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Dec. 21, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
42:36
Censorship Industrial Complex with Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi discusses the Censorship Industrial Complex and provides an update on the Twitter Files to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Matt Taibbi on Substack: https://www.racket.news/

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Hey, everybody.
I've got one of my favorite guests here, Matt Taibbi.
Matt is the author of four New York Times bestsellers and an award-winning columnist for Rolling Stone.
His recent book, Hate Inc., is a turbocharged take on how the media twists the truth to pit us against each other.
In talks, Taibbi paints an alarming portrait of politics, media, culture, while providing a way forward against our most urgent crises.
Taibbi also wrote New York Times bestsellers and St.
Cloud President, The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement.
He is a winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and he is one of the The most, I think, eloquent deconstructors of Wall Street and the banking system and all of the big, big grifters on our country and our international economy and the Fed, from the Fed on down.
Anyway, welcome back, Matt.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for having me.
The Supreme Court case just came out, and it's a Colorado Supreme Court case that probably by the time this shows, everybody will have rehashed and rehashed.
Tell me what your take is on it.
It throws Trump off the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
Because of this statute that was passed after the Civil War to keep Civil War veterans, Confederate veterans from voting in the election, Confederate leadership from voting in future elections to protect Reconstruction in the South.
That's really why it was promised.
I'm not an attorney, so I'd be curious actually to hear your opinion on this because it feels to me that this is neither the sense for which that law is designed.
It sounds crazy to me.
It's very much in line with this sort of lawfare phenomenon that we've seen.
In the last seven years where, you know, rather than leaving the fate of America to the auspices of voters, whom I think elites increasingly distrust in this country, they are looking for other techniques.
It's not dissimilar from what happened, you know, in Florida and what happened with you and some, you know, in some other democratic states.
But this is, I think, I think it's a huge and crazy step.
I'd be curious to hear what you think.
I feel the same way that you do.
I think it's bizarre.
And then the second point that you make, that it's part of this pattern of disenfranchising voters and choosing our political leaders through appointment of the party leadership and the elites is...
I'm not a fan of Trump.
I'm running against him.
But I don't want to win this way.
I don't want to win by kneecapping my opponent.
I want to be able to win an election fair and square and not leave half the country angry that they didn't get to vote for their candidate.
This is the kind of thing that you see in Pakistan or Iran or some other country that has a pretend democracy where popular leaders are...
that they can't participate, that they get rid of them one way or another so that they can't run.
And we look at that and we say, "Yeah, that's not a real democracy." Well, that's happening here now.
And like I say, I'm not a fan of Trump's, but if you don't believe in democracy, if you don't believe in the people as the demos, which is the demos of democracy, You can't say that you believe in democracy if you mistrust, if you distrust the people to choose their own leaders.
Yeah, it's shocking.
I mean, obviously we saw hints of this in 2016, 2015, when we started to see the spade of punditry where they were talking about there's just too much democracy.
We have to go back to the smoke-filled room.
We can't allow the rabble to be making these consequential decisions or irrational decisions.
But even going back before that, I think some of the roots of this, you have to put at the feet of the war on terror and think about all of the major decisions that we made, sort of casually throwing out Bill of Rights characteristics that have been sort of casually throwing out Bill of Rights characteristics that have been central to American life for hundreds I mean, we throw out habeas corpus.
Due process is gone in a lot of these procedures.
If you add COVID, which is kind of the culmination of the war on terror, it started with 9-11 and ended with COVID, where they completely shut the door on the U.S. Constitution, and they got rid of free speech, the First Amendment.
They got rid of right to assemble with social...
Who could have imagined that there would be a crime to assemble and social distancing?
That seemed like a...
Well, I even put that in the Constitution, because who's going to tell you you can't get together with your friends?
Well, you know, they did it.
And then the religious freedom, they closed every church in this country for a year with no scientific citation and no notice and comment rulemaking, no public hearing, no environmental impact statement.
And then they got rid of jury trials of the Seventh Amendment by saying if one of these companies hurt you with a vaccine or some other intervention, you can't sue them.
And then the whole Fourth Amendment probably envisioning against warrantless searches and seizures was just obliterated by all the track and trace surveillance and you got to show your medical records before you go into a building and all of this.
It was really, it's like they targeted the Bill of Rights one after the other for obliteration.
Very odd.
Very alarming that nobody cared.
The Fourth Amendment case, the one involving getting geolocation information from phone providers.
When this decision came down, I immediately thought of the sort of internal memos that the Obama administration wrote.
In support of the drone program, where there was this very curious part in one of them that talked about how due process didn't necessarily have to involve the party in question, that any kind of process could be due process.
That's kind of what this is like.
It's sort of like due process, but yet the important party isn't invited.
It's nuts, but there's a generation of people, I think, that's growing up That thinks this is normal.
And, you know, it's astonishing.
I mean, the whole country needs a civics lesson.
It's really...
I don't know how this...
My kids' generation, they think it's normal for the government to be...
Like, they're not freaked out at all about the government reading all their emails and everything else.
They shrug.
And then, you know, when COVID came...
I mean, the biggest liberals that I knew, and all of the word liberal...
It means freedom.
It was drawn from freedom of speech and the idea that they could start censoring people.
They started with the vaccines and with these medical interventions, but then they kept expanding it to Ukraine war.
It's exactly the stuff you want people talking about.
Government policies is the reason we fought the revolution in the first place, because people wanted to be able to criticize their government without It's
just extraordinary.
I mean, they're not supposed to be propagandizing the public, and they just told them a lie straight out right before the election.
Oh, I know.
I mean, this was a big theme of all the stuff that, you know, we've been working on in the last year, which is that all of those prohibitions against intelligence agencies propagandizing the domestic population, you know, from the Smith-Month Act to the The charters for the State Department and the CIA. They're all just being violated willy-nilly, all of them.
And there's not even any kind of embarrassment about it or any suggestion that anybody's even worried about it.
You have agencies like the Global Engagement Center, which is a State Department agency, and they're openly involved in censoring Domestic content or doing content moderation domestically.
And they have no legal remit to do that.
And it's just considered, you know, people just shrug, as you say.
And it's remarkable.
I don't want to insert my situation into the conversation, but part of this is why the Secret Service denial, to me, You know, which is the first time in history that anybody who asks for Secret Service protection has been denied.
And I exceed all the parameters and metrics for which they've routinely given Secret Service protection.
And, you know, it's a minor, minor issue.
But it's now all of these agencies.
When my dad went into the Justice Department his first week in there, and Arthur Seisinger talks about this in his biography, he gave a speech to all the division heads and branch heads saying nothing is going to be politicized here.
You know, we don't go after people.
We don't ask their political party.
None of that's going to happen in my Justice Department.
And that was a routine speech that every attorney general gave.
Do the Justice Department because it was so important that Americans have faith in the institutions of democracy and that they aren't politicized and that the whole world looked well.
That could not be corrupted.
And now you have this, you know, it's really the thing that disturbs me of all the things that, you know, disturb me about President Biden right now.
You know, the war and all of that.
The war is kind of part of his DNA. He's always been kind of a, you know, a warmonger.
And, you know, he's always been kind of fighting for war with Ukraine.
But the thing that really...
That really irks me is all this politicization of these institutions without him ever saying anything about it.
I'm just going along with it.
I feel like they've completely lost touch with what America is supposed to look like.
People don't even know what it's supposed to look like anymore.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
The Secret Service decision in your case, I mean, it jives with this overall trend of you have this odd contradiction among sort of the upper-class, blue-leaning intellectuals in this country.
On the one hand, they're furiously angry that there's been this collapse of trust in elite institutions.
And they want desperately to remedy that.
But at the same time, they keep taking these steps that guarantee that nobody will trust those institutions.
And it's everything from what you're talking about, like with the obvious politicization of the Secret Service to this Supreme Court case to the news media not correcting major errors.
You know, year after year after year to the censorship issue.
If you want people to listen to the national news media, they've got to stop getting things wrong and they have to, you know, admit it when they do.
And they refuse to do it.
And then they're surprised that there's a loss of trust.
It's baffling to me.
I don't really understand it.
I mean, I'd be curious.
Well, people say to me all the time, you know, accusingly, a lot of the mainstream media, you know, you've been bashing, telling everybody not to trust the institutions of government, and you've got people to doubt NIH and CDC and And if you then get into the presidency after you've destroyed the trust in all these institutions, how are you going to govern?
And I say to them, I'm going to make people trust the institutions again.
How are you going to do that?
I'm going to make them trustworthy.
That's what you've got to do.
You can't just force people to trust stuff that you'd be out of your mind to trust the government or the mainstream media today.
If you trust government, if you trust the mainstream media, you're not paying attention.
You're not paying attention to anything.
Yeah, and again, this goes back to your situation came up in exactly this way in probably one of the last Twitter files reports that we did that was about the Virality Project, which was this Stanford effort backed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center and some other government agencies to root out what they called COVID misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
But what they did is there was this weird drift.
They would start off talking about things that, you know, are kind of obviously Would fall under the category of misinformation, you know, like the idea of microchips being, you know, implanted in vaccines or something like that.
But then, very quickly, they would come to define anything that undermines confidence in government policies, anything that undermines confidence in individual officials like Anthony Fauci, or anything that would, you know, quote-unquote promote hesitancy.
They'd define that as misinformation.
And there was a passage that particularly referred to you that I thought was one of the most striking things, where they talked about how repeat offenders, people like you, are almost always reportable.
You know, to me that was striking because as a journalist, you know, we're trained that if we get something wrong, that you punish the speech, not the speaker.
You don't sort of decide that somebody is inherently libelous or, you know, is More prone to libel than somebody else.
You deal with each specific case, but that's not how they do it.
They're assessing people and sort of making these binary decisions, trustworthy, not trustworthy, and there's no process.
They just kind of put people in baskets.
It's a crazy way to go about things, and it's totally contrary to the spirit of this country, which is everybody gets a chance to defend themselves.
Everybody gets a chance to give their side, and nah, they're not into that.
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned an interesting word, malinformation, which I think they made up.
And they applied that to me a lot because of what I was writing about.
Listen, if somebody said to me, you got this wrong, and there's a couple things I got wrong, and we immediately corrected them.
Somebody says to me, you got this wrong, this description, this study didn't happen.
There was a Filipino study that I wrote about that I got a fact wrong and I immediately corrected it.
But nobody could point to a piece of information that I had put that was false.
And we had made it because of, you know, we had a major fact-checking operation at CHD that was revealing at 350 cases.
PhD scientists and MD physicians who were on this, you know, scientific advisory board, and we were, everything that went out from us, everything was cited in source.
We were very, very careful, and nobody pointed to an actual erroneous statement that I made.
But they invented this new word called malinformation, which is not misinformation or disinformation.
Disinformation is somebody deliberately seeding the dialogue with a manipulative piece of misinformation.
Misinformation is just you got it wrong.
Misinformation, you deliberately got it wrong.
Malinformation is information that is factually correct, but it is inconvenient, nevertheless, to government officials.
And they had to make up this word, which is some bizarre pedigree, I don't know, or etymological root.
Yeah, I'm still looking for the first use of that.
Yeah, because when we first encountered it, You know, the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, they had something called the MDM subcommittee.
So that's the misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation subcommittee.
Malinformation ended up becoming one of the categories that could be applied in the virality project and some other sort of anti-disinformation schemes that went on.
But it was definitely used by the Department of Homeland Security So it has to have come from somewhere, and you're right.
It's a word that specifically was invented to deal with things that aren't true, but they are true, that aren't false, but they want to treat as false.
We saw plans for discussions about sort of future DHS activity where they talked about building resilience in the population against what they call despair-inducing MDM. So despair-inducing malinformation can just be things that are true that make the population dissatisfied.
Yeah.
Me saying, you know, this individual is corrupt, this government official is corrupt.
Right.
That is depressing.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
But you can see how very quickly a person who is put in the position of evaluating all this and thinks that they're doing God's work, they will come around pretty quickly to starting to define all kinds of things as malinformation.
And That's the big problem with this stuff.
They start doing things like, oh, there's somebody on Facebook who's talking about a relative who got myocarditis after getting the shot.
And this person might even be pro-vaccine, but they'll call that malinformation because it's, you know, quote unquote, promotes hesitancy.
And yeah, they had a whole list of those incidents, but it's a crazy concept.
It's the kind of thing that Orwell would have invented.
And I know that's a cliche, but in this case, it's really, it's very apt, I think.
Yeah, I mean, one of the amazing things that you're now encountering, like with this institution at Stanford, is this question about where the money is actually coming from for all of these, like, It looks like a lot of it is coming through intelligence agencies and that they're routed through these, you know, these bizarre chains that people...
Tell us what you found and who is funding and who is really behind the censorship industrial complex and who are the characters who are, you know, who they brought into this whole thing.
Have you ever run across Averill Haynes?
Oh, right.
Yes, of course.
Yeah.
This is part of the reason that the, you know, The Twitter file story and then, you know, some of the other stuff that we've done since then.
It's incredibly confusing because this new industry, this kind of censorship industrial complex, as Michael Schellenberger calls it, it comes from a lot of different places.
It grew out of sort of the counter messaging operations in the war on terror.
So you had groups within the Pentagon that were doing anti-disinformation work.
It's targeting, in Arabic, targeting ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and they were funded pretty heavily over the years, but they switched.
You know, they went from this, what one person called, one former agent called CT to CP. It's counterterrorism to counterpopulism.
So you move...
The CSCC, which was strictly anti-terrorist, to the Global Engagement Center, which is kind of strictly anti-disinformation, and that they're one of the partners for Stanford.
So we found money from the Department of Defense, from the State Department.
From the National Science Foundation, all of those contributed to the Stanford programs.
Also, we found a significant amount of money that came from private donors like Reid Hoffman.
It was a big one, Pierre Omidyar.
I don't know if he was involved with the Stanford programs exactly, but he's involved with a lot of these programs.
Explain who those guys were.
Reid Hoffman's a LinkedIn billionaire.
There's the Newmark Foundation, which is Craigslist, Piero Midiars, eBay.
There are a lot of these tech billionaires are major funders of what they call anti-disinformation.
NGOs, I think that's a Sometimes an overly generous term because a lot of them aren't really non-governmental.
They're pretty explicitly partnered with governments.
But there's a lot of private money that gets mixed in with these operations.
I think the Stanford Election Integrity Partnership was really It was sort of a prototype for how to do these things.
It's kind of started by the Department of Homeland Security.
The idea seems to have come from there, but they can't do it because they don't have the legal authority.
This is said openly by the people Who run the program that we have to do this because DHS, they even said that the exact quote was they kind of don't have the legal authority to do this or the funding.
So you need kind of a private face so you can step in and do this work that would be absolutely illegal if the government did it directly.
So the funding, you know, is sometimes routed In this indirect way, you know, Stanford gets a number of government grants, but they're not directly for these programs.
They also get some support from the Newmark Foundation, right?
Or from somebody like Reid Hoffman will contribute to a group like New Knowledge, which does this kind of work.
But there's always the consistent pattern is the involvement in some way of a government agency or intelligence agency A big pile of money that comes at least in part from the private sector and then sometimes like a veneer of an academic project on top of it.
And that seems to be what the standard pattern is.
So talk about some of the highlights of what you found most recently in the Twitter files.
Yes.
So, in working on this, we had a bunch of whistleblowers come forward from different...
And just lay the groundwork for people who don't know what the Twitter files are.
These are all documents that were made available by Elon Musk when he purchased Twitter, correct?
Yeah, so Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, one of the things he did is he invited a bunch of independent journalists to San Francisco, had a surprisingly brief meeting with all of us, basically said, I'm going to open up all the files for one of...
America's largest corporations and you can do what you want with that material.
And basically did that for about two and a half months.
We were just sort of rooting around with no supervision in Twitter's files or with limited supervision, I would say.
And we found all kinds of stuff that I think he didn't even know was there, in particular about the relationship between The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and all these platforms.
We found that was a very sophisticated, constant relationship where they were flagging lots of content.
So we did a lot of those reports and they made a lot of noise last year around this time.
But since then we've had other people come forward with other documents from other kind of censorship operations.
There's this thing called the CTI files that we did a couple of weeks ago.
And this was a group that was also put together to, ostensibly, to police COVID misinformation and disinformation It was founded by a British data scientist who has some former defense ties and then somebody who was still working for the Pentagon at the Special Operations Command as a quote-unquote technologist at the time.
And they organized this group of volunteers, quote-unquote volunteers, that were largely from the tech world to not only review content, But to do things like create sock puppet accounts to infiltrate groups online,
we have training videos where some of the people involved in this group are talking to the new recruits and saying, we're going to do all the things the bad guys do, but for good reasons.
So that includes using fake accounts, infiltration, repetition, creating false news stories.
It's all kinds of documents like this, and they're openly saying, we want you to create more sock puppet accounts for Twitter and Facebook.
We want you to use burner phones.
I mean, it's stuff like this.
So we just put that out a couple of weeks ago, but the key takeaway to that is the Twitter files are mainly about the defensive aspect of this, which is censorship and de-amplification, but we're also now finding out that there's an offensive component To some of these operations where they're sort of COINTELPRO style, you know, creating the appearance of things that aren't real on the internet.
So you might have fake accounts that are trolling individuals.
I'm sure your account is subject to it all the time on Twitter.
And my guess is that we're going to find more of that as we go forward.
Just take a moment to comment on Elon Musk.
It's pretty unique because there's no corporate CEO in our country who would allow anything like that to happen.
And his lawyers would lock him in a padded cell if he tried it.
It's amazing that he led you into this treasure trove of, like...
Actionable information that makes the company look terrible.
Oh, exactly.
I mean, as an attorney, I'm sure you can appreciate this.
The first meeting I had with him, there was a fairly senior attorney in the room.
And he's sort of going on and on about, yeah, you can look at this and that.
And the attorney sort of gently raises a hand and says, we're not talking about privileged material, though, are we?
And he's like...
Yeah, we are.
Why not?
I looked over and you can imagine the look on that person's face.
And the look on that person's face was actually one of the things that reassured me that this story was for real.
And actually, all throughout the project, the kind of look of abject horror on every attorney's face that we saw in the Twitter offices It was an indication that the stuff we were getting was deeply upsetting to them.
Because in addition to all the things that were pertinent about censorship and cultural issues, there was all kinds of stuff in there about ongoing litigation and financial information that we could have just dumped out there and it could have made a tremendous headache for the company if we wanted to.
But he didn't care.
In fact, the only thing he ever really did...
I mean, I remember this one moment...
Very clearly, there were like 10 of us in a room, just clacking away, looking at all this stuff.
And he sort of poked his head in like, you know, the show Fawlty Towers and he said, does anyone need any coffee or anything like that?
And, you know, then he disappeared after that.
That was his contribution to the whole thing.
There was none of this kind of overlord You know, hanging over our shoulder watching what we were doing, which was, it was really weird, Robert, but it was amazing.
I mean, again, I'd be curious to hear, I mean, as an attorney, I can't imagine that they would have gone to bed at night thinking anything but just pure horror about the whole thing.
Yeah, I'm stunned because I'm sure that they were screaming at him.
I've never heard anything like this.
It's completely irresponsible, but it was so beautiful that he did it.
And he's a South African and he loves our country enough and the whole idea of free speech.
He's only doing it here, by the way.
In the other country, right now, all of these companies are...
Are bowing and scraping to foreign leaders.
And they're all over Europe.
They're censoring everything.
And, you know, they're spying and censoring.
But he's carved out this country and said, you know, we're going to keep this as kind of an oasis of free speech.
Because he has to.
He can't.
In Europe, they pass these terrible laws that say if you violate by putting up, questioning vaccines, that kind of stuff, you pay these huge penalties.
They're ruinous.
They'll bankrupt you.
Of course, in China, you know, nobody can operate in China without doing exactly what the government tells them to do.
So he's doing it over there.
You know, he's keeping his business model alive by, you know, by gaving into him over there.
But it's just unbelievable what he's done here in terms of protecting free speech.
And think about...
Where we'd be right now in this country if it weren't for Elon Musk, because Facebook is not going to lift the censorship.
Google's not going to lift it.
Instagram, YouTube, they're all heavily censored.
And the only place that free speech survives, and then everybody else has got corporate control.
You don't hear anything.
And Twitter's the only place where there's free speech left on a big platform in our country.
Yeah, I mean, and obviously, look, Elon has his foibles.
I mean, he's having a spat with the company where I publish right now, and some of the, you know, so he's suppressing some links there.
But overall, yeah, absolutely.
The only way...
The public, A, would know anything about any of the stuff that's going on, and then B, that there would be any chance for any kind of carve-out in what turns out to be a pretty ironclad informational cartel, not just in America, but all around the Western world, is if a highly eccentric billionaire decides to opt out.
I mean, this is like the one scenario that they didn't You know, account for when they built this system.
And even then, I don't know how long he's going to be able to hold out because they have so many different ways of applying pressure.
And the law you referred to in Europe, the Digital Services Act, that's going to be the prototype of the kind of thing they're going to install everywhere.
They obviously want to do it here.
It'll be harder because we have a different tradition, but You're right.
The penalties are crippling for even one violation of that act.
So it's going to be interesting to see what happens there.
Yeah, you know, I talked to Jack Dorsey about it, and he really admires Elon.
He's very interesting about it because he's critical about some of the financial choices Elon made at the beginning.
He thinks he should have unloaded Twitter and then maybe bought it after it.
Because it was clear that it was going to plummet.
But he said a couple of interesting things.
One is he said, ultimately, they're going to make Elon cave because there's so many ways they can come after him.
And they can, first of all, get rid of all the advertisers, which is what they're doing.
And he's been really courageous about that, saying, go ahead, do it.
Hey, I lived in that great moment, right?
The go-after-yourself moment, which was fantastic.
The other thing that Jack Dorsey said, because I asked him, what are you, you know, what's the solution to all this manipulation that's going on in the internet where these sites are, you know, are censoring and manipulating the way we think about things, the way we see the world, the way that we experience the world.
And, you know, everything is Things can be programmed.
Societies can be programmed.
And this instrument of the internet is the perfect way, as it turns out, to program human beings for compliance.
And what Jack Dorsey said is the answer to that is to make all the algorithms transparent so that you can choose your own algorithm.
So right now, If you're a Republican and you ask a question, you'll get a different set of information than your neighbor who's a Democrat, because the algorithm is trying to figure out how to accomplish certain things, mainly to maximize the amount of time that you're going to spend on this site.
And they do that by feeding you information that fortifies your existing worldview and your existing beliefs.
But a lot of the manipulation is taking place involuntarily.
They're trying to make us see the world in a certain way.
And he said that the only way to counter that is to make all the algorithms transparent and allow you to choose your own algorithm.
So you can say, you know, I want a Republican algorithm.
I want a Democrat algorithm.
I want an algorithm that feeds me stories about biology that does this, this and the other.
So at least, you know, you're in charge of your own manipulation.
And I said to him, that's actually a great idea.
Yeah.
And he said, I've said it five times.
I've testified in front of Congress.
This is the way to solve the problem.
And he said, they just, they know everything.
It just doesn't even make a ripple.
But anyway, it's an interesting idea.
Well, he, he, he's developed a social media or he, he helped develop a social media platform called Noster, which is really fascinating because the concept of it is to make the social media program not a full service program like Twitter, but more like a protocol like email.
So everybody uses email, but everybody can use your own version of it.
You can have Gmail if you want.
You can have Yahoo Mail if you want.
It'll have different features to it.
It will sort your mail in a different way or whatever.
And the idea behind Noster is that the protocol would basically be non-manipulatable, but you could overlay your own filters and algorithms.
I think that's a really great idea.
If they can make that functional, then that's terrific.
Because the problem right now is that anything that's owned, they're going to be able to manipulate it.
Even with Elon sitting there trying desperately to keep control over his own company, they're able to impact the revenue In so many different ways.
And we even said this to each other in the first days of the Twitter files, the reporters.
We were like, whatever this is, it's temporary.
They're going to pressure this company and this thing is going to get locked down.
So yeah, I think you have to find a way to make it so that it's not controllable and not susceptible to manipulation.
And Jack's right.
Do you use Noster?
You know, I like Noster a lot.
I would use it more.
The functionality isn't perfect for what I do.
There are some features that are missing.
It's not easily searchable for news, which makes it pretty hard for somebody like me to use it as a primary social media tool.
But I think in the near future, they'll figure out a way to get around that and Then that's where people will go.
This is one of the interesting things about the internet in this period is that we're seeing that audiences are capable of mass moving from one place to another pretty quickly.
And you have to learn how to navigate that landscape.
I mean, as a political candidate, you must have to be thinking about that right now.
Because the strategies are totally different than they were even a year ago.
Yeah.
I mean, we have a whole team.
And luckily, Amaryllis is running the campaign.
You know, was like a marketing director or something for Twitter and had her own tech company.
And so she's in kind of the perfect position to do this.
But I use Noster.
And, you know, it's kind of like all the cool people now are using Noster.
Yeah, I definitely like it.
I think it's cool.
Yeah.
Anyway, we've got to get off because I'm being told we've got another thing, which I hate to leave you because there's so much more to talk about.
Tell people how they can find you.
You're on Rumble, right?
I'm actually on Substack.
So it's at www.racket.news and you can find our stuff there.
It's R-A-C-K-E-T. Racket.
Like a tennis racket.
Yeah, you know, we're publishing a lot these days and have a lot of stuff coming out about the subject.
I got Labor Party files coming out about the CCDH and some other things.
So, yeah, which I think you'll find interesting.
That's the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Yes, they're big fans of yours, I'll put it that way.
I'm on their disinformation.
People have been doing a lot of work.
I think Paul Thacker has been doing some good work, and he was part of your crew on the Twitter phone.
He was.
Yeah, he came in.
I've known Paul a long time, back to the days when he was a Senate staffer.
Terrific journalist, great investigator.
Yeah, and that Center for Countering Digital Aid That has a really interesting pedigree.
And the money sources of that are very, very, most of them are very obscure.
And anyway, that'll be interesting as that begins to unravel.
Just quickly about that.
I mean, that's one of the things we've got in these documents is sort of concrete proof that the CCDH started as a project of something called Labour Together, which is...
Destroyed the left wing of the Labour Party in Britain.
Exactly.
And they basically are doing the same thing to the Democratic Party here.
They took the Labour Party in Britain and turned it over.
They empowered the corporate wing, it was corporate controlled, and they destroyed all the progressive wing, and they did the same thing to the Democratic Party here.
Yeah, it's like an exaggerated version of what the DLC did to the Democratic Party, right?
But they did it with the aim of getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn first, but now this project, the CCDH, has morphed into this massive, extremely ambitious thing that impacts quite a lot in the world.
So, anyway, you know that.
They've paid a lot of attention to you.
So, more on that is coming.
All right, Matt.
Wonderful to have you.
I hope we can get back soon.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Robert.
Thanks for everything you do.
Campaign trail.
Take care.
Thank you, Matt.
Thanks, man.
That was great.
Good luck.
What do you know about Noah Schlackman?
Oh my god, a total idiot.
You know, so all the people who are at Rolling Stone working under him now.
Yeah, I only know a few people left from that editorial staff, but they were...
He's not a popular editor, let's put it that way.
But he's a hardcore, hashtag resistance believer.
Not a journalism guy, he's a political guy.
Are you having a thing with him?
Oh yeah, he is a vendetta against me.
We also publish an article at CHD showing his intelligence agency ties.
Oh really?
You should look it up.
It's Dick Russell did a two-part.
It's called The Belly of the Daily Beast or something, and it's about the CIA takeover of, I think, Rawlings' Daily Beast on Daily Kos, and it shows the intelligence agency pedigree in Slack.
There's some interesting stuff in that.
It's been Dick Russell, and it's in The Defender, and it's a two-part series, but there's some interesting things in there about him.
It's called The Belly of the Daily Beast.
Belly of the Daily Beast, wow.
And John Avalon, you know, all of these guys who have agency ties.
Interesting.
Excellent.
Can't wait to look.
Well, thanks again.
And I definitely want to check you out on the campaign trail, so we should talk about that.
Oh, that'd be great.
Love that.
Thanks, Matt.
All right.
Take care now.
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