Matt Taibbi dissects Trump’s declassification push, exposing Biden’s pardons of Fauci and January 6 figures as potential perjury cover-ups tied to suppressed COVID-19 lab-leak investigations—while questioning whether Ukraine war escalation and Nord Stream sabotage served hidden agendas. He links Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane probe to the DNC server hack and unsolved murder, warning that upcoming leaks will reveal intelligence-media collusion. Parallels to election interference emerge: No Labels’ suspicious "dummy" website, New Hampshire primary chaos, and Trump assassination attempts with Ukrainian ties hint at deeper manipulation. Senate probes may expose State Department-FBI censorship under the EU’s Digital Services Act, while Wikipedia’s editorial gatekeeping distorts history. Legacy media’s failure—ignoring 9/11 warnings while obsessing over trivial scandals—sets the stage for a decentralized investigative renaissance, where Substack and podcasts replace "paper-trained" outlets. The era of suppressed truths is cracking open. [Automatically generated summary]
So, everyone's mad that, and even some Democrats, I think, are mad about these last-minute Biden pardons of Fauci and the J6 committee, etc., etc.
So, let's just set that aside.
My concern is not that these people are punished.
Fauci's 81. Yeah, who cares?
I think he'll be punished, you know, in some larger sense.
But, I want to know what they did.
That's the...
Okay, so can we just go through a couple of these and...
Why would you pardon Fauci?
What are the potential crimes, the crimes you think he committed and could be punished for that you're trying to prevent him from being punished for by pardoning him?
Right, and that's one of the things that raised a red flag for some of the people who are looking at the COVID phenomenon is just look at the surface characteristics of the disease.
It's highly transmissible.
It's not terribly symptomatic.
Everybody's going to get it.
Not everybody's going to be harmed by it.
It's what they designed, what you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance.
I think any normal person can make up his mind about Fauci.
It's pretty obvious who Fauci is.
The super bureaucrat.
It's in the bioweapon programs and the Frankenstein science that's being funded by our tax dollars around the world, to be specific, in Ukraine, in China, in Djibouti.
We have biolabs in a lot of places around the world, and what are they doing?
What was their relation to the Wuhan Institute also?
I mean, I think those are all important questions, both the bioweapons and their relation to the pandemic.
But the thing is, about these pardons, they're a mistake.
If you want to know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out.
Because now, once the pardon's delivered, the person can't plead the fifth.
If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the fifth anymore.
If they're brought before a congressional committee, they can't evoke their right against self-incrimination.
So they have to say something.
And this is what's so interesting because I've been talking to criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and they all kind of said the same thing.
It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved, right?
So that's a red flag for us.
When we see somebody getting a pardon, we think, well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there, right?
So either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate or there's something we don't know about that is interesting.
It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating.
As the Department of Justice itself said in a memo, I think, on one of the J6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a pardon going forward.
So, you're making an admission if you accept a pardon.
Yeah, I wouldn't accept one if I were totally innocent.
Yeah, and also, I wouldn't accept one if I had something to hide.
Because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to take the fifth on that.
If you saw them, they all basically said the same thing.
Like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration, you know.
Biden issues pardons.
It's always after the comma, right?
That's one theory.
The other theory is that in the last days of a presidential administration, it gets pretty chaotic in the White House and people who want things and, you know...
They will come in and there will be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper.
And that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons.
For instance, the J6 pardons, this has never happened before, where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people, right?
It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol Police officers who testified, to the staff, but it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned.
So now, if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to go over a test to prove that you're actually part of that category, that I testified before the committee.
Does that mean that the committee called you, that you talked to a staffer once, or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified?
It's very weird, and the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry.
But it suggests what I have thought from the first week, which is they're like serious crimes here.
I mean, you talk to Steve Sund, you know, who ran Capitol Police, who's like a non-political person, just career law enforcement, former MP, you know, former Washington, D.C. cop.
I don't think he has any weird agenda.
I mean, his story is so unbelievable.
They just didn't give him any intel at all and didn't give him any resources, and everybody else knew this was happening except him.
I mean, the whole thing is so nuts that you're like, wait, there's something going on here.
I think we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism.
I think this is after eight years of crazy, misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, ranging from Russiagate to Nord Stream to the COVID origins.
I think we're going to find out a lot of this stuff.
There are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place.
There are reports that have been commissioned to look into a lot of these questions, and they're going to be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel.
It's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not going to have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff.
They're just going to sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we want to find.
And I think that they're going to have that collaborative arrangement.
And I sense it in some of these confirmation battles, particularly the sort of offline stuff that you don't see in the media, but just when you find out the lengths to which permanent Washington is going to, say, sabotage Tulsi Gabbard, who's an army officer who's had a clearance for more than a decade, carries an automatic weapon.
I mean, clearly we trust her with America's.
Of course we can.
So what is this?
And it really is people are panicked that what they've been doing is going to come to light, I think.
Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence to conduct a wide ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence to conduct a wide ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community Holy shit.
And really, in the mid-70s, who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide-ranging...
You know, list of horrible, stupid things from, you know, trying to murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Jr. to trying to, you know, leak news about mistresses of civil rights leaders.
I mean, the list went on and on and on.
And we only found out about it because they went too far, right?
And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer to start looking.
But can I say one thing that I've noticed now that I'm in middle age is that all my life, the older guys I've known, like you go on duck hunting trips or whatever, in Washington where I lived, like with my dad and his friends or whatever, and the guys who were in their 50s and 60s all thought this way.
They all thought this way.
You know, after like a lifetime of government service as an operations officer, whatever you're doing, right?
No, I never thought of Schoolhouse Rock and all the president's men as sophisticated propaganda put there by the intel agencies, but I think you're right.
There were so many different things that I never got to the end, but I would say that the big ones, you know, there are huge glaring questions, which is unusual.
I think of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people...
Signing documents or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in American history, right?
So you have to look at what was the process of the White House operation, right?
Who was actually running things?
We know from a surface point, Who held the posts, right?
So Ron Klain was the chief of staff.
We know roughly who else was in Joe Biden's orbit.
What was the schedule?
Did he sign things by AutoPen?
Because they have this machine that does.
And who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on, right?
These are all questions that we have to get answers to.
What was the day-to-day operation of the Biden White House?
And again, especially in the last year, because I think, you know, that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like, you know, cutting off the Democratic primaries, the challengers, you know, these are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions.
Who decided to kick Biden off the ticket?
Biden, on July 13th, was giving a speech in Detroit, and he's like, I'm running!
I mean, he couldn't have been more affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race.
Within seven days, he was out of the race.
Within three days after that Detroit thing, there were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to, or going to try to pressure him to drop out.
But I don't believe that.
I think we need to find out exactly what those communications were.
I mean, who had the authority to push the President of the United States off his own ticket?
It's very conspicuous that when he wanted to say things, he said it on camera, but there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful, and that was done on Twitter or in a letter or in a press release.
I mean, even the note explaining the pardons, who wrote that, right?
There were stories, but they were incredibly incomplete.
And this is one of the things where I was looking at it, even from just a professionalism point of view, in terms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these papers.
How does nobody ask?
Who made the decision to nominate Kamala Harris?
How did that happen?
How was he kicked off?
Or how did he come to that decision?
Normally, there would be a big show of that, right?
Somebody would come out and give an interview to, I don't know, 60 Minutes and say, well, here's how that happened, right?
And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation.
Whenever there's something...
Big that happens with the president.
Here, they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release, and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers.
None of it made any sense.
So, you know, they have to get all those communications.
And I think that's what was important.
You know, there were preservation letters that were sent out by some Senate committees.
I hope it captured a lot of this stuff, but we'll see.
All we know, we saw little bits and pieces of things.
There was a really weird moment, you might remember, when Biden said something to the effect of, We can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was, right?
And people immediately interpreted that as a regime change comment, right?
47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walkback, clarifying statement saying, you know, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something ambiguous like that.
But there were leaks in the press about what happened there.
And there was a remarkable line in one of the stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement.
How is he not in charge of it, first of all?
Right.
And they're talking about Jake Sullivan is involved in the process.
But that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where at best Biden was a participant.
So I think we need to know a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions.
It might be different in terms of, you know, for each president.
I mean, I remember being in Russia in the late 90s.
There were multiple episodes that you might classify as quasi-coups, right?
There was an episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karzhakov, and it kind of turned out the other way in the end.
But there was intense reporting about this by the supposedly unfree Russian press at the time.
And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in?
What did he do when he was immediately kind of used to clamp down on an investigation of Yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at the time?
I mean, that's all in the weeds.
What I'm trying to say is even in a third world country, we got more information about...
Stuff that was going on than we got last year in the United States of America where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in Washington supposedly covering all this stuff.
It will destroy the EU. Ultimately, when people wake up from their dream state, it will destroy NATO because it was an attack by one NATO power on a NATO ally.
Another NATO member was attacked by the United States on Germany.
So COVID? I mean, there are so many different areas where they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate that.
We just went through a period where, you know, there was sort of mass stonewalling of Congress when it was trying to investigate.
What happened with COVID? You know, people that were key people like Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas, right?
And so we're going to...
There are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now, you know, with FBI communications between the Bureau and a lot of these scientists, you know, dating back 10 years.
And it's going to tell a very...
A crazy story.
I mean, a really interesting story.
There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014 because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking, which is, you know, when did we start defying the ban on gain-of-function research?
We clearly did.
I think that's pretty established at this point.
Why were we doing it?
What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing?
What kind of advance notice did we get?
What kind of lies were told about it?
Who were responsible for those lies?
What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine?
And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House?
This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way because...
There was also a sort of massive effort to control the public conversation about this that went through the health agencies, so we know they're looking at that.
And that's another executive order, by the way.
The free speech order directs them, the Department of Justice, to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff, so we're going to find out.
But I just think COVID is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff.
And, you know, it's going to be like a turkey shoot where every direction they look, they're going to find something, you know, revelatory.
Julie Kelly, I don't even know what she did before.
She's purely kind of a creation of the internet.
Well, she's a self-creation, but her medium was the internet and X specifically.
And she just got mad about January 6th and just relentlessly focused on that.
I'm sure she has other opinions, but she only did that.
And, I mean, man, this one woman, I think she's my age-ish, unearthed all this information that was like, no one else got it except her, because she was just so focused on this thing.
I mean, I remember hearing a story about IF Stone.
When I was starting on Substack, I was calling around to some of the old timers and saying, like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media?
And they told me a story.
Then they said, you know, I have stone cranked out a newsletter for those people who don't know.
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You wonder, again, I'm delaying you in your narrative once more with apologies, but you wonder even just the four topics you've mentioned so far are so big that if we got the truth or some higher percentage of the truth about those things, you wonder about the social effect.
So one of the things the censors always say is they're doing this or preventing you from knowing certain things to preserve societal stability.
Yes, but it'll be like, I mean, hopefully it'll be like the church committee hearings where, look, we just have to accept.
stories revelations for instance it's already starting in the news media we're starting to get stories from journalists who are told they had to suppress i saw certain angles right uh you know there was a you know politico story about some people who were told to stay away from the the hunter biden laptop story two politico reporters having left politico admitted that politico which is supposedly covering washington told them no we're not we're not doing that right exactly
and you know my first question is why didn't you say that when it happened but i guess people have jobs right so that's uh that's a thing but there are going to be a lot more of those i mean they're already kind of whispers are going around but people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent
uh that they lied to them about important things and they're it's going to be difficult at first especially since there are not solid new institutions institutions in place to replace them. - Yes. - You know, it's one thing if you're taking down the CIA in the '70s and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there, right, this is different.
The media is gonna have to rebuild itself from the ground up.
I think it's already doing great, but it doesn't have that look for a lot of people, right?
I guess, look, if you want trust in institutions, and I definitely do, I do.
I grew up trusting institutions.
I don't now.
That's their fault, not mine.
I think your country doesn't work if nobody trusts any of the institutions, right?
It just doesn't.
So we want that.
The only way to that is through...
Transparency, honesty.
So I get all that and I'm for it vehemently.
I guess what I'm saying is the people who've been administering the system and benefiting from it are completely freaked out.
Right?
It's why they're trying to stop Tulsi.
But I wonder if they get threatened enough if they don't become like just flat out dangerous to everybody else.
Like the only way to stop disclosure at this point would be with like a catastrophe that's so all-encompassing, 9-11, COVID, that it just – everything shuts down.
All trends in progress stop.
And I just feel like there's a lot at stake for these people.
If you're, you know, John Brennan or Jim Clapper and you're like a criminal or Mike Pompeo, you're a criminal, that's my opinion, but I think they're obviously criminals.
Yeah, I had the same fears, and that was part of my thinking when they started approving the firing of American missiles into Russian territory and British missiles and French missiles.
I'm like, what possible reason would there be to do this?
You're not really going to make any military gains by doing this.
So you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline.
The headline...
I don't think it gets you anything.
So, what were they doing?
And, you know, as you're saying, they were fiddling with regime change in the interim.
Yeah, I think that was a fear that a lot of people had.
I didn't think that, frankly, that Trump would become president.
You know, for a variety of different reasons, I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that.
Up until the second he said the oath, I was like, man, you know, I mean, you just get superstitious or paranoid or whatever it is, having seen all this stuff.
Try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation.
But they could really have done that.
They could have basically put a net over everything.
I mean, that's the thing that's scary about the European situation is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely...
Control the flow of information, what people see, what people don't see, that they can punish people who step out of line.
And we were this far away from being part of something like that.
And if they were going to do that, if they had done that, and I think there was probably some thinking that...
That would have been accomplished by 2024. If you go back and look at some of the European Union's papers on the subject, they were anticipating that we were going to be signatories to certain agreements, like the Code of Practice on Disinformation, that we would have our own version by now.
If they had done that, then none of this would be possible.
All these independent outlets...
They could scream to high heavens, but no one would see it.
I mean, you know this because when you were doing shows about COVID, well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook dial it down.
He goes from being censored to being the head of NIH. It's an amazing transition, but the thing that's so extraordinary about it...
America would have had a completely different idea about lockdowns if they had understood how infectious the disease was, how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from getting infected, and how unlikely that was to succeed and how, you know, compared to all the other negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that.
Like, they wouldn't have made that decision going forward, but they were able to effectively suppress that point of view, which is really scary, right?
I mean, there was real research out there and most people didn't see it.
Well, yeah, I mean, I know some ER. Doctors as well.
And they had to go looking for information.
And it was very hard to find.
And to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find the sort of counter-narrative thing easily.
And I think for a lot of doctors during that period, it was frustrating because even peer-reviewed research was not always...
So, yeah, during that period, it affected the whole question of, like, experts who talked to the press.
Like, they weren't always informed about what was going on or about different studies that had been done.
And, yeah, we had a completely different idea about the pandemic than maybe we should have.
But the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself, though I think it was, but that it was a proof of concept of something that was to come, you know?
Do you think that as we unearth more about COVID that the biggest question of all, which was, what was the point of that?
I mean, if every part of the society was coordinated and aimed toward the same goal, which was increasing the fear, Preserving the lies about its origin, hiding a lot of stuff, and pushing you toward the vaccine.
And it was utterly coordinated.
If anything was coordinated, that was from the churches, to the schools, to the media, everything.
We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things.
I mean, you're probably not going to get a document that says, look, it's really important.
That we do this because if we really stress masking, then we'll have established the precedent that visible symbols of conformity are a positive goal for an authoritarian regime.
I mean, they're not going to have that on paper anywhere, right?
But there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to follow instructions about...
How we manage the problem of academic freedom, right?
There are probably going to be emails back and forth saying, we have to change America's thinking about this and get them to start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority, right?
There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in FOIA disclosures with some of these anti-disinformation groups and that sort of thing.
So I imagine there's going to be some stuff with the White House, the CDC, the NIH. There might be some things like that in there.
But the higher level, sort of broader conspiratorial questions, I don't know what we're going to get.
I want to tell you about an amazing documentary series from our friend Sean Stone called All the President's Men, the Conspiracy Against Trump.
It is a series of interviews with people at the very heart of the first Trump term, many of whom are close to the heart of the second Trump term.
This is their stories about what permanent Washington tried to do to them, in many cases send them to prison, for the crime of supporting Donald Trump.
Their words have never been more relevant than they are now.
Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, I'm in there even.
All the president's men in the conspiracy against Trump, and you will find it only on tcntuckercarlson.com.
And, you know, the sort of related phenomenon of fake news, intelligence leaks designed to destroy careers, which bleeds into kind of lawfare, right?
But Russiagate specifically, that's a big story.
That's a place where I think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because we know where the documents are.
In some cases, we even have them already.
They're redacted.
So we get to look under the redactions now.
Why did they start the original investigation?
What was the impetus?
For the July 31st opening in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane.
You know, there's some conflicting stories in the past.
Did it really come from Britain?
Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it?
Or was it something else?
Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in May of 2017?
It's just an extraordinary thing.
Thinking back to that time, we don't remember it.
But the FBI opened a probe into the sitting President of the United States to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time.
And what evidence could they have possibly had for that, apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey?
So the predicate for all of this, I think, and maybe even earlier, but to my knowledge, late in the summer of 16 with the hacking of the DNC and the emails from the DNC. And the FBI never investigated it, never investigated the actual, you know, the physical removal of this data from their servers.
Instead, a company called CrowdStrike, which worked for the Democratic Party, did.
And then exactly at that moment, or right around that moment, a DNC staffer was killed in Washington, D.C. in an apparent robbery in which nothing was taken from him that I happen to know for a fact the MPD, the Metropolitan Police Department, thought was bizarre.
And they kind of didn't believe it.
A Fox News host went on air and asked questions about this killing.
Why wouldn't you?
And the parents of the man who was killed either sued or I think they sued.
They certainly threatened to sue and basically scared the crap out of everyone.
And there were people at the DNC, one of whom I know, who thought that he was murdered for political reasons, at the DNC. A very high-ranking person in the DNC told me that.
And I probably should just say, but everyone can guess who it is who's informed on this, but I don't want to betray confidence, but I'm not making this up.
And I don't know what happened, but as far as I know, not one person has looked into that in the media.
No, and even if it is just an unsolved murder of a type that they normally solve, The whole situation, that whole timeline was very strange.
It doesn't really make sense.
The hacking of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, when the information was released online, they never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it.
And there was an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign.
To create this narrative that, you know, upon closer examination turns out not to be true.
So we got to go back and find out what did exactly happen there.
Why did they order this crossfire hurricane probe?
Why were they sending informants in after Trump or people in his orbit?
I mean, I did a story to the effect that the people in the House Intelligence Committee who were looking at this, you know, Kash Patel's initial probe, they came up with a number that it was 26 different people who were being investigated in Trump's orbit.
No matter what happened, it's a huge story because it's a political espionage story.
It's not unlike Watergate, really.
Exactly.
And we've laughed it off, or the mainstream press has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be taken seriously, but it does.
It absolutely does.
Just because it's Donald Trump doesn't mean you can ignore...
The FBI conducting political investigations willy-nilly and inventing predicates to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all kinds of other crazy, can I say crazy shit?
I mean, that stuff was all nuts, and we need to find out exactly what happened with that.
And that is one of the reasons I think that people are nervous about this.
Weaponization of a government probe because it's absolutely going to look in that direction.
And, you know, that's one of the first things they're going to look at is who was behind that?
You know, who cooked up the Steele dossier?
How was that released?
You know, and then there's the whole question of, you know, leading up to impeachment and the leaks.
That were done.
A lot of them were kind of illegal on their face, right?
Like, you can't leak signals intelligence to newspapers, and it was done repeatedly during that time period.
They would tell you the thing that happened that day, and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that you needed to know to really understand what you were reading.
And so, yeah, I think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and in hindsight, and that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who...
Anthony Fauci comes out and says, well, masks are important because of X. Well, you have to put in the timeline of what he originally said about that.
Or Joe Biden saying, we have to...
Correct misinformation because they're killing people.
You've got to point out that they were wrong about things themselves or that the Biden administration itself was de-amplified by some of these platforms accidentally, but they were, right?
But yeah, they just left out a lot of backstory and we have to get back into the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning.
Russiagate, I mean, that's one of the reasons why the pardon of Adam Schiff is kind of interesting, because he's a central figure of both the J6 committee, but also the Russiagate story.
And, you know, he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given, but whatever.
Yeah, Russiagate is a thing.
Then there's the whole question of lawfare, right?
And the effort to make sure that Biden faced no opposition at all in his re-election campaign.
And here I'm not just talking about Donald Trump and the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the 14th Amendment and all that.
This extends to even to groups like No Labels or the Green Party or Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson or Cornel West.
There was an extraordinary calculated effort to prevent competition.
So that's not necessarily illegal.
Parties can do whatever they want internally.
But it's still fascinating that there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign – If there's any communication between the White House, say, and the groups that were suing, you know, no labels or RFK or, you know, issuing challenges, no labels went through this extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no labels site.
And it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it, so they would try to associate no labels with Trump.
And there's a lawsuit going on about it right now.
What was the real origin of that?
Like, you know, who financed that whole thing?
I mean, I think there are a lot of stories about little tiny dirty tricks that are going to be coming out.
How was the coordination managed with these sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the ballot access issue to there were Klan Act suits that were filed against people?
Did that have any connection to people who are actually in office?
If it did, then we have another corruption situation involved.
But yeah, the larger question of who was managing all this stuff, because it clearly wasn't Joe Biden.
You know, our mutual friend Walter Kern talked about this, saying that this was the first time that we had a president that had a sign on his desk basically that said, the buck does not stop here, right?
We don't know where the buck stopped during this period.
And so, that's a fascinating question.
You know, wargaming of the last election season.
There are a lot of stories.
People don't even remember this.
Like, New Hampshire held a primary, right?
People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary.
And then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night, months later, where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the delegates themselves.
I'd never heard of that before, just canceling an election and redoing it in a closed meeting.
I think it ended up mostly having the same result, but for some reason they held the second contest.
It's just very strange why that happened.
That we've got to get into.
Then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents.
We heard nothing about that.
It was the most extraordinary news story that I've ever, I mean, apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and COVID, you know, a presidential candidate and ex-president gets shot, and the story's dead within, like, 48 hours.
All you read in the news from the FBI, there are these comments saying that they don't have any motive evidence.
We've done 100 interviews, but we don't know anything about why this happened or, you know, what was going on there.
Do you believe that?
I have a very hard time believing that there's nothing interesting.
And we know that our intel agencies working through the Ukrainian intel agencies have murdered all these people and tried to murder all these people, including some I know personally.
And so that's just a fact.
And he was there with them.
But this had nothing to do...
And by the way, are those the only two attempts on Donald Trump's life, do you think, during this campaign season?
And I will say, you know, whatever people watching think of Trump, I know for a dead certain fact that a lot of people who work for him really like him personally.
You know, the government affairs, you know, Rand Paul's committee, the government oversight committee in the Senate, they really want to do a big thing, like a government files type of thing, where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically.
And I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the...
The example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence, and we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content.
But we only got to see a little bit of it.
And I think what's going to come out is how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it.
You know, how many people were committed to that effort?
Also, were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act?
Was the State Department doing that?
You know, I think, so there's going to be a big...
The Digital Services Act is like the wet dream of every sensor in the world, right?
Basically, it mandates that every internet platform abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers, who are basically licensed content reviewers who look at things on social media.
And if they see a narrative that they don't like, They will elevate it to the platform.
If the platform does not abide by the recommendations, they get crippling, enormous fines.
And this is one of the reasons why there was a dispute between Elon Musk and Europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely enough.
This just came into effect last year, but it's an extremely effective way to regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it.
It's the private platform that actually commits censorship.
And this third party methodology, which is specifically, by the way, what what Donald Trump referenced in his free speech executive order, we don't want that to happen.
We're going to not allow that.
They already have the full blown Death Star version in Europe of that.
And so, the investigation here in the United States is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing.
The Twitter file suggests that we're already doing it informally and illegally, probably, but we want to find out exactly.
Sometimes that was done informally, by inference, or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations.
But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement Center or the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force making direct recommendations to these platforms, or the White House in your case.
We're going to find out all these communications, not just little pieces of them.
Advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages.
If it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there.
There was a bizarre incident last year where the Real Clear Politics polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades, they kind of left it off their page of polling average sites.
Because they didn't like the page, I guess.
I don't know.
But, yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there.
Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a senior position in NPR. One government media job to another.
And my only point is that just by, you know, changing the direction of their BS, they're not going to win back audience, right?
People, you know, and this is something that...
I've noticed since I've been in the business, people in media continually underestimate audiences.
They think that they're much stupider than they really are.
I remember when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it.
They'll turn the page.
But it's not true.
a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine and so when they do these sort of transparent It's totally true.
I actually think it's more sinister even than you described.
So the two topics after, you know, 30 years in television, the two topics that they like never wanted to do.
They always want to do stuff about trannies or race or, you know, whatever, all that stuff, but they never want to do economics or foreign policy ever.
And their view was, or their stated view was, the audience doesn't care.
And then I get fired and start doing foreign policy stuff, and it gets crazy numbers.
And I only do it purely because I'm interested.
That's it.
I was always interested, and I'm also interested in economics.
I'm not an expert, but I think it matters.
That's why I'm interested, right?
You do a story like that?
You blow out of the water all the pap that they do.
So it turns out there's a deep reservoir of interest among viewers and readers for these stories.
And I'm starting to think that maybe the people who run the networks where I worked, they just didn't want to address that stuff because there was a consensus on it that they agreed with and that they didn't want to challenge.
I think that especially when you're talking about...
Interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective.
Try pitching stories to one of the big newspapers about maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of a thousand military bases in the Middle East or whatever it is.
Drone warfare.
You know, you're going to have a hard time selling that one, right?
They did it not by saying, you know, we just don't agree.
You know, we have one perspective on that, and we're going to stick with it.
That's a straightforward way to explain it, which I can digest.
They instead said, no, the audience just doesn't care, and you're basically putting the business at risk by covering things that people have no interest in, so get back to Natalie Holloway or whatever the drama of the moment was.
And I believed that.
I believed it.
I mean, I just assumed people just aren't interested.
I guess I internalized our audience's dumb position, which they had for the whole time I worked there.
Well, you did big, I guess numbers is not applicable to a magazine, but that got, I mean, your stories on that were widely read because you're one of the only people doing it.
doing it was just it was just the fact of you know how does this work who was really profiting by it what happened to the people who bought these homes etc etc just basic questions and people wanted to know and as you discover they want to know other things where are they spending the money that I send every That's right.
Disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay.
And in retrospect, I think, were there things going on in the world, bigger trends that maybe we should, you know, as a news company, we should have been paying attention to?
Sure.
To kind of prepare people for at least the idea that like, wow, something bad could happen because there's a lot going on abroad.
You know, sort of beautiful fall morning and everything changes.
And it's like, I do think it's fair to ask, even if there's no intent involved, like, how did we, like, what should we have done differently to at least give people the sense that there were highly organized, well-funded elements abroad that hated us?
But, like, 9-11, like, how exactly did that happen?
We have all these law enforcement and intelligence agencies protecting us, and they had no idea that there are, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of, you know, the 19 hijackers, but then all the support people.
Living in our country, training, getting money from someone.
We never really...
What?
Anyway, I don't know why I'm going off on that, but it's like no one ever asked the basic questions.
Well, it becomes overwhelming after a while, right?
I mean, you know, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or, you know, you're going to die if you don't, you know, take this medicine or whatever it is or, you know, your kids are going to die.
Emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult.
I mean, I think this was a factor in...
It was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because audiences were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them.
So it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things.
I think it's happening slowly, but...
What's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to come out.
And so you look at things, I kind of like, you know, I'm not a detail guy.
You are.
What name one like tiny detail that you are personally obsessed with and maybe mildly embarrassed to admit you're obsessed with, but like what's the one thing that you just, you want to know?
Well, look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire.
NPR did a story, like, virtually...
I believe it was a couple of days after the debate.
I'll have to go back and look at this.
But there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls.
And of course, we later found out from Biden staffers that they said they never had...
I'm sorry.
That was about Kamala.
They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead.
Even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite.
For me, the story that I just can't get past is what happened in that one week.
And how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it?
Had the media been so completely paper-trained by that moment that they...
It maintains discipline in Washington and in the media, which is commitment to party first.
And what is, so that is the one thing, like, all the things I disagree with the Democratic Party and some in the Republican Party, on policy, like, I have all kinds of disagreements.
I think that, they think that, so I got it.
But the one thing I really can't relate to is the loyalty to party.
Well, right now we have this situation where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party explanations.
And that's why it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions and that's where all the people are going.
Podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about had a huge impact in the last election.
And you know what?
Shame on those media people who laughed at those podcasts because, among other things, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts, like significantly lower.
You get to hear different points of view, and that's been excluded from this other form of media, this kind of bifurcated, red-blue landscape, which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse.
But I just think that this period now, it's going to be great for launching.
This new media that's necessary because they're going to have all this material to work with and because it's going to be all documents, people are going to trust it.
In the same way that they trusted the Twitter files, I didn't have anything to say about it.
I just sort of put it out there.
But all these independent organs are going to look at these reams of material.
And they're going to discuss it and pass it around.
And that's going to be how the public is educated, which is great.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
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That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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