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April 21, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
51:43
Live with Journalist (& Democrat Enemy #1) Matt Taibbi! Viva Frei Live!
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Time Text
I'll go wide, actually.
How are you doing?
Great.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me on.
Thank you for coming on.
I mean, I know you must be getting pulled in every which direction these days.
Matt, before we get into the biggest news of the whole thing, I won't get into your childhood and all this stuff, but I think most people know you.
30,000-foot overview.
Tell us who you are and that you were once a beloved award-winning journalist before the Democrats declared you public enemy number one.
Yeah, I've had a very unusual career.
I went to school overseas in Russia.
I'm old enough to have gone to college in the Soviet Union.
I spent almost a decade working as a reporter in Russia.
I worked in the Moscow Times.
Then I had my own newspaper there.
I came back.
I worked at Rolling Stone for about...
Almost 15 years.
And I had one of the iconic jobs in kind of lefty journalism.
I was the campaign reporter for Rolling Stone, which is a great job.
I was a huge fan of Hunter Thompson growing up.
And Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is one of my favorite books.
So I did that for a long time.
I did a lot of work on the financial crisis.
and yeah, I won the national magazine award, but I think the funnier part about this is that, uh, For a long time, I was sort of like a liberal icon, even though I'm not terribly political personally, mainly because people thought that the stuff that I was writing about finance was to the advantage of Democrats.
So, I don't know.
It's very strange that this has happened.
There's been a big change in the business in the last six or seven years, as you know, and I'm one of the people who's kind of been moved out.
Let me ask you this.
I mean, you're at the stage now of living life backwards, although having gone through it forwards.
Looking back at the Rolling Stone with your perspective from today, was it always as unreliably partisan, biased, politically motivated as it has become in recent years?
No, no, no, no.
Rolling Stone was, I think, I think it was a great magazine for...
For a lot of reasons.
I mean, look, it was privately owned, so unlike corporate news, there was some wiggle room to do some stuff there.
And the owner, Jan Wenner, he and I had a contentious relationship, but he let me write all kinds of stuff that was not in the direction of the Democratic Party.
I wrote...
Very critically about Barack Obama.
I wrote a huge piece called Obama's Big Sellout in 2009 when he brought in all these Citigroup people to run his economic policy.
They were very aggressive covering all kinds of things and it was a terrific magazine but it's been sold and now it's a corporate run organization.
Whose editor came from the Daily Beast, so it's like a magazine version of the Daily Beast, which is the worst thing you can possibly imagine.
Okay, we could do the history for a long time, but I think we need to get into the present.
I know you've explained it elsewhere, just for those who may not know.
How did it come to be that Elon taps you to reveal the Twitter files, or at least your chapter of the Twitter files?
Well, I was one of a number of people who...
Who was contacted by the company, let's put it that way.
There's a reason why the original stories that I wrote were attributed to sources at Twitter.
There were a couple people involved, and I went out there to San Francisco.
But I think he made a conscious decision that he didn't want to bring in legacy media people to do this.
For a couple of reasons.
Number one, I think he didn't trust them.
Which is really interesting.
And number two, he was trying to make a point about, you know, that there is a vibrant independent media community, and that was important to him.
So he was trying to restore some credibility, I think, to the platform by being more transparent, and that was the idea behind the Twitter files.
All right.
And now, I mean, for those who also don't know, I mean, I think most of us appreciate it.
The volume of material that you had to go through, did you have a team to help you siphon through triage the important from the less important?
Not really.
I mean, at the beginning, there were a bunch of us involved, and then kind of suddenly there was almost nobody involved.
And that's one of the things that bothers me about this whole episode.
You know, you get...
Dumped a whole 100,000 documents or something like that.
It's great.
It's wonderful.
It's a reporter's dream to see this kind of stuff.
However, there's no guidebook to tell you what to do.
You just got to...
You've got to look through all of it and try to figure out what's important.
None of the sources are going to talk to you, the people who are in these documents, because they're probably guilty or they're hiding something.
So you have to piece that together yourself, and you could very easily get something seriously wrong doing that, which is why this kind of reporting is so difficult.
It's the challenge of investigative reporting, right?
It took us a long time, or it took me a long time, just to establish one kind of key thing, which is the communications channel between Twitter, the FBI, DHS, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, how that system worked.
That took like a month just to figure that out.
And yeah, no, it was very, very difficult stuff.
You know, we worked basically around the clock, I would say.
In the practice of law, when we get these types of document dumps, there is software.
So you can go look for certain keywords.
You can look for names.
I mean, were you dealing with any software to facilitate your triage of the documents?
Not really.
First of all, we were doing these kind of odd, bespoke searches.
The system changed each time we did searches.
So we would get batches of documents.
We weren't allowed to, you know...
Take them home, really.
And we just had to sit and read through them.
That was really the only way to do it.
I mean, if you're an attorney, then you know it's very similar to a big litigation where you get a ton of stuff in Discovery.
And yes, there's software to do it.
You can do keyword searches, but that's no substitute for just reading through it.
Like most of the stuff that we got that was cool on those Twitter files.
We got by accident just by reading through, and we were looking for something else, and something else turned up.
So yeah, in that sense, it was unlike litigation, because in litigation, you're looking for something specific.
Here, you're looking for anything, but you don't know whether it's newsworthy.
And had you had a prior relationship with Musk, if you're allowed to tell me, in terms of how he came to you, among others?
No, I mean, I knew he was a reader, but I'd never met him, and I didn't know him.
So he gives you access to everything.
For those who haven't watched Schellenberger on Rogan, go watch that.
My only critique of the Twitter files, and it has nothing to do with you, more with Musk, is that...
There was too much of it, and even for the people who wanted to follow up and keep up to it, like me, it didn't teach me anything new, but it was even hard for me to follow up on.
So Schellenberger was on Rogue and did a great breakdown, a three-hour breakdown, so that is still too long for most people's attention span.
You have one takeaway to highlight for the rest of the world as to the most egregious fact that came out of your discovery here.
What would that be?
Oh, without a doubt, it's the permanent...
Bureaucracy that they had set up for dealing with content moderation requests from the government and specifically from the intelligence community.
We figured out how that worked.
They had regular industry meetings.
They had a system through which The requests traveled.
They went through the Foreign Influence Task Force.
They went through a portal called Teleporter.
Remember, in the pre-Twitter Files world, we didn't know for sure how often the government talked to these companies.
What we found is they did it constantly, and they sent spreadsheets full of requests.
That's the big one for me.
And the teleportal thingy thing where they had access to videos and documents, you know that they had access to this teleportal, but we don't have the videos or whatever documents they shared?
We have some of them.
Yeah, so in some cases, it's incredibly frustrating.
We can see that there's a thing there, but we can't open it.
It's like Mission Impossible.
There's a timer.
They were able to see it for X number of days.
But we do have a big stack of stuff that came through this system, and these include big Excel spreadsheet files full of account names that they wanted.
They come from all over the government.
We found them from HHS, the Treasury Department, FBI, DHS.
There's some that look like they come from the CIA.
I wasn't able to establish that as a fact, but I talked to some CIA agents who said, that looks right.
And some of them were really bizarre.
Like, there was one that was clearly intended for YouTube that was just a list of videos and said, we assessed that these were created by the Internet Research Agency and they contain anti-Ukraine narratives.
Like, that's a reason for censorship?
I mean, maybe, I'm not a fan of Russian invasion, but I don't think we should censor that, you know?
Matt, how long had this been going on for up until, the story that we all know is the, What I call persuasion or planting the seeds of disinformation on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Now we all know that that was bullshit from the beginning.
But how long was this going on before the Hunter Biden suppression?
Like two years?
So there was an informal system that they had, I think, that goes back to 2017 at least.
And that's because there was a whole kerfuffle within Twitter.
Where they had this big struggle with the Senate Intelligence Committee over access to content moderation after Russia gets started.
And after that, Twitter kind of opened the door.
But the formal system, the one with the regular meetings and the teleporter and all that, that was all set up in advance of the 2020 election.
So we can place that to the week, basically.
And that was place it to the weak.
And this is what my biggest takeaway is.
If people only understand one thing, it's that the intelligence, FBI, CIA, meeting with social media to suggest that there would be a big Russia hack relating to Hunter Biden's laptop a year after they had had this laptop and knew that all the content on it was authentic and accurate.
Yeah, we have a crazy email where some of the Twitter people are talking about how they attended this tabletop exercise about a possible hack and leak involving Hunter Biden.
And then when it happened, they were kind of high-fiving each other and saying they were off by a week or something like that.
It was a joke to them.
Good thing we had that tabletop exercise.
It was some kind of quote like that.
Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.
Jim Baker.
People don't understand this.
It's not just meetings between the FBI and the CIA.
Jim Baker was the FBI's external counsel?
General counsel.
General counsel.
How the hell does he get involved?
Was he an executive at Twitter, or what was his position within Twitter?
He was deputy general counsel at Twitter, even when I got there.
And I didn't know that.
It's embarrassing that I didn't know that.
And that's actually...
So it's funny.
You'll appreciate this.
When I did the first Twitter files dump, which was about the Hunter Biden laptop story, looking through it, I thought, these feel like documents that have been selected, that have been prepared for discovery.
It didn't feel random.
It felt like they had been called by an attorney.
And I thought, well, that's okay.
They're still relevant.
It's still full of stuff that tells the story of what happened on that day.
But it definitely felt like this was a package.
And then we find out two days later that Jim Baker was involved in that process.
So that was one of the early scandals there.
And then he got...
The term Elon used is he was...
Oh, God, I forget what word he used.
It was really funny.
It was like he was left or something like that or exited.
Exited, that's what it was.
I was going to use the RoboCop term, but I don't want anyone misconstruing it as anything.
Oh, my God.
People need to understand that, that the external counsel for the FBI was working within...
Twitter, to curate the content that was being disclosed to you for the purposes of reporting on the Twitter file.
It doesn't get more corrupt than that.
But now we're going to fast forward a little bit.
So you've got Twitter files dump one, which was the Hunter Biden.
Twitter files dump two, which was sort of the EIP, the Election Integrity Partnership, working with, yes, I'm going to say it, CISA, because they even say it in their own documents.
Let's get a little into this Mehdi Hassam interview that...
I presume it did not go the way you wanted it to go.
No, it was a disaster.
I was being...
Look, first of all, I was totally being cocky about it.
I've had a personal...
I've been upset with MSNBC for a long time over the Russia story in particular.
And I was trying to make a point that in journalism you have to face your critics, that it's important to do that.
For your credibility, because they haven't done that with the Russia story.
So I thought, well, I'll go on, and I'll take this hostile questioning, and then I'll make the point that that's what you do.
But, you know, he caught me in some errors, and then I lost my temper, which is fatal on television, and it didn't go well.
I say the only reason it didn't go well is because they can now...
People make mistakes.
This is what drives me nuts, especially when you're dealing with that volume of information.
And the mistakes were, in my view, immaterial, but they were mistakes nonetheless.
And I think because you are a...
I will call you a journalist, and I'll call you not just a substack journalist, but a journalist with integrity.
You care more about correcting the mistake than defending it.
And had...
Had the opportunity been provided to correct it, you know, without public humiliation, you would have been more than eager to do so.
But the biggest, there's three points.
I still don't understand the 22 million posts flag.
We're going to maybe get to that one if we can.
The CIS versus the CISO.
That's not, it's not, it's not, the accusation is that you added the A in one of the quotes because you thought it might have been a typo in the original and you put it in brass.
I did, yeah.
That it was added.
The CISO versus the CISO.
In the context of that particular exchange was that they had partnered together and were working together to censor or flag content that was suspicious or problematic.
What's the difference between the CIS and the CISA for those who don't know?
So CIS is the Center for Internet Security.
CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
That is a sub-department of the Department of Homeland Security.
EIP is the Election Integrity Partnership for Stanford University.
And there's another thing called EIISAC, which is, I don't even remember what that acronym stands for, but all four of these entities were partners in this collective effort to mass-moderate And I'll just quickly explain what happened.
We did a ton of stuff on 2020 election in the very beginning of the Twitter files in December.
And then we didn't.
We sort of dumped that topic for a couple of months.
And I came back to it to do a thing on EIP and Stanford later.
And in those interviewing months...
I just lost track of those acronyms.
And when I saw CIS on a page, I thought they were referring to CISA.
And I did what journalists do, is when you add something, you put it in brackets so that the reader knows that you're adding it.
But it was a mistake, you know?
You didn't do what Kevin Kleinsmith did of the FBI when he...
CISA modified an email and didn't make any indication that he had modified the email to delete something and add something and then submitted it to a FISA court to get an unlawful spy warrant.
You indicated in the square brackets, I've added this because it should be a typo.
Right.
But I was wrong about it being a typo.
I mean, that's clearly true.
It's a mistake without a difference as far as I'm concerned.
But CIS is not a federal agency and CISA is, correct?
That's the material distinction?
Yes, although it's a very, very thin distinction because CIS itself is almost wholly funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
This is another problem that I had.
I had actually tweeted in the beginning of the process that it was very easy to confuse CIS and CISA because CIS is also a Homeland Security contractor.
CISA is a Homeland Security body.
SIS is a Homeland Security contractor.
And all three were working in concert with this moderation system.
And I had been looking at...
We sort of one email after another that talked about their partnership.
And, you know, you would send an email to CIS.
It would go to EIISIC.
Then it would go to CISA and EIP.
And I read a million of those form letters.
And so my brain was scrambled over all that.
But CISA is the big agency.
And Medi thought...
That they weren't involved at all, and therefore it was a big material difference.
I don't believe that Mehdi believed that.
I believe that Mehdi, Mehdi Hassan, everybody is the interviewer, when he said, "It wasn't CISA, it wasn't CISA, it was CISA." And I know that he was, whether or not he knows, I think he did know, because CISA on the EIP website from Stanford...
Is identified as a partner of the EIP.
The EIP admits it in their own landing page.
I think Medi knew that and was trying to confuse his viewers to suggest that because you had made the typo or the correction incorrectly in the CIS working with, that CISA wasn't a partner when they were.
All that to say, however, what was your relationship like with Medi before?
Was it acrimonious or did you not really know him before?
I didn't really know him before.
I mean...
I knew other people who had worked at The Intercept, so I knew of him, but we had never really had any contact that I remember.
I'm quoting Seinfeld.
He's a very bad man.
Is he a maliciously dishonest journalist?
Well, now I would say yes.
I've never encountered this before.
Let me just say that I was raised in the era when...
Before you publish something, the night before you put a story to bed, you didn't sleep because you're afraid you get something wrong and then that's going to be your reputation.
If you do get something wrong, you've got to own it and everybody else in the business will look at you sideways.
There's this honor system that you work under that everybody else in the business respects, which was really important for all of us.
It kept everybody sharp and it kept us honest.
It was also, you know, when you made a mistake, nobody tried to kill you over it, but you were encouraged, you know, they were encouraged to catch you out publicly if you worked at another organization.
But many will not admit his own mistakes, and that's when the system breaks, is when somebody doesn't admit it.
Well, I'll tell you this now.
I thought it at the time, and I think it's proven to be true now that Stacey Plaskett...
Has taken her talking points from those which Mehdi was feeding to her.
Mehdi right now must be feeling like that guy in Shooter McGavin that was there to heckle Happy Gilmore.
And when he meets Shooter, he's like, I did good, right, Shooter?
Mehdi right now must be to the Democrat Party saying, I did good.
I think he was putting out that feeler.
Go after Matt Taibbi.
He lied under oath.
He perjured himself.
I'll pull up this stuff when you're not here so I can go over the wordsmithing bull rubbish.
It seems like Plaskett has heard this.
You get a letter from Plaskett.
Does it go to you or does it go to your lawyer?
I didn't even get it.
That's another funny part about all this.
Like, I had to read about it in the news.
In her own letter, she says, you made a mistake in your designation.
You signed a document that said you wouldn't make knowingly material false statements and you're going to face perjury for what I already identified earlier on in my letter as a mistake.
Let me ask you the human question here.
Does it stress you out in any meaningful sense?
Are you nervous?
Have you been sleeping?
Have you been dealing with this, I don't know, as the superhuman journalist that you seem to be?
No, I mean, I'm nervous.
I've got kids, you know, so I can't afford to be blasé about this kind of thing.
But at the same time, you know, I know that what they're trying to do is they're trying to intimidate.
Me, and by extension, anybody else who would do this kind of work.
And so this is part of the job.
You cannot show fear or back down in these moments.
You have to fight back.
It's the same thing as when you publish a story, you have to fight for it after it's published, if you believe it.
And then if something like this happens...
Again, I think it's part of the responsibility, I think, of being a journalist is to put up with it.
So I'm trying, you know, and my wife is very cool about this.
I should add that, that she's not freaking out and telling me to quit journalism or anything like that.
So it's, you know, we're going to stick it out.
And look, also, it seems that you've had something of a falling out with Elon.
Are you guys back to being friends or no?
Not yet.
I mean, I have hope.
You know, I think there's been a big misunderstanding there.
I was a little taken aback, I'm not going to lie, when he deactivated the Twitter files and shadow banned me and all this stuff.
I mean, I was in the middle of a dispute between these two companies, and I think some wires got crossed.
But, you know, he's a complicated person, and we'll see.
I have been told that he's complicated, and I'm not saying this to be funny or make fun of him, but he might be sensitive, and especially when you're dealing with things on a...
Everything at your level and at Elon's level is amplified when there's a misunderstanding, and so were you totally flabbergasted when he published your DMs to him?
At this point, nothing flabbergasted me about this story.
I mean, this whole thing has been like Mr. Toad's wild ride.
From the beginning of the Twitter files, it's been...
One nutty thing after another.
But in modern America, you have to assume that any communication that you have with anybody is going to be made public at any time.
So, yeah, that was, you know, look, it's his company and, you know, that's so.
And I'm not trying to get into the thick of any gossip stuff.
What was the rationale?
What was the reason for which he released those DMs?
Was the disagreement as to whether or not you were employed by Substack or why you were defending Substack?
So this all started because the links to Substack articles were being throttled down or they weren't opening.
I'm a Substack contributor and that meant I couldn't share my own articles on Substack.
I asked Elon, "What would you have me do?
If I can't market my stuff on your platform, I can't use your platform." That led to a back and forth where...
It got kind of unfriendly, but basically, it was a business decision for me.
I think when you're censored on a platform, the consumer's only option is to not use the platform.
So that's what I did.
And the irony of this is that I had just been heckled as Elon Musk's puppet 10 hours before that, but it wasn't even a consideration for me.
As soon as they did that, I was like, I'm...
I'm not going to use Twitter anymore.
No, they get it on both ends.
They accuse you of being his puppet, and then when the two of you have a fight, then they say, look, even Taibbi can't trust big bad man Elon Musk because look how he throws his own allies under the bus, which is just confession through projection.
Right.
The question that I had, so you have a wildly popular sub-stack, and it's an understandable issue.
Anybody who accuses you of grifting or whatever, it's your business.
And it made, from Twitter's perspective, I mean, I can understand the rationale, but it still makes no sense, considering you can always link to external links on Twitter all the time.
Let me ask you this.
What's next now?
Hold on.
You're working on something else that I was just about...
I forgot my thought.
We still have Twitter files to come out, so, you know.
What can possibly come out?
What's left to come out?
It's corruption all the way down.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I wish we had more.
We have a lot of stuff that's still really interesting and I think is going to be of interest to people.
I spent some money in March hiring some people to do some extra research and that's all going to start coming out next week.
It'll be pretty cool.
It'll serve as a...
Kind of like a wrap-up report on this censorship industrial complex thing that Schellenberger talks about.
It's a good term now.
I remembered my question, Matt.
The day you testified before Congress, the IRS shows up at your house?
Yeah.
And the funny thing is, I initially thought, no way, that's got to be a coincidence.
It's too silly to even think about that being connected to my testimony.
But then there were a couple of things that happened that started to make me think.
The first one is they told me affirmatively not to call for four days.
When the IRS shows up at your house and then tells you that...
They want you to spend the weekend worrying about it before they tell you what the issue is.
That was thing one.
Thing two was when they finally did tell me what the issue was.
One of them was totally insane.
It was this idea that my 2018 return had been rejected over Fears of identity theft.
My electronic return had been rejected.
Now, I have copies of them accepting that return.
Also, I'd never heard anything about this.
Like, you would think over the course of four years that if I had an unfiled return that you'd have heard about that.
So that was when I started to get paranoid about that whole thing.
Matt, the idea that the IRS shows up at your house the day you're testifying, anybody who's expected to believe that's a coincidence is an idiot.
It's not a coincidence.
It's brazen.
It's like Soviet-level brazen.
Yeah, I know.
Glenn kind of made the point last night, I think, Glenn Grunewald on his show that if I have a weakness, it's that I'm a little naive about stuff like this.
So yeah, they did that.
After consultation with some friends who used to work in and around Congress, they told me that I should inform the committee, and I did.
It's just turned into this never-ending craziness since then.
For me, it's ironic.
I was thinking about this today.
I used to live in Russia.
I knew all of the Russian reporters who were going through a really hard time in the late 90s and early 2000s.
They were being hit with crowbars and some of them were being shot at.
There was one guy I knew named Alexander Hinstein who was picked up and they threatened to throw him in a mental asylum, like Soviet-style, over some story that he wrote.
And we were drinking and I said something to him like, you know, that's never going to happen to me.
I'm an American.
We don't have to deal with it.
We just get sued.
That kind of craziness doesn't happen to us.
I thought of that.
After this whole thing happened, like, wow, that's where we are now, you know?
Yeah.
And then some...
Let me ask you this, and I know you have to go, so thank you for sticking around longer.
People have asked, do you regret voting for Biden?
And I don't want to ask you in that...
I didn't vote for Biden.
I voted for Hillary.
Oh, that's even worse.
Oh, man.
Okay, I'm joking.
But here's the real...
This is the serious question.
It's the one I've asked Jimmy Dore.
I asked Glenn Greenwald.
Where do you find yourself politically right now?
Do you consider yourself politically homeless?
Do you still somehow think in your head you're a liberal Democrat?
How do you view yourself in the world politically now?
Well, I'm now a registered independent.
I don't think my political views have really changed over the years.
That's the ironic thing.
I've always been very interested in civil liberties.
I've always kind of thought that...
It's important to stick up for the little guy.
I'm not terribly political.
I'm not a Marxist or anything like that.
But the Democrats, I was more attracted to that party growing up, mainly because of a lot of cultural things that are now completely opposite.
You couldn't be a comedian and be a Republican in my youth.
And now there's no sense of humor.
It's like outlawed on the left.
And these ideas about speech are such an anathema to the things that I was raised to believe in.
My mother is a lawyer also.
I remember helping her prepare for the LSATs when I was in high school.
And I remember just falling in love with the whole idea of, like, the Bill of Rights and civil liberties, and I was sort of deeply attracted to all those ideas.
And now nobody believes them in the Democratic Party.
It's like a shock, isn't it?
I mean, I don't know.
It is.
First of all, you're actually shocking me with your level of innocence.
I've never considered myself a liberal or a conservative or a Republican or a Democrat or whatever.
I'm Canadian and I have ideas on both sides.
I've been making the joke, you know, like, the Democrat Party went from hashtag MeToo of five years ago, where any male who showed his genitalia, even voluntarily to other people, can get cancelled, to the Democrats of today compelling women and girls to be exposed to male genitalia in the name of transgender rights.
I mean, in 50 years, we're going to be reading articles about how the parties switched again and Republicans became the liberals and so on.
It's nuts.
I just wonder, from your perspective, and you're in the journalistic world, And so setting aside the Mehdi Hassans of the world who work for MSNBC and they become the lapdogs of the government and not the watchdogs of the government.
New York Times looking to rat out the Pentagon leaker instead of to interview him and tell us the truth about what's going on in Ukraine.
You're in the industry.
What is the sentiment of the journalists?
Do the institutional journalists or the legacy media...
Do they know what they're doing or do they still think that they're in the right?
And the independents, are they now realizing that whether you like the Republicans or not, Trump might have been right about pretty much everything he said six years ago?
I think the people who still work in legacy media, there's a small percentage of them who are true believers in whatever this thing is, which feels like, it's like Scientology to me, whatever it is.
There's a few people who are very vociferously believers in that.
There's a lot of people who are clinging to their jobs and who are quiet and not saying anything.
And then there's a whole class of people who are like me who got kind of pushed out in one way or another.
And we are all in touch with each other and mourning the loss of the business.
Journalism really depends.
And this is the part that I don't understand.
In order for press organizations to have power, they need to have independence.
It's the perception of independence that makes politicians, for instance, answer questions.
If they don't think they have to answer you, then they won't.
So you have to have this perception of separateness.
And that was always the thing.
That protected us as media people was this idea that institutionally we are our own thing.
We protect our own.
If one of us is threatened, we all come to their defense.
And that was a powerful thing when I first came into this business.
Now they are proud of the total lack of a Chinese wall with power.
They see themselves.
Openly, as part of that apparatus, they are happy to work alongside people who came from the CIA or the FBI or the National Security Council.
It's a complete 180 from where it was even 10 years ago.
I think it did die with Julian Assange when the media did not come to his defense or journalists because of political bias.
Unless I'm rewriting the chronology, They viewed Julian Assange as being why Trump got elected, and therefore he was a legitimate target, despite the fact that, you know, Ellis Berger, 40 years ago or 50 years ago, was a hero for doing what he did because he revealed the truth about a horrible, unjust war.
Hold on, who else was there?
Yeah, just quickly about that, because this is an important point that drove me nuts about the Assange thing.
First of all...
The Assange case is not about 2016 legally.
No matter what you think about Julian Assange, if you have any kind of brain and any kind of ability to be objective about the situation, you have to be able to read that indictment and see that it's about earlier events and see that it has massive relevance to the future of reporting.
Because what they're accusing him of, like conspiring to obtain national defense information, is something every national security journalist does on a daily basis.
So if they're going to put him in jail for life for that, that has enormous consequences for everybody in the business.
And for all these people to be quiet about that because they don't like what happened in 2016, it shows you that intellectually they've dropped like eight levels.
Almost overnight.
They're not able to process these things.
Someone pulled up the comment that it's fascism.
It's the actual definition of fascism, but it's like it's partisan politics has actually infiltrated their brains where they can justify, and they know that it won't happen to them.
When they want to leak the stuff that the intelligence wants them to leak, they do it with impunity.
It's the weaponization of everything, but Matt, I mean...
You're born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, right?
I was reading Wikipedia, and I was like, New Brunswick, that's where they were going in Harold and Kumar to get the burgers.
That's right, that's right.
There's a New Brunswick in New Jersey, there's one in Canada.
Of course, of course, yeah.
You've lived in Russia, which I find curious, and some people are going to think it's suspicious, but it's never been like this.
We're living in a full reversal of what a free and democratic America used to be when you were growing up.
Oh, yeah.
America used to...
I mean, I grew up in kind of Wayne's World America.
You'll appreciate this as a Canadian, right?
Like, that portrait of what America was like.
You go out and play a little hockey on the street and, you know, giggle at the TV and get high and eat pizza and laugh at comedians.
America, for all its sins, and it has multitudinous sins as a nation.
Culturally, it was a pretty cool place to live, I would say, for a long time.
And there were a lot of great things about living in America.
And I was proud to be an American.
When I went to Russia, you know, it was a great thing to be able to tell Russians what it was like at home.
And they were interested in it.
Now, this is crazy.
This is a totally unattractive and I think actually un-American version of what...
This country is now.
Our most important qualities as Americans, I always thought, was our fierce sense of independence.
This total resistance to being told what to do.
That's a very American quality.
You can't tell me anything.
I'm going to do what I do.
I'm a free person.
I have rights.
This new version of what an American is thinks that There's this collective approach to society where we all are part of, you know, this machine that attacks enemies.
And that's what our identity is.
And that is, it's just crazy.
It's so gross, more than anything, you know?
So I don't understand it.
You're, how old, may I ask how old you are?
53. Shut the front, you're 53 years old?
I am, yeah.
Dude, you hide it well.
I was going to say 36 because I didn't want to insult you by asking if you were my age.
When you go to Russia, you're in Russia in the thick of Russia, Russia.
Yeah, I went there.
It was still the Soviet Union when I was a student.
I stayed through the 90s and left in 2002.
I was there when Putin came to power.
I knew a bunch of those journalists who got murdered.
I wasn't close friends with any of them, but there was one guy I knew who I used to call for advice all the time, this guy Yuri Shikachikin.
He was a reporter who became a Duma deputy, which is like a congressman, and he was one of the people who was investigating these bombings of apartment buildings that happened in Russia in, I guess it was, 1999 and 2000.
He was murdered.
So yeah, I was there during all those crazy times.
Absolutely.
But I never thought I would see it here.
That's the crazy part.
My underlying issue also is the authoritarian dictators look at Canada and the way Trudeau dealt with peaceful protests.
They look at Biden, the way he's dealing with reporters, with protesters, with the January Sixers.
They lose any and all moral authority to lecture other dictators and in doing what they're doing at home, empower other dictators to do whatever the hell they want because F you, who are you to tell me what...
You're doing it back home!
Let me ask you one thing.
Why did you choose to go to Russia?
Your father is, from what Wikipedia said, half Hawaiian?
He's Filipino and Chinese and something else.
We don't really know.
And adopted.
Where's your mother?
She's Irish.
So how do you end up in Russia?
So when I was a kid, I was a real nerd growing up and very lonely and introverted.
And my hobby was comic fiction.
And one of the first stories that I read growing up that really cheered me up was this...
A story called How a Mujik Fit to Officials by this author named Mikhail Saltikov.
And I became obsessed with Russian writers.
Later, there was a writer, Nikolai Gogol, who became my favorite.
And I went to Russia because I wanted to learn to read those books in Russian.
In fact, I specifically went to Leningrad because that's where Gogol was from.
So that was the reason I went there, was to learn Russian and to read all those books.
Fantastic.
Let me try to push my luck and just show you one thing.
Before we go, it was not this.
It's not this.
Oh, where is it?
How nervous were you when you testified before Congress?
I'd say it was about a six, you know, maybe a seven.
You don't want to make an idiot of yourself.
Oh, this is it.
I want everyone to understand.
Kierkegaard is my favorite expression ever.
It can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
I remember commenting on this when...
I forget who published it.
I'll see it from the tweet.
Listen to this, people.
Mr. Chairman, I'm not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who pose a direct threat.
First of all, the irony of what you just said there, given what she's done.
Pose a direct threat.
Matt, I know that I am obsessively neurotic and I see threats everywhere.
When you hear her say that to you, a direct threat, you're a journalist testifying before Congress.
Does your stomach drop?
Does it skip a beat or your heart?
Yeah, there were a bunch of moments like that in that hearing where your spider sense goes off a little bit.
There's something not right about that.
Ranking Member Plaskett saying that right off the bat was pretty intense.
That was a pretty intense statement to say about any journalist.
Then there was a moment where they were asking me about the legitimacy of making money.
Then there was a moment where a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, Said I should take my tinfoil hat off and learn to love the FBI.
And then the thing that really freaked me out was the prosecutor, Dan Goldman, who's a New York congressman, asking me if I agreed with the indictments of the GRU officers.
And, I mean, a first-year law student knows that indictments are just...
You can't agree or disagree with them, you know?
But the whole theme of it was you're not a legitimate reporter and you must respect authority more.
And that was the overriding idea behind the performance the Democrats put on.
I didn't understand it at the time, but now it's clear that they were trying to send a message by that.
And who said Taibbi should sell a shirt that reads so-called journalist?
Who was it that called you the so-called journalist?
And who called you the Substack journalist?
Oh, that might have been the other Texan.
I forget what her name is.
Gloria.
She was the one who didn't know what Twitter was or what posting was.
Garcia, yeah.
But the so-called journalist thing, I remember, you can see in the video, I looked over at Schellenberger because I was so shocked that they would say that.
Because even for an independent journalist, I'm pretty decorated as a mainstream journalist.
For her to...
It was just such a...
Mean-spirited insult and unnecessary, like politically unnecessary, that I was thrown by that.
I've watched these congressional hearings for a while now and appreciate, like going back years, they're nothing but partisan grandstanding.
So it didn't come off as anything surprising or shocking to me.
I just loved how surprised and shocked you were.
But the direct threat is a very serious issue because...
If something is a direct threat, it's not a dog whistle.
That is let people know because what has to be done with direct threats?
Active protection.
And the irony, that hypocrite projector herself says, you're a direct threat to anyone who opposes you.
So what does she do?
You oppose her.
She threatens you with five years in jail for perjury.
And Matt, I'll just read this one just so people get a little black pill.
Matt pulls back the black curtain of the deep state in the Dems.
They don't even blink.
I'm having a hard time staying positive.
Let me ask you, Chris, where do you think it goes?
What do you think happens for the next election?
I mean, I don't know.
I'm a pretty optimistic person, and I think this stuff is so repulsive intellectually that it won't last for long, is my hope.
You know, it's becoming harder and harder to believe in that.
But just before I go, to address what you just said about the direct threat, look, America's become infamous in the last 20 years for its decisions to basically just terminate people who are threats.
We see it symbolically online all the time, like we're going to remove this person or delete this person because they're a threat or a foreign threat actor or a malign threat actor or whatever the term is.
But we've been like droning people just because we assess them to be threats for 20 years now.
And this is why when that first started happening, you know, I was...
Among many journalists at the time, it was saying, this is crazy.
This is going to lead to bad places, right?
Like, if we start getting used to the idea that we can just do this, then we are going to lose all respect for the law, and we are going to become, you know, basically it's going to be a Hobbesian state of nature type of situation.
I think that's kind of like where we are now.
There's no longer any belief in the legal process, I don't think.
Well, I unfortunately agree with you, but I'll say with not the shutting down, but with the going under of HuffPost news and the absolute loss of any faith in any of these legacy media and the total faith in people like you, I'm optimistic at the ability to get...
Good information, but I don't know how much worse it has to get before it has to get better, but it's going to have to get a little worse and it's going to ultimately get better and getting better.
Matt, I mean, you have more traffic, you have more influence than any of those hacks combined, and I think they know it, which is, that is directly proportionate to the...
The level of the malice of their attacks on you.
So I would take it as a compliment.
Yeah, thank you.
If it doesn't end with me in Florence, Colorado doing 18 months or something like that, I'm fine with it.
You've got the entire legal law tube.
The YouTube law, the rumble legal community behind you.
I'm going to end this with you and we'll have our proper goodbye off camera.
But Matt, first of all, I'm going to thank you.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a great talk.
We should do it again.
Absolutely.
I don't like seeing people get abused by malicious, dishonest people.
At some point, I had to stop looking like I was deliberately paid to defend you.
That many...
Not sabotage, what's the word?
Ambush was the worst thing I've ever seen because it was so dishonest because at the end of the day, it just ignored everything of substance from what you revealed to the world with Musk.
It's corruption.
Through and through, and people have to understand that.
Where can people find you, Matt?
At racket.news, and I'm still on Twitter, at mtaiby.
Is that racket, R-A-C-K-E-T dot news?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, I'll put all the links in the pinned comment.
Matt, let's do it again, definitely.
I'm going to end this stream with everybody.
Thank you all.
Enjoy Friday night.
I'm going to go eat something I haven't eaten all day, and I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so I'm going to go see if I can find something good.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Everybody, thank you for being here.
Matt, stick around with our proper advice.
Thanks everybody.
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