Matt Taibbi discusses the Twitter files and censorship in this episode with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk released internal documents detailing censorship, blacklisting, and other practices to Matt Taibbi and other journalists.
Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of the newsletter Racket News on Substack: https://www.racket.news/
I have a guy that I've admired for many, many years, Matt Taibbi.
All of you know, if you've ever been part of any kind of insurgency in the last 22 years, he's played such a useful role in explaining To Americans and the rest of the world, beginning on Wall Street, in layman's terms,
with beautiful poetic language and a lot of humor and just a knack for these killer phrases that you come up with, explaining to people how power is In the American political and financial landscapes and who's in charge and sort of how the sausage making takes place and the gruesome inhumanity of some of these people and childishness
of some of the people who are in charge of everything, you know, how inept and how sort of inexplicable and inappropriate it is to put these people in charge of the world.
The masters of the universe actually, you know, do not have any clue what they And you've shown that better than anybody.
Let me read a little of your official bio.
Matt Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and award-winning columnists for Rolling Stones.
His recent book, Hate Inc., is a turbocharged take on how the media twists the truth to pit us against each other.
And let me read a little of your Wikipedia.
You were born in 1970.
I think you're, are you Polynesian?
I'm Irish and Filipino, basically.
Okay, Irish and Filipino.
You reported on finance, media, politics, and sports.
A former contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Taibbi began a freelance reporter working in the form of the Soviet Union.
He later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper, the Moscow Talmud.
So this is your second career.
And in 1997, Taibbi and Mark Ames co-edited the tabloid newspaper Exile.
Well, that is when you...
You're 17 years old, is that right?
I was 27.
I had actually played, just before that I was playing pro basketball in Mongolia, believe it or not.
In 96 and 97, yeah.
And then you really made your breakthrough for people like me in 2008 when you wrote three columns.
They weren't really columns, they were extensive articles from Rolling Stone about Wall Street and the crash back then.
So, just give us a little background on you, and then I want to talk a little bit about the Twitter files and then some larger issues.
But, you know, how did you end up doing this?
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on.
It's an honor.
And, you know, I think we talked before in the past a long time ago, but it's great to catch up now.
Yeah, I mean, my background, I studied in Russia in the early 90s.
I wanted to be a novelist when I grew up.
All my heroes were absurdist novelists.
So that's sort of my background in journalism.
My father was a reporter in Boston.
He worked for Channel 5.
Was he an absurdist novelist?
Yeah, like Gogol and Bulgakov.
That's why I studied in Russia.
I wanted to learn Russian so I could read those books.
So it's very funny because what we were talking about at the beginning, a lot of what I wanted to do with my life, you know, sort of writing...
I wanted to write novels like The Master of Margarita or Dead Souls, and it turned out I didn't have any talent for that.
But the world actually is as absurd as those books are now, and so it's all kind of come full circle.
But my background is really as I grew up in a family of journalists, came back to the States in the early 2000s, started working for Rolling Stone, and then I switched on to Wall Street in that beat after the 2008 campaign and spent a lot of time on that.
Then I became an independent journalist once, you know, the media world started changing, as you know, in 2016 or 2017 or so.
And so tell us about, you know, because you reemerged after the pandemic with the Twitter files.
And tell us how that happened.
It was kind of random.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I had sort of mused online that he would be a real hero if he were to open up the internal documentation of what was going on at that company.
But I think he already had that idea, frankly.
I was contacted and went out to San Francisco and I was one of a small group of journalists who was given access to the internal documentation of Twitter.
And from a reporting standpoint, it was a very, very difficult task because we were just sort of fishing through large amounts of files and had to build a coherent...
Or a series of coherent stories out of it, which was very challenging.
But we found much more rampant, I would say, corruption and contact with the government and the enforcement agencies than we had expected.
And it became a very difficult reporting task.
And it was you, Paul Thacker, Paul was one of the journalists.
Did you actually see each other out there?
Yeah, Paul wasn't there in the beginning.
In the beginning, it was me, Barry Weiss, Michael Schellenberger.
There were a couple of other people.
Lee Fong came on shortly.
He had worked at The Intercept.
And then Paul eventually came in, I think in late February or March.
There were some other people who came in and out.
David Zweig.
At one point, there was sort of a whole room full of us, but that was a very brief period in time.
And I was really the only person who was there constantly from the beginning, myself and Schellenberger.
How did you...
I mean, it was like a million pages or something, right?
Yeah, it was a lot of documents.
I would say, you know, it's obviously a small fraction of what the overall traffic was at the company, but we were probably looking at somewhere between 100 and 150,000 emails at least.
And then that doesn't count the attachments and other stuff.
There was Slack communications.
So we were trying to build Stories out of things like what happened with the Hunter Biden story, what happened when they took Donald Trump off the platform.
And then we found this whole thing about the communication with the FBI, the Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and some other agencies, and all of the platforms.
And that became the dominant story for us that we were trying to track down.
And Averill Haynes was one of the...
who was the DNI, I think, at that time.
I think that's right.
So did you have a search engine that was using search terms to try to find...
We did, although we...
I don't think we ever talked about this.
Any of us really talked about this, but I think we found early on that that was not the best way to do it.
Really, the smartest way was just to take a bunch of documents and try to read them chronologically and not look for anything in particular because we would find all sorts of things by accident that way.
And that became a much more, I would say...
You know, less targeted form of journalism.
We weren't looking for the story.
The stories kind of came to us.
Your name popped up a lot.
I'll have to say, we ran across your name quite a bit.
And that was a story that we haven't actually put all those documents together, but there was a lot of stuff in there.
But I'm sure you heard the disinformation dozen, the letters from the CCDH. And, you know, that was one of the things that clued us into this whole system of, it was sort of like quiet censorship, where they wouldn't tell you what was going on, but everybody was clamping down sort of universally behind the scenes.
Yeah, and what was the involvement?
Did you actually find involvement of the CIA? I know there was a portal that the FBI was using, and there were some stories that indicated the CIA also had access to that portal.
So we know the CIA attended meetings with what they call the industry meeting.
There was a whole group of companies, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and there were probably two dozen that came in and out, but the big ones showed up every single time.
We have documents where the CIA requests Permission to come and sit at some of these meetings.
And then we have a stack of reports that came through what they call the Foreign Influence Task Force, which is managed by the FBI. But we have a whole lot of documents that look like they came from the CIA. Some of them are marked OGA for other government agencies.
And I showed some of them to other, you know, to ex-CIA agents.
And they told me that it looks like CIA reports because there's like a terror line that's the same, the format.
And there were a number of ex-CIA people who we know, we could tell, worked at Twitter.
We looked into their backgrounds and they were pretty senior people in the Trust and Safety Department.
What do you think their objective was?
Their objective was to just quiet any kind of dissent about the government policies.
Yeah, I think in the beginning, it started out as they had a very particular objective about establishing a narrative about Russian disinformation, the influence of Russian, quote unquote, Russian bots on the platforms.
And when Twitter, you know, they initially asked in 2017, they asked Facebook and Twitter to give them a report about how many Russian bots were on the platform, how many were linked to the Internet Research Agency in St.
Petersburg.
And when Twitter didn't give them a number that was big enough, there was all this negative feedback from the Hill, from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And I think initially they were just trying to get a foot in the door about that issue.
But over time, it seems like they had a lot of opinions about a lot of things.
And they were sort of quietly recommending that Twitter take action on accounts about all sorts of things.
Everything from...
Promodoro accounts in Venezuela, to the Yellow Vest movement, to leftist movements in Africa, to populist movements involving Brexit, or the Catalan independence movement, that really spanned the entire spectrum.
Now, they weren't demanding that the platforms take this down, but when you get a spreadsheet with You know, a thousand names on it or account names on it.
And we were looking and seeing that most of them, a lot of them weren't active.
You can draw your own conclusions from that.
At the beginning of the pandemic, before they de-platformed me at Instagram, which is my major kind of vector for talking to the public, there were a lot of articles that suggested that the things that I was posting at that time were coming from Russia and that they were part of a big Russian disinformation campaign.
And that was puzzling to me because I had no information from Russia.
But do you think that was just a prescribed narrative that somebody decided this is how we're going to attack this, we're going to blame everything on Russia?
Yeah, in fact, we found internal documents about the construction of what they call a denialist at Twitter, which is when they have these tools called visibility filtering, where they can basically amplify you all the way down to not visible at all, and they can have everybody see you if they want.
If they want to de-amplify you, they put you on what they call a denialist.
And we found a denialist called is underscore Russian.
And basically, that just meant you had opinions that coincided with what they called sort of Russian propaganda.
So people like Jill Stein were marked is Russian.
WikiLeaks was marked is Russian.
And over time, we found that this was a habit, that when they wanted to...
Mark something as sort of unseeable or wrong or foreign disinformation.
There would always be an implication of Russianness sort of layered on top of it.
And yeah, so I think that was the way they got in the door.
They started with Russian disinformation, but they slowly moved that target to the domestic arena and not very subtly, I don't think.
What was your feeling about Elon throughout this?
I mean, he, you know, you originally said that he was a hero.
And, you know, that's kind of how I feel about him, too.
And I really started admiring him at one point when I saw an interview that he did about AI. And he said, AI, the first thing it's going to do is going to take our jobs and then it's going to kill us.
And, you know, coming from the tech industry, I think it was really important that one of these Silicon Valley giants talked about the danger of it, because the only thing that we hear from them is that it's going to, you know, create this Eden, this utopia on Earth when we have all this technology.
And if you look through history, technology mainly is used to do good things, but it's almost always abused.
And the capacity to abuse AI and these surveillance technologies and digital IDs and digital currencies is so monumental these days that, you know, it's very suspicious to see somebody have a conversation about it where they don't mention that, because that should be foremost on our mind.
But then, you know, you see him today, he tweeted about Neuralink, and Neuralink looks kind of sinister if, you know, it's It definitely would have a sinister application to control people's brains.
So what is your assessment of him?
Yeah, it's difficult.
You know, obviously, in journalism, you always want to have a clear idea of what people want out of press coverage.
And I think that's essential, really, to evaluate and whether...
Your sources are trustworthy or not.
In this case, this is one of the rare cases in my career where I really didn't fully understand what the motives were behind the story, but the documents were so explosive on their face that it didn't really matter.
However, I can give you my impressions.
I think he's sincere about trying to shake some things up.
I do get a sense that he's patriotic in a way.
He thinks that things are...
Going in a very dangerous direction.
He wants to do something about that.
It's just not entirely clear to me what all those things are.
He and I obviously had a dispute.
I think it's actually kind of a misunderstanding.
There's been a dispute between him and Substack, which is the independent media company platform that I use.
So that's unfortunate.
But the Twitter files are a unique thing.
We haven't seen a CEO do something like this in Certainly not in my lifetime.
Do you remember anything like this ever happening?
I've never seen anything like this.
I mean, if he talked to a lawyer beforehand, any lawyer would tell him, you better not do that.
In fact, I was suing all these companies at one point for being part of the TNI, the Trusted News Initiative.
And Twitter was part of that.
And when Elon took over, the attorneys who are working with me on this, Jeff Rubinfeld from Yale, said, maybe we should go to Elon and propose to drop Twitter from this lawsuit if he makes this stuff public voluntarily.
And, you know, to me, it didn't seem like a good idea to approach him in that way.
And then he just did it on his own.
Right.
Yeah.
That's an amazing story.
And I totally believe it.
I mean, I had moments where I felt like saying, you know, if I were your lawyer, I would be advising you not to do this.
I remember seeing the looks on some lawyers' faces in that office.
It was like they were watching Nosferatu for the first time.
I mean, the idea of letting a bunch of journalists loose in their files, I actually felt badly for them at one point.
But again, that's not my job to worry about this kind of stuff.
So it was totally unique.
It was very hard to understand, really, from his point of view, because the potential downside was so great.
But, you know, if you have that much money, I guess you can do that.
And for that, I think people really need to be thankful for it.
Yeah, I guess Paul Thacker had the same dispute you did about Substack.
And that just explained to the audience that he wanted your stories printed on Twitter and not printed on Substack.
And you guys thought, if we do it on Twitter first, what does it matter if we write about it on Substack afterward?
Does that basically summarize the...
Yeah, he has a new subscriber service and I think his idea was that we would move to the Twitter subscriber service.
Substack is basically the same idea.
I'm not an employee of the company.
I just use their service to process payments.
He wanted to do something very similar on Twitter.
And wanted me to move there.
My explanation was the optics of that would be really bad for the story.
Even the appearance of a financial relationship Would create, kind of cast the kind of ethical Paul over the Twitter files releases.
And so that, you know, the independence has to be clear to the reader.
So I sort of politely declined.
I didn't know that they were really mad about it.
But that's the essence of the dispute is that, you know, I think they were mad that we didn't move.
And from our point of view, I thought we thought it was necessary, I think.
And did you actually talk face to face with Elon Musk?
Not about this.
I'm sad about that, unfortunately.
This was all done through other people and through texts and stuff like that.
We never had a discussion where I got to be able to explain what it looked like from my point of view.
But, you know, I understand what he's trying to do.
I'm not so sure I agree with it, but, you know, from his point of view, you know, this is a huge story.
We benefited from it, clearly.
But we weren't doing it.
I wasn't doing it for the money.
I was doing it because it's an amazing story.
I think any journalist would respond the same way.
Either way, it's, you know, I'm grateful that he did this, and I always will be.
And I think the...
The country is going to benefit continually from these releases going forward.
Is there a lot left that has not?
Yeah, there's more.
There's stuff coming out.
Are you still working on it?
Yeah, I mean, I still have material that I just never reported, and there's a lot of it.
You know, these stories take a lot of time, and we've got to try to confirm things and make sure that what we're looking at is real, and so there's a lot of stuff that's still coming down the pipe.
There are some other journalists who are working on some stories, I think, that are going to come out pretty soon, actually.
There's one about Ukraine that's really interesting.
You know, that I'm hoping will come out in the next couple of weeks.
But that won't be mine.
That'll be somebody else.
Speaking of Ukraine, you wrote a very interesting story this week.
It was a conversation you had with Kern about the Ukraine, about the digital passport in the Ukraine, basically putting your entire life into a cell phone.
It was a brilliant conversation that you had with them.
And, you know, you talk about Samantha Powers at USAID, who is, and, you know, as everybody knows, USAID is a CIA front and played a big role in overthrowing the government of the Ukraine in 2014 with the National Endowment for Democracy.
You know, the U.S. government funneled $5 billion through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to support these Protests that later morphed into an overthrow, a violent overthrow of Viktor Yakovych's government.
And with the neocons in the White House then putting in place a handpicked government of their own choosing that they chose before, you know, months before the...
Right.
That's our guy.
And then, you know, one of the things that's happened in Ukraine, and I talk a lot about You know, the war on here, but we haven't really talked about how the war is being exploited by U.S. financial interests.
I've written a little bit about it on Twitter, about the land grab that's going on now in the Ukraine, where, you know, Blackstone Group and the U.S. These other, you know, U.S. multinationals are going in there and purchasing all the farmland to control the food supply.
But you talk about this interesting meeting with Visa, which is...
Visa is one of the companies that's been working with the Gates Foundation and MasterCard to develop digital IDs for the entire global population.
And they're now rolling one of these things out.
And, you know, I guess it's...
Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, they have this thing called DIA. It's the Ukrainian word for sort of doing or being.
And they call it a U.S. government supported everything app is the term that I saw on USAID. And...
It's basically a single portal where your whole life is on there.
Your identification, you can do your banking, your mortgage applications.
But in the war environment, they added basically a snitching app.
So if you want to rat out collaborators in the next building You know, in the Sasyedny Dom, as they would say in Russia, right?
Like, you can just punch in a button and give information about the people who, you know, they have an app called e-Enemy, and you rat people out.
Now, this is an application that they're trying to bring to other countries.
There's several countries in Africa that are already trying to do this kind of thing.
And what's really worrying, I don't know, did you ever see the movie Starship Troopers?
I have.
They have the advertisements on that movie.
Yeah, it's exactly like...
You get to turn in people who you don't like.
Maybe they're just people you don't like, but they're people you're saying are enemies of the state.
Right, and in that movie, it's this sort of...
It's a parody.
It's an absurdist parody of this fascistic autocracy that has this relentless messaging machine, and everybody is just wired into this single...
I mean, there's no other way.
I mean, I've talked to some people who worked at some other tech companies who said they're not doing that exactly in the United States yet.
But if we were ever to go to war, that would be the idea, I think, is that instead of having Facebook, Google, and Twitter, we would have basically a single informational landscape of some sort.
What we saw in the Twitter files is under the surface, they're doing a lot of these things.
They're doing what they call sort of Unorthodoxy mapping, or they're basically looking to see what your opinions are.
And if you have kind of unorthodox or wrong opinions, you're deamplified, you're pushed down, you're seen less.
In some cases, you're just moved off the platform entirely.
And...
They're doing that informally in the States, but they're doing it overtly already in the war arena in Ukraine.
And I think for having lived in the former Soviet Union, Russia, where we saw kind of modern gangster capitalism unrolled before it came to the U.S., you know, I worry that the Ukrainian version is what may be in store for us.
Yeah, and you can also, under this app, you can report riot movements of Russian troops or Or what have you.
But, you know, clearly the most sinister and useful part of it for people is that you get to report your enemies.
And it's not very clear, you know, what happens to the people that you report.
Do they go on a list?
Do they have...
Is there three strikes and you're out?
Is there, you know, are they...
Is some...
Will we Gestapo dispatch to their doors to question their families or what happens to them?
But it's a very, very sinister capacity that you're handing people.
Right.
And what's so scary about the, and yes, there does need to be some reporting about what exactly happens between, you know, step one and step three or whatever it is, but you can imagine it's probably not pleasant no matter what.
But the scary thing is I think they've already kind of tested this out in the West.
Like, you know, with the virus, for instance, with the coronavirus, the idea of people reporting other people on the platform and that this becomes a way to accumulate demerits for a certain account.
Within Twitter, they had a system where if you were reported by what they call a trusted partner, you would get, you know, a certain amount of negative attention that may move you toward a denialist.
So again, informally, they're kind of doing the same thing already here in the States.
And I think you were probably a victim of that, honestly.
But, you know, again, over there it's overt and it's just very scary.
You know, I remember when, during the Bush administration, I think it was during the Bush administration, Admiral Poindexter came up with this total information system that he was going to put together that would collect all the data on every human being in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
And people were so offended by that and indignant, Republicans and Democrats.
And, you know, it seemed like this paranoid, fascistic...
It should have been obviously wrong to everybody.
And there was a universal repulsion.
People were appalled by it.
And I remember then also when I was a kid, Most Republicans didn't want the Social Security system because they thought it meant a universal ID. And they said any government that wants a universal ID is the beginning of a totalitarian government.
You know, they're going to try to keep track of us all and try to surveil us.
But nowadays, everybody just accepts it.
And it's this, you know, one of the things that you write about a lot is The capacity that people have to forget things, this built-in forgetter, and that that is being amplified by technological forces and the media and the collaborative nature of media and government today that, you know, we're being kind of constantly hypnotized to forget the past.
You know, one of the times that struck me was when we went into the Iraq War in 2001.
Back then, everybody said, you know, we learned a lesson from Vietnam.
We're not going to do this yet.
And then they give us this kind of, you know, they hypnotize us with these comic book depictions of, oh, you know, Saddam Hussein.
Bad, we're good, and we need to abolish.
Good needs to be victory over bad.
We did something that America had never done before.
We did a preemptive attack against a country that did nothing to us.
It had nothing to do with 9-11.
It was a propaganda triumph.
It was the most...
But then people said, okay, we're never going to do that again.
The neocons are out for good.
They're disgraced.
And then all of those guys show back up in this administration.
And they do the exact same play over again, and we fall for it again.
So what is that?
Right.
I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
It goes back to that moment in time when they were beginning the propaganda campaign to go into Iraq.
I remember having this reaction thinking that I was high or something, that this was...
What are they even arguing?
This country clearly has nothing to do with 9-11.
How can they possibly put this past the entire country and get Congress to agree to it?
And the fact that they were able to do that and have this propaganda triumph where they got a majority of the country...
At least superficially behind this effort.
And they were able to drum up so much anger, like real vitriolic, you know, anger about toward Iraq.
And, you know, when we didn't find WMDs there, this was the beginning of this process that's now kind of automatic in the United States where, oh, wow, well, that turned out not to be true.
Let's move on, you know, and This gigantic moral panic evaporates.
At that time, it took a little while for that to be processed.
Now we do it just routinely.
I mean, we have these moral panics over and over and over again.
And I think it's exhausting for the public, whether it's Russiagate, Bounty Gate, COVID misinformation, right?
Nine different things over the course of the first year, even, about the efficacy of masks.
Then it's the efficacy of the virus.
You won't be able to contract it.
You won't be able to transmit it.
Then when they roll that back, they don't say, I'm sorry.
They don't go back and fix any of the stories.
And I think this is a real problem for media because this idea of getting something wrong and not telling your readers that announcing that to your readers, it creates an audience that just has no capacity for learning or retaining information or anything.
They're just confused and reacting to sort of emotional stimuli.
I know you must be frustrated by this, but I think it's very off-putting.
And the thing you referenced, Total Information Awareness, that program that was created under Bush, there was a DARPA-created program.
It sounded like an insane fantasy that could never possibly happen.
It was too paranoid.
Now, it's very clearly what they're up to.
And those same organizations, DARPA, ARPA, they're behind a lot of this sort of anti-disinformation technology.
And it's not a fantasy.
It's real.
It's happening.
Yeah, I mean, the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over again and expecting different results.
But if you have amnesia, if you have a permanent case of amnesia, you're incapable of learning anything new and changing your behavior.
We learn through undergoing painful experiences, learning from that.
And then not doing it again.
But, you know, there doesn't seem to be any learning going on.
It just seems to be a series of just these apocalyptic blunders with no accountability and not even anybody admitting they're wrong.
I mean, you're right.
The New York Times You know, which was telling people, which was rebuking people and gaslighting people for not getting vaccinated because you were going to save grandma.
And then when they say, oh, it doesn't prevent transmission, everybody recognized that.
But there's still no broad scale recognition.
There's still people all over this country.
I was at a dinner the other night with Boris Johnson in which he said, you know, we saved Britain with the vaccine.
And you're like, okay, But are you not paying attention to all the information that's come?
And to look at the U.S. experience as a success story, when we had the highest death count, body count, COVID body count of any country in the world, we have 16% of the COVID deaths globally and only 4.2% of the population.
And, you know, how is nobody looking at this and saying, this doesn't make sense?
And, you know, we got to learn from mistakes, but you never have to admit the mistake.
Yeah, it's really scary.
I think they're just assuming that people are not processing information on their own.
But clearly, when you tell people and you scare people, you could go out of your way to terrify people into taking action because if you don't do this, you will die.
Like, your friends will die.
Or you'll kill other people.
You'll kill your grandmother.
Right, right.
I mean, that is very emotionally manipulative, right?
And then to sort of say five months later, yeah, actually, not really.
It's not exactly what we said.
Sorry.
They don't even say, sorry, my bad.
They just kind of move on.
The reaction, I think, for audiences, they either just sort of blindly accept or they don't.
They recoil and there's this rage that builds up in the population that they're just not acknowledging.
And then there was the other problem that we found in the Twitter files of this thing, the Stanford Virality Project, which was like a single processing platform for all for the major Tech platforms like Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.
This is where they sort of reported all their vaccine information and their data.
And they were telling all these platforms that you should consider as standard misinformation on your platform.
Even true stories of vaccine injury or true stories that may promote hesitancy.
So they're openly telling these platforms that true things may be something that has to be suppressed.
I think the public sees that and that's very confusing.
I don't know how you logically respond to that when you see it and you don't see anybody making a course correction for that.
And what happened to journalism?
Because journalists were supposed to know that, you know, their job is not to manipulate information to achieve a narrative.
Their job is to tell the truth and to be gatekeepers of the First Amendment and free expression and not to be censoring things.
But the journalists were instead leading the assault on free speech and they were championing censorship.
And what do you think happened?
They all forgot what they learned in journalism school, what they learned when they were.
Everybody read Orwell.
Everybody read Aldous Huxley.
Everybody read all Robert Heinlein.
Everybody read all of these books that said the guys who censor are never the good guys.
And that anytime you censor, you're going to end up in a totalitarian situation.
But what happened to them?
I have no idea.
I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts are about this because it's a huge mystery.
I mean, again, I grew up in a family of journalists.
Every journalist I knew growing up had a copy of Catch-22 not far from, you know, from wherever their nightstand was.
And, you know, the whole thing about the great loyalty of the crusade and the censorship, I mean...
The censors have always been the bad guys for reporters, and all reporters that I know, even ones who just were basic beat reporters, were all trained to kind of physically recoil from being wrong.
Like, getting something wrong is the big...
Fear that hangs over your head.
That could be career-ending.
So we're trained to be terrified of that.
To get something factually incorrect is the big no-no that can never happen.
And every good reporter I know had the same thing where the night before you publish, You don't sleep very well.
You're worried.
What happens when it comes out?
Is somebody going to see something that I didn't catch?
And that is gone.
That whole instinct in the business has been eliminated.
And I think if you look, you'll notice that a lot of the people who are known for being...
Good investigative reporters have been booted out of the business.
I mean, the biggest names in journalism are very conspicuously not there anymore, right?
Like whom would you put in there?
I, Hirsch, right?
I mean, he's not in there.
Even Woodward is now kind of an apostate because he gave, I mean, look, people have different opinions about Bob Woodward, but again, this was the basic standard Discipline within the business is, you know, check your facts, get things right.
And he was sort of the approved establishment vision of what an investigative reporter is.
He's the one who said that he told Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism Review that I warned everybody in the newsroom about the Russiagate story to be worried about the Steele dossier.
I mean, that is a galactic error falling for a paid opposition research document that is totally unsourced and wrong.
And to carry that for three years is that it's an error as big, I think, or bigger than the WMD mistake and just no recognition of it whatsoever.
And anybody who did worry about it is out.
There's none of us working left working in major journalism anymore.
Yeah, I mean, people get mad at me in the Democratic Party for saying, hey, wait a minute.
Those things were we now have the proof that they were made up.
They were invented by not, you know, and invented by, and then Fortified by CIA agents, 50 CIA agents who sign a letter publicly, which turns out to be a propaganda trope, and FBI agents who are involved in essentially fixing an election by inventing a lie.
Two of them, maybe.
Trump overcame the first one, but the original Russia story, I think we now know, is kind of fabricated, a lot of it.
And then the Hunter Biden laptop story, which they suppressed.
I don't know how important that story is.
I think that still remains to be seen.
But the suppression of it...
That clearly happened.
And you're right.
I mean, I wasn't a fan of Donald Trump.
I wrote a book about him called Insane Clown President.
But you can't just accuse somebody of something and have it turn out not to be true and not say you're sorry and just keep going as if it didn't happen.
It's a total breach of the public trust.
And I just don't understand how they make that fit psychologically.
Again, I'd be curious to hear what you think about that.
I'm baffled, but I saw it not just with journalists, but I saw it with people who I respected, people who were, you know, human rights activists, who should know better, who should know that censorship is never, should be tolerated, you know, who were First Amendment absolutists five years ago and now are applauding censorship, Democrats who have completely fallen for the war narrative, you know, the whole...
The very, very powerful gravities of orthodoxies, which, you know, I think were biologically hardwired for orthodoxy, you know, because it gave us unit cohesion during the, you know, 20,000 generations.
Human beings were wandering the African savannah in these small warring groups, and you had to, you know, you had to follow.
You had to have a kind of cohesion with your group so that they became the in-group and everybody else was the out-group.
I think those are the biological underpinnings of orthodoxy that hardwires it.
But journalists are supposed to have an immunity for that.
They're supposed to be a fierce Posture of skepticism, as Louis Brandeis put it, toward any kind of aggregations of power or anybody telling you, you know, here's what's what, without saying, well, you know, give me the evidentiary basis.
You know, that's what a journalist is trained to do.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I grew up in the 70s, too, and American liberalism was sort of founded on, I mean, the image for me is the VW bus with the question authority sticker in the front.
And the Nazis were, you know, walking in Skokie and through a Jewish neighborhood and having, you know, liberals and the ACLU say, yeah, we hate what they're saying, but, you know, you got to defend their right to say it.
And the reasoning behind that is so obvious.
I mean, it's not an extraordinarily difficult thing to figure out.
If you don't stand up and let this happen in Skokie, the next thing that's going to happen is that throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Panhandle, every little southern town is not going to let the NAACP march, right?
That was the justification for the Skokie case.
It's why censorship doesn't work.
It's a chain reaction that just never stops once you start down that road, as you know.
When they first started down this journey, I think the biggest first step was Alex Jones.
There were a few people in media who said, You know, this is going to lead to a bad place.
They're going to be banning all sorts of people within a short period of time.
And everyone said, that will never happen.
Oliver Darcy at CNN was like, no, that will never happen.
He's the big media reporter.
Look where we are now.
There's so many.
I mean, you can't even keep track of who's been banned from the platforms now.
It's absurd.
Yeah.
What was your evolution on COVID? I mean, were you immediately skeptical or were you, I mean, what put you over?
Well, I think the, first of all, it's a difficult subject for me.
It's a little bit like finance was very difficult for me at first because I had never been trained in that topic.
So I was starting at square one when that happened.
And I feel like COVID is a little bit like that.
You must have a big brain because you really did such a public service on that.
Well, thank you.
All of us, what the heck was going on and how bad it was.
Yeah, I mean, well, that's another topic.
But the mortgage-backed securities were part of the reason they worked is because they were designed to be so complicated that journalists couldn't figure them out and regulators.
And, you know, this is a little bit like that.
I mean, it's a scientific story.
And in journalism, there's always this problem.
Where when something is beyond the ability of sort of an ordinary beat journalist to figure out themselves, they have to rely on experts and authority figures in the first initial blush of a story.
And so they gave us early on a direction to go in with this.
But we had to take it on faith.
And I think the mistake that all the reporters made is they didn't leave room for doubt about this stuff.
Even just with the idea that it could have come from a lab.
I didn't think that was terribly likely at the beginning.
I mean, I always thought...
I usually default towards the most...
You know, the least conspiratorial explanation, but you have to at least allow for the possibility that, you know, there was some kind of human culpability there.
And they didn't.
They shut the door immediately with that, which was very suspicious to me.
Why would you do that?
You know, as an investigator, there was no possible way they could know if they haven't discovered the link.
If they haven't found that, you know, patient zero of COVID yet, then you can't close the door yet.
But they did it, which I think, again, it was just another one of those stories where, journalistically, from the beginning, it was compromised.
So that was worrying to me.
And I think now, over the years, I've just seen so many of these stories go wrong that now we're starting to see, I think, there are more people coming out of the woodwork who are pointing us in a direction of You know, this not having zoonotic origin and that sort of thing.
The story is not uncovered yet, but I don't trust anything they tell me about this story anymore.
All right.
Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
And thank you for the public service that you performed over a career.
It's been really an important one of the last real journalists standing now.
Who are the journalists that you read and respect?
A lot of them are my friends.
I mean, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate.
There are a lot of people out there now who I follow.
Lee Fong is a reporter.
He's a really terrific young investigative reporter.
You know, he used to work at The Intercept, but he's independent now, too.
It's kind of a lost art, you know, investigative journalism, the sort of classic version of it, and it's too bad.
But I think there are some good young reporters out there, and they're doing great work.
You know, we should support them.
Matt, where can people find you?
I'm at racket.news or taibi.substack.com.
Yeah, I've been there for four years now, and that's where you can find me, or at mtaibi on Twitter.