like the fact that it's screwed up, but it works.
This system has been a great thing, and people don't believe that.
I think they've lost that belief, I think, which is so sad.
I feel it really strongly, and I also feel that any semblance of national unity or common belief, shared culture, even shared language, but particularly the culture, is gone.
And I noticed it in talking to you, because actually, you know, maybe you voted for one guy, voted for the other, but our core beliefs about the, you just articulated them right there, I've never doubted that a day in my life.
And now, the role of the media, I think, is an important one in American society.
We were given a very important responsibility to tell the public when things aren't going right, and to do that continually, no matter what.
You know, which way the political winds are blowing, stick to that.
And so now it's kind of more important than ever to keep doing that.
I mean, you asked me, like, does this get turned around?
I don't know, but the only thing I know is I think, you know, you have to keep doing this stuff and telling people about it in the hopes that it will get turned around.
So last question, you spent 10 years Within a society that punished journalists physically at times for telling the truth, you're watching political figures go to jail, and whatever you think of the charges or convictions or whatever, in every single case, you know for a dead certain fact if that person hadn't been in politics on the wrong side, he would not be going to jail.
Yeah, no, I thought it had to be a coincidence, but I now no longer think it is, and I do worry about it.
I mean, I haven't even shared this with my wife yet, but I thought it might be time for us to get another house in some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty.
I mean, Trump's Twitter account is what won him, I think, the 2016 election.
And that was one of the reasons I think journalists hate him is because he proved that in the internet age, you don't need reporters if you're a politician.
They couldn't stand that.
I mean, I listened to those conversations.
They were very resentful of the fact that he didn't have to go through their approval system, you know.
But he's not on Twitter anymore.
I mean, it's extraordinary that Joe Biden is the only candidate in this election who hasn't been censored in some way.