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Joe Rogan Experience #1940 - Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and author. He writes and publishes TK News at taibbi.substack.com and hosts the "America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn." He's also been the lead reporter on the Twitter Files, which come out on Twitter at @mtaibbi. www.taibbi.substack.com

Joe RoganhostMatt Taibbiguest
Jun 27, 20242h 46mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:25

    Twitter Files: Taibbi’s “surreal” reporting access and what it revealed

    1. JR

      (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. NA

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Hello, Matt Taibbi.

    4. MT

      Hey, Joe. How's it going?

    5. JR

      (laughs)

    6. MT

      (laughs)

    7. JR

      Good to see you. It's always so hard to get rolling after you've been talking.

    8. MT

      (laughs)

    9. JR

      I mean, so I'm always excited to see you so we're just blabbing.

    10. MT

      (laughs)

    11. JR

      And now we're rolling. So what's cracking?

    12. MT

      Uh, a lot. A lot. It's been, uh, it's been a crazy, uh, couple of months, uh-

    13. JR

      I have enjoyed your work with the Twitter file. I enjoy all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files. That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain.

    14. MT

      It- it- it's, uh, it- it's been one of the weirder, more surreal experiences of my life because m- you know, as- as a reporter, you- you're always, um, kind of, uh, banging away to try to get one little piece of reality, right? Like, you'll- you might make 30 or 40 phone calls to get one sentence. Uh, the Twitter files is, oh, by the way, here, you know, uh, take a laptop and look at 50,000 emails, you know, full of all kinds of stuff. And so it's, you know, for- for somebody like me, it's like a dream come true. We get to see all kinds of things, get the answers to questions that, uh, we've had for years. And it's- it's been really incredible.

  2. 1:25 – 2:20

    Government–platform censorship pipeline becomes “formalized bureaucracy”

    1. JR

      Has anything been surprising to you?

    2. MT

      Um, a- a- a little bit. I- I- I think going into it, I- I thought that the, um, that the relationship between the security agencies like the- the FBI and the DHS and companies like Twitter and Facebook, I thought it was a little bit less formal. Like I th- I thought maybe they had kind of an advisory role. And what we find is that it's not that. It's- it's very formalized. They have, um, a really intense structure, uh, that they've worked out over a period of years where they have regular meetings, um, they have a system where the DHS handles, um, you know, censorship requests that come up from the s- the states and the FBI handles the international ones, and they all float all these companies. And, um, it's a big bureaucracy and we- I don't think we expected to see that.

  3. 2:20 – 4:49

    ‘They felt impregnable’: casual paper trails, Schiff staff request, and ‘Secret Phone Numbers’

    1. JR

      It's very bizarre to me that they o- that they would just openly call for censorship in emails and these p- private transmissions, but ones that are easily duplicated, you could send them to other people, it could g- it can easily get out. Like that they're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be involved in this censorship of what turns out to be true information, especially when it- in regards to the Hunter Biden laptop, that they would be so comfortable that they would just send it in emails.

    2. MT

      Yeah. Yeah. Well that- I think that shows you the mentality, right?

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. MT

      Like that they- they really genuinely felt that they were impregnable, that they don't have anybody to answer to. Um, a- I mean a normal person doesn't put incriminating things in emails because w- we all have the expectation that someday it might come- come out.

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. MT

      You know? Uh, but these folks didn't act that way. I mean, they- y- you see... I was- I was especially shocked by, uh, an email from, uh, a- a staffer for Adam Schiff, the congressperson, the California congressman, and they're just outright saying, "We would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee." (laughs) You know? I mean, this is-

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. MT

      ... this is a congre- this is a member of Congress.

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. MT

      Right? Most of these people have legal backgrounds. They're- they've- they've got lawyers in the office for sure. Um, and this is the H- this is the House Intelligence Committee. Uh, you would think they would have better, uh, operational security. Another moment that was shocking to me, there was a, um... there's an email from an FBI agent, uh, named Elvis Chan, in San Francisco to Twitter and they're setting up this signal group, uh, which is gonna include all the top sort of censorship executives at all the big companies. And it's a Word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important executives. And the email just, uh- uh, the subject line reads, "Phone Numbers." Uh, right? And then the Word doc is just called Secret Phone Numbers.

    11. JR

      (laughs)

    12. MT

      Right? (laughs) And I'm thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico?

    13. JR

      (laughs)

    14. MT

      Really? You know? I mean, like, I mean, e- even a journalist can't miss that. You know what I'm saying? Like, like... (laughs)

    15. JR

      (laughs)

    16. MT

      Call it something else, you know? I do- I don't know. Tha- tha- that part of it was amazing.

  4. 4:49 – 8:32

    Elon Musk buys Twitter: motives, backlash, and ‘Hitler of the Month’ media playbook

    1. JR

      So strange. It's so strange to get such a peek 'cause I don't think anybody ever anticipated that something like this would happen where Twitter would get sold to an eccentric billionaire who's intent on letting all the information get released.

    2. MT

      Yeah, I mean, I- I think Elon Musk essentially... he- he- he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company.

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. MT

      Uh, and I mean, I- I don't really fully know his motives in- in doing that. Um, I think he's got a pretty, a- a developed sense of humor though.

    5. JR

      Yes.

    6. MT

      Uh, and that comes through. I think he- he gets a kick out of seeing all this stuff come out on Twitter, which used to be the kind of the private stomping ground of all these whiny journalists. And now here are- here is all this information that is just horrifying to all of them. Um, I mean, that's a... $44 billion is a lot to spend on that thrill, but, uh, I'm glad he did.

    7. JR

      Well, he truly believes that censored social media is a threat to democracy. He really believes that.

    8. MT

      Absolutely. Yeah.

    9. JR

      Yeah. And I believe it too.

    10. MT

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      I just don't have $44 billion.

    12. MT

      Right.

    13. JR

      And even if I did, I'd be like, "Uh- uh, I don't want that heat." (laughs)

    14. MT

      Right. Right. Yeah. I- I- I don't- I don't think that's what I would spend it on, but, uh, no, he- he- he believes that. I think he also...Um, I think he also believes that the credibility of these companies, um, uh, can only be restored by telling people what, what they talk about in private, or what they have been talking about, you know, with the government and that sort of thing.

    15. JR

      Yeah.

    16. MT

      So, um, he might be right about that, you know? Um, we'll see, I guess.

    17. JR

      I, I think he is. I mean, it's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. There's an am- amazing amount of resistance against him and, you know, there's the, just the publicity campaign against him has been fascinating to watch. People go from thinking that Elon Musk is the savior that's bringing us these amazing electric cars and engineering new reusable rockets, to he's an alt-right piece of shit who wants Donald Trump back in the office. And it's like, it's very wild.

    18. MT

      It, it, uh, the, the speed with which they can sort of shuffle somebody into the Hitler of the Month club-

    19. JR

      Yeah. (laughs)

    20. MT

      ... uh, routine, right? Like, you know, it, it, we- we've always done this with foreigners, you know? Whether it's Noriega or Saddam Hussein or Milosevic or Assad or whatever it is. What, like, we have a playbook for cranking out negative information about, um, you know, foreigners who get in our way for whatever reason. But now, we- we've de- we've kind of, uh, refined that technique for domestic people who are inconvenient, you know?

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. MT

      I think they did it with Trump, obviously. Um, you know, they tried to do it with T- Tucker Carlson, with you. Uh, you know? I mean, you, you got a taste of that for a few, a few times. Um-

    23. JR

      Yeah, it's interesting.

    24. MT

      Right? Uh, and then, you know, with, with E- with Elon, yeah, they, he went from being the guy who made electric cars sexy to, like, you know, uh, something to the right of Viktor Orban in, in, like-

    25. JR

      (laughs)

    26. MT

      ... ten seconds. It's, it's amazing.

    27. JR

      It is amazing. And the narrative has spread through progressive people. "Well, they'll just say it now." It's like they've reached the memo, the memo's got to them, and then they just... I hear people in LA, I hear people that I know, like, "Oh, Elon's just so crazy." It's like, w- something happened to him. He went nuts and he's a right-winger now. Like, how? What are you saying? Like, what, what examples do you have? Like, they don't have an example. They just have this narrative that reached them as signal. Like, "Elon bad now."

    28. MT

      Right.

  5. 8:32 – 11:20

    Trump, Taliban, and the ‘Public Interest Policy’: how Twitter changed after Jan 6

    1. JR

      "Oh, Elon bad now. Elon bad now. Elon bad now." And they just start saying it. And you go, like, "What, what examples are you using of, like, his behavior?" "Well, he let Trump back on the platform." Okay, well, the Taliban's there.

    2. MT

      Right, yeah. Exactly.

    3. JR

      You didn't have a problem with the Taliban? The Taliban just bought blue check marks. Did you know that?

    4. MT

      Did, did they really?

    5. JR

      Yes.

    6. MT

      I- yes. Didn't know that.

    7. JR

      Yeah, they're buying blue check marks-

    8. MT

      (laughs)

    9. JR

      ... so they could be verified. Um, the, the real terrorist. The fucking Taliban is on-

    10. MT

      Right.

    11. JR

      ... and no one has a problem with it. The CCP's on Twitter.

    12. MT

      Right.

    13. JR

      No one has a problem with it.

    14. MT

      Right. But Trump-

    15. JR

      But they say, like, Trump, "They let Trump back on."

    16. MT

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      Look, Trump is hilarious. He's a ridiculous person. But don't you think it's better that his tweets get out there and then a bunch of people get to attack him in the tweets? And if those tweets that people attack him with are good, if people are saying good things, then those things get retweeted and liked and then they rise up to the top of the algorithm. It's all good. Like, you need a voice against someone like that. You can't have that guy howling into the wind on some QAnon forum and all those wackos just are, they're only talking to each other with no pushback at all. If you really don't like Trump, you want him on Twitter.

    18. MT

      Yeah, absolutely.

    19. JR

      You want that guy to have some pushback. You want people to be talking against what he's saying. You want Twitter, the real Twitter now, which will actually fact-check everybody. They fact-check Biden, right? They'll, they'll fact-check him. So if he says something stupid, they'll go, "No, that's not what's true. Here's what's true."

    20. MT

      Right. And, and, and-

    21. JR

      That would be good.

    22. MT

      And that was actually, for a while, Twitter's official policy. They had something called the Public Interest Policy, which specifically laid out exactly what you said. Like when, when a n- uh, uh, a world leader, uh, no matter who it is, says anything, we want it to be out there because we want it to be debated.

    23. JR

      Yes.

    24. MT

      We want people to see it, we want people to talk about it, we want people to reach conclusions about it. And, uh, one of the things that we found in the Twitter files was after January 6th, they, there was this intense debate within the company where, uh, they were basically saying, "Oh, thank God we're gonna repeal the Public Interest Policy," or, "We're gonna poke a hole in it," right? Um, and no longer have that belief system that just because somebody is a world leader, we need to hear what they have to say. So they invented a new, um, a, a, a new policy called Glorification of Violence, or they, they called it that. And essentially what they said was you, you had to look at Trump not in terms of each individual tweet, uh, but in, in terms of, uh, what they called the context surrounding. His whole career. Uh, all of the people who followed him. Whether or not they were violent, whether or not they said things that were offensive. It's like the speech version

  6. 11:20 – 14:30

    ‘Stochastic terrorism’ and the slippery expansion of moderation justifications

    1. MT

      of stochastic terrorism. I don't know if you've ever heard that, that term.

    2. JR

      No.

    3. MT

      It's, uh, uh, stochastic terrorism is this idea that, um, you, you can incite people to violence by saying things that aren't specifically inciting, but are statistically likely to, uh, create a, a, you know, somebody who will do something violent, even if you, it's not individually predictable. Um, and that's what they did with Trump. They basically invented this concept that, yes, he may not have actually incited violence, but his whole, the whole totality of his persona is, is inciting. So we're gonna strike him.

    4. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MT

      And so they, so they sort of massively expanded the, the purview of what, of things they can censor, just in that one moment. Uh, and it was, it's, you know, you can see it in these dialogues, how, how they came to that decision, which is just fascinating.

    6. JR

      It's just such an extraordinary amount of power to give people, the ability to censor people on the biggest public forum in the world.It's so extraordinary in the fact that they can come up with these justifications for why this is a good idea without anyone pushing back, without anyone saying, "Do you, do you understand where this goes to?" This, this eventually leads to government control of all thought and speech. This is where you're going. You're allowing the government to influence you based on one specific problematic individual and that could spread out into every one of us.

    7. MT

      Right.

    8. JR

      All of us. Easily, quickly.

    9. MT

      Right. Right.

    10. JR

      Quickly.

    11. MT

      I mean, w- w- we heard at the World Economic Forum, right? We heard the, yeah. (laughs)

    12. JR

      Brian Stelter was there.

    13. MT

      (laughs) Brian Stelter.

    14. JR

      Brian Stelter's now at the World Economic Forum. "What can we do about these problems?"

    15. MT

      (laughs) He looked very comfortable there, didn't he?

    16. JR

      Of course he does. He's with evil lizard people-

    17. MT

      (laughs)

    18. JR

      ... that are trying to control the world. That's his bosses. He knows how to handle that kind of situation.

    19. MT

      (laughs)

    20. JR

      "I've been around evi- evil, evil lizard people."

    21. MT

      (laughs) He looked, uh, he, he looked as happy as, as maybe he's ever been.

    22. JR

      Well, he's probably very excited just to be working again, in any f- way, shape or form.

    23. MT

      That's true.

    24. JR

      You know? And he's not a guy that, really is supposed to be in front of a camera, right? He's supposed to be a journalist, but he's not even good at that. So, he's, what he's doing now is holding water for the evil leaders of the world who want to institute hate speech policies nationwide, and, you know, centralized digital currency and they want everybody to eat bugs-

    25. MT

      (laughs)

    26. JR

      ... and you will own nothing and be happy. This is the fucking people he's working for now.

    27. MT

      (laughs)

    28. JR

      'Cause he's basically a prostitute. And, you know, they, they hired him to go over there and do that, and he's like, "Wh- what can we do? What can we do better?"

    29. MT

      Uh, yeah.

    30. JR

      "What can we do different, to get everybody to stand in line?"

  7. 14:30 – 21:19

    Hate speech, satire, and the U.S. legal standard (Brandenburg)

    1. JR

      Well, I think when you're working in a corporate news structure, and y- you could speak to this better than I could obviously, but I think when you're working in an environment where you have editors and people in your ear, and you have producers and you have narratives that the company is pushing, and then you have sponsorships that you're beholden to, it's very difficult to form any sort of problematic or controversial independent thought and then try to express it publicly. You, you're not gonna do it.

    2. MT

      That's-

    3. JR

      It's just too scary and sketchy. So, when you're trying to keep that job, and here's a guy like Brian Stelter who already lost one of the biggest gigs in all of broadcast news. He was on fucking CNN. And then, you know, here he's standing there and they're saying, "You're, y- you're gonna have hate speech laws in America too." He's like, "Okay."

    4. MT

      (laughs)

    5. JR

      "Everything's running smooth. Everyone's smiling."

    6. MT

      (laughs)

    7. JR

      Like, he, he, he's doesn't, he's not suitable for that role.

    8. MT

      Right.

    9. JR

      That's, he doesn't belong there.

    10. MT

      Right.

    11. JR

      You don't have the stones to carry that conversation in a way that's gonna benefit all these people that are listening to it. What you want is someone who's in that position that goes, "Hold on, what do you think is hate speech? What's hate speech to you and what's hate speech to me? And who gets to decide?"

    12. MT

      Yeah. How, h- how is that gonna be-

    13. JR

      Yeah.

    14. MT

      ... uh, adjudicated? Like-

    15. JR

      Right.

    16. MT

      ... y- what's, what's your definition? What's your diffident of, def- definition of hate?

    17. JR

      Right.

    18. MT

      What's your definition of speech? Like-

    19. JR

      Exactly.

    20. MT

      You know what I mean? Like, the, there are a lot of questions.

    21. JR

      Does context matter?

    22. MT

      Right. Yeah.

    23. JR

      And how do you decide? And obviously when you're looking at things over text, context gets very blurry. You don't know if someone's joking around. Like, there's so many pages that I get sent that are satire. I've got a hilarious one, there's a new one, Rick Rubin sent me this, this one, and he's like, "This has gotta be satire, right?" And it's brilliant, brilliant satire, but there's, uh, this per- person who has, like, the best version of, uh, super liberal, uh, like, "My children will never eat food from a gas stove," like, like (laughs) , that kind of shit.

    24. MT

      (laughs)

    25. JR

      And there's so many of these, like, y- it's hard to tell who's, who's what and what's real and it's, it's just one of those things, where you're, you're, it's, it's, it's hard when you're looking things through text. 'Cause people are sneaky. They're really good at it. And people are so ridiculous in real life that a really subtle parody is very hard to discern. So, is that hate speech? If someone's doing it as a parody, is that hate speech?

    26. MT

      Right.

    27. JR

      Like, when do you decide that something is hateful?

    28. MT

      A- and that's exactly why traditionally in this country w- w- judges have always said, well, they haven't always said it, but they've, they eventually came around to the idea that we can't involve ourselves in these questions. They're t- they're, they're too difficult and it's not our job. Um, we're gonna step in in only the most extreme cases, right? So, the, the current standard is, you know, uh, the Supreme Court case, Brandon... Brandenburg v. Ohio, which outlaws imminent, uh, uh, incitement to imminent lawless action, right? So, you have to be basically saying, you know, "Let's go get them."

    29. JR

      "Go, go get them. Let's," you know-

    30. MT

      "Break into the White House." "Shoot, shoot that person." Like-

  8. 21:19 – 30:02

    FBI ‘pre-crime’ posture after 9/11 and the informant-heavy domestic cases

    1. JR

      It's, it's a very interesting and very nuanced conversation as to what should be allowed and what should not be allowed and why. And I think it's complex and it's ever-changing and it depends upon the tools that are involved and it depends upon what's the, what are you talking about? And then it also depends upon, like... Here's, here's a big one that drives me nuts about this January 6th. Why is it okay for the FBI to have agents that incite people to go into the Capitol? Why is that okay? What benefit is that for society? Like, uh, how much, how much influence did they have? How much rabble-rousing influence did they have? How much coercion? I mean, what-

    2. MT

      Well-

    3. JR

      ... why is that okay?

    4. MT

      So thi- so this is another topic that, uh, is fascinating because it hasn't gotten a ton of press. But, uh, if you go back all the way to the early '70s, the, the CIA and the FBI got in a lot of trouble, um, for various things. The CIA for assassination schemes involving people like Castro, the FBI for, um, you know, uh, COINTELPRO and other programs, domestic surveillance. And they made changes after congressional hearings, the Church Committee, uh, that basically said, "The FBI, from now on, you have to have some kind of reason to be following somebody or investigating somebody. You have to have some kinda criminal predicate." And, "We want you mainly to be in- investigating cases." But after 9/11, they, they peeled all this back. There was a series of attorney general memos, uh, that essentially refashioned what the FBI does. And now they don't have to be doing crime-fighting all the time. Now they can be doing, uh, basically 100% intelligence-gathering all the time. They can be infiltrating groups for no reason at all. Not to build cases, but just to get information. Um, and so that's, that's why, that's why they're there. They're like, they're, they're in these groups, they're, they're posted up outsi- outside of the homes of, of people they, who they find suspicious, but they're not building cases. Uh, they're not, they're not investigating crimes. It's sort of like Minority Report, the-

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. MT

      Right?

    7. JR

      Pre-crime.

    8. MT

      It's pre- it's pre-crime.

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. MT

      And, and the public has accepted this, you know, w- without much trouble, you know?

    11. JR

      Yeah, there's a little bit of pushback from people online, then it goes away, where there's no real repercussions. Like the Governor Whitmer case-

    12. MT

      Right.

    13. JR

      ... where there's 14 people involved in kidnapping her, and 12 of them are FBI informants.

    14. MT

      Right.

    15. JR

      Which is fucking bonkers. And then the two guys who are doing hard time, they're like, "We thought it was fantasy." Like, "We're, we're idiots. We didn't know." Like, one of the guys literally said, "I never planned on doing anything. To me, it was just, just fantasy."

    16. MT

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I mean-

    17. JR

      They're morons who get talked into this. And imagine you're getting talked into this by 12 people who turn out to be informants.

    18. MT

      Right.

    19. JR

      That's wild.

    20. MT

      Yeah. Yeah. And why are there so many informants-

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. MT

      ... you know, give, like, hanging around with this-

    23. JR

      Fucking head of the Proud Boys.

    24. MT

      Right.

    25. JR

      The head of the Proud Boys was an informant.

    26. MT

      Is, is that true? I didn't know that. (laughs)

    27. JR

      You didn't know that?

    28. MT

      No.

    29. JR

      What's his name? Enrique Tarrio? Yeah, pull that up. He was a fucking informant. So this guy who was at the head of the Proud Boys, the guy who's organizing the things and get ... He was an FBI informant.

    30. MT

      Wow.

  9. 30:02 – 55:38

    Media capture and the collapse of credibility: from legacy institutions to Substack

    1. JR

      Uh, I just ... You know, I'm just astounded by the, the lack of ability to see the future. You know, the lack of ability to see where all this goes. The, like ... And, and letting this happen, and not being outraged, and letting the government creep into all aspects of your life in this way. There's no net positive. There's ... In the end, it's just c- government control of speech and thought and k-... content and everything you do.

    2. MT

      Right, and, and complete capture of the media-

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. MT

      ... and, and all of that, you know. And that's, that's, you know, that's kind of what we're trying to, to fight against. And it's, uh, you know, the, the, the one heartening thing is that, is that the, the, uh, the, quote-unquote, "mainstream press" is now, uh, really, it's in free fall now, right? Uh, the, uh, uh, its, its influences is more and more limited every day. Um, you know, the problem is that, uh, something needs to step up in its place. And, and, uh, you know, but, but th- they're just, uh, they don't have any authority at all, uh, outside their own little bubble anymore.

    5. JR

      Yeah. Propaganda's a scary thing. And when you have, uh, mainstream news organizations going along with what appears to be propaganda with no pushback at all, like where, where is journalism? Like journalism is such an important part of, uh, any sort of functioning culture where people need to find out what, what is the real information. And there's people that have a responsibility to try to find that information and then give it to people, so they can make informed decisions. And they can know w- what, what is the workings behind the machine? What's the wiring? What's happening? How are, how are these decisions getting made? When the corporate media doesn't do that anymore, we're fucked. And you, in your time, have seen that.

    6. MT

      Mm-hmm.

    7. JR

      You've seen this transition-

    8. MT

      Mm-hmm.

    9. JR

      ... into, like, the media becoming an arm of propaganda as opposed to what it was in the '70s or what it was in the '60s where it was the news. This is what's happening. This is what we've uncovered. This is our undercover investigation. These are our, our facts. Our informant has told us this. Now, we know that. Nixon did this. Kennedy was aware of that. We know these things now because of real journalism.

    10. MT

      Right.

    11. JR

      And it seems like, for whatever reason, there's two branches going on with journalism. There's people like you and Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald and the Substack people that are like, "Hey. Hey, hey, hey. This is not what I fucking signed up for."

    12. MT

      Right.

    13. JR

      "I'm here to do actual real journalism. And you people in these gigantic mainstream organizations are losing your fucking minds. You're crazy. And you're doing it in, w- with, so, for so many reasons, because, uh, because Trump sucks, because you're pushing a woke agenda, because, you know, you want..." Uh, w- w- whatever the reason is. Like you've decided to become a part of a propaganda machine, and it's not journalism anymore.

    14. MT

      Right. Yeah.

    15. JR

      You're ignoring really important stories that are inconvenient to the narrative that you feel like it's your obligation to push.

    16. MT

      Yeah. Uh, m- remember when Trump became president, and he was making noise about not letting certain people have credentials to get into the White House?

    17. JR

      Yeah.

    18. MT

      And there was this big hue and cry, like, "Oh my God, he's not gonna let us into the White House." And my first reaction to that was, "Who fucking cares if, you know, if you're not let into the White House?" You, you, you have an adversarial relationship already. You're supposed to with government.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

    20. MT

      Right? If they, if they don't let you in, just report on it anyway, you know? Like g- it's not a big deal. But, uh, f- for, uh, the new generation of, of journalists who, who've come in, they imagine themselves, b- because they're socially the same people that they're reporting on, they hang out in the same circles, they go to the same parties, the idea of not being let behind the rope line, um, is an atrocity to them. They, they, they don't understand it. And they see their role as helping explain the point of view of power. I mean, it's just what we were talking with Brian Stelter before.

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. MT

      Like, like, "My job here is to, is to kind of sell this to the population."

    23. JR

      Yes.

    24. MT

      Whereas, the old school journalists were not like that. Like, the, the, the, uh, they saw their role as, "Yeah, you know, we're, we're patriotic, you know, and like, we, we lo- we love our country. And if it does the right thing, we'll, we'll, you know, we'll report that. But if it fucks up, we gotta report that too." Like, "You know, we, our job is to ask difficult questions. And if we have difficult truths, we gotta report those things. And so we're not really on your side." Like, "You, you, we're not your friends, you know. Um, you can hang out with us. Uh, we can hang out with you, uh, at a campaign stop. But there's supposed to be tension there." And there's always supposed to be tension there. And, uh, what you see now is that there's no tension at all, right? Like, the, there's just this sort of seamless community of people who all think the same way, um, uh, you know, whether it's, you know, Rachel Maddow or, or, you know, Don Lemon or who- whoever it is and, you know, the, some Biden administration official. Like, uh, they're all kind of on the same page. They see themselves as part of the same group. They see themselves as having the same mission. Um, but the press, the press has to have its own mission-

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. MT

      ... or else it's not legitimate.

    27. JR

      Well, I don't think they're journalists.

    28. MT

      Right.

    29. JR

      I mean, they're really just television propagandists. That's what they are. And they're, they're working for these enormous corporations, and it benefits those corporations to have a narrative. And so you have a spokesperson for the narrative. They're not, there's n- no way Don Lemon is a journalist.

    30. MT

      Right.

  10. 55:38 – 59:21

    Russiagate, the Nunes memo hashtag, and how Twitter Files undercut ‘bot’ claims

    1. JR

      Well, here's a crazier one. The Russiagate.

    2. MT

      Oh, well, yeah.

    3. JR

      That's the craziest one.

    4. MT

      Absolutely.

    5. JR

      The fact that they pushed that for three years and they've never come out and said, "We were misinformed. That is not the case." There really wasn't this crazy collusion between Russia and Donald Trump, and in fact, there was some information that seems to point to that Hillary Clinton had involvement with Russia too, and that they've kind of all had involvement with Russia.

    6. MT

      Yeah.

    7. JR

      And that this, this wasn't some grand conspiracy to elect a, a Russian puppet as the president of the United States. Sorry.

    8. MT

      Yeah. It, it was, it was a three and a half year sort of mass hysteria experiment, right? And, I mean, this is one of the things, uh, it, it, it's one of the reasons I, I got kind of quietly moved out of mainstream journalism, right? I, I didn't have a particular, uh, problem at Rolling Stone, but you know, I, I... Early on in, in the Trump years, I, I said, "There's something wrong with this story." I, I, I think there are elements of it that aren't, aren't provable. I don't think we should be running this stuff, you know? And, uh, then, uh, before I knew it, I was working independently. But anyway, uh, it, uh, the Twitter files, we, we've, we're finding stuff that now tells you absolutely like what actually the truth was during that time. Like, for instance, one of the big Russiagate stories, uh, was from early 2018 when Devin Nunes... Remember, the, he was the Republican congressman, he was the head of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. He wrote a memo, uh, basically saying, "We think they, they faked FISA applications. We think the FBI used the Steele dossier to try to get surveillance authority against some Trump people like Carter Page, and we think they lied and cheated to do that." And so, he submitted this classified memo. And not only was he denounced everywhere as a liar and wrong and all that, but there was this big story that was all over the place that, uh, a hashtag, #releasethememo, had been amplified by Russian bots. Uh, you probably don't remember this, but, but this story was everywhere in January and February of 2018. This idea that, that, uh, Release the Memo was basically a Russian operation and that, that Nunes was, uh, benefiting from it. Well, I'm reading the Twitter files, I was looking for something else entirely. Uh, and then suddenly, we come across a string of emails internally at Twitter where Twit- where the Twitter officials are saying, "You know, we're not finding any Russians at all behind this hashtag. And we told, uh, the members of Congress who asked about this, um, that there are no Russians involved in this. Uh, because D- Dianne Feinstein, uh, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, they all came out with this accusation about, about it being linked to Russia. Um, we told them that there's nothing there, and they, they went and they did it anyway, you know?" And so, there are lots of stories like that now that are kind of falling apart, right?

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. MT

      And, and-

    11. JR

      Most people, I think, don't even know that the Russia collusion thing was bullshit. I think the general public that heard that Russiagate narrative, the, the people that haven't looked into it past what they've seen on television probably still believe there's some sort of collusion.

    12. MT

      Yeah. Uh, be- because there's never been a reckoning for it.

    13. JR

      Right.

  11. 59:21 – 1:11:08

    WMD, accountability gaps, and the modern attention treadmill (Epstein as example)

    1. MT

      You know? I mean, after the WMD thing, uh, which, you know, went on for a surprisingly long time considering how little evidence there ever was for that.

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. MT

      Uh, and, and considering that there were lots of journalists at the time who would have liked to have proved Bush wrong about that. Um, it still took years and years and years for the business to admit that they, they screwed that up.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. MT

      They blamed it almost entirely on one person, Judy Miller from New York Times.

    6. JR

      Really?

    7. MT

      Yeah. Other people who, who got that story just as wrong, like Jeffrey Goldberg, he's now the editor of Atlantic Magazine. Like, there were all kinds of people who totally screwed that story up and got promoted. Um, and so, there... But there was, there was at least a little bit of reflection about getting a big story wrong. Like, you, you-

    8. JR

      That's such a big story.

    9. MT

      Right?

    10. JR

      That's such a big story.

    11. MT

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      The fact that there really were no weapons of mass destruction and they, we, we really did start a war for nothing, that really did kill somewhere in the neighborhood of a million innocent people.

    13. MT

      Right. It's over a fake news story.

    14. JR

      Yeah, over a fake news story.

    15. MT

      I mean, that, there, there should be, there should be sorrow. (laughs)

    16. JR

      Yeah.

    17. MT

      You know what I mean? Within news organizations-

    18. JR

      Yeah.

    19. MT

      ... about a mistake of that magnitude.

    20. JR

      And the fact there's no repercussions and the people who were promoted that, that promoted that very same story that led to that, that led to the, the, the public support of it, of the war.

    21. MT

      Yeah. And, and not only did we...... not only did we promote the people who got that story wrong, uh, you know, ex- except in that one case with Judy Miller, who had, who, who was sort of villainized, uh, you know, but people were fired who, who were, who were questioning it. Like, Phil Donahue had a show, a very highly rated show on MSNBC at the time. He lost his job. Jesse-

    22. JR

      W- what did he say?

    23. MT

      Uh, he was just very critical of the war effort. He didn't believe the whole thing and, and he, he thought-

    24. JR

      And that's why he lost his show?

    25. MT

      Yeah. They, they, they took him off the air.

    26. JR

      Wow.

    27. MT

      Jesse Ventura will, will tell you this story. He, he, he, he's currently... He lives in a, in a compound in Mexico.

    28. JR

      New Mexico. Yeah.

    29. MT

      Ca- Casa MSNBC, he calls it.

    30. JR

      (laughs)

  12. 1:11:08 – 1:39:09

    Platform censorship logic in practice: YouTube ‘hate speech’ and Google search shaping reality

    1. JR

      I have a good friend who used to be an executive at Google and we were at a party. And it was, uh, me and my wife and this lady who was one of the bigwigs at YouTube. And so, uh, she sits down with us and we're talking and she's, you know, asking me about, you know, podcasting and this and that, and we're having this conversation. And I say, "What, how does YouTube decide, like, what gets marked as bad?" Or, you know, I go ... 'Cause there's a conversation between Sam Harris and Douglas Murray, two public intellectuals, that someone put on their YouTube playlist. Like, they didn't even make this conversation. They just, like, "This is something that I have on my channel, on my playlist." And it got, they got flagged for that. And sh- yeah, they got, they got a strike against their channel for that. And I said to her, I go, "Why would that be?" And she goes, "Well, because it was hate speech."

    2. MT

      (laughs)

    3. JR

      And so I go, "How did you just say that?"

    4. MT

      (laughs)

    5. JR

      I go, "How did you just say it was hate speech?"

    6. MT

      (laughs)

    7. JR

      I go, "Do you know the content of the conversation? You're talking about two public intellectuals."

    8. MT

      Right.

    9. JR

      "And you, you just said it was hate speech." And my wife is, like, squeezing my knee-

    10. MT

      (laughs)

    11. JR

      ... 'cause she, she, she sees I'm getting red.

    12. MT

      (laughs)

    13. JR

      And I'm like, "You just said it was hate speech." I go, "Do you understand what they talked about? Do you know what they talked about? Why'd you just say that?" But she was just like, "It's, it's hate ... What they said was hate speech." She had just, like, this arrogance because she was in this position of power where she could say, "That's hate speech. That's not hate speech."

    14. MT

      Right.

    15. JR

      And, and this was quite a while ago. This was, like, 2015, '16.

    16. MT

      Oh, wow. So it's early.

    17. JR

      Yeah, early.

    18. MT

      Wow.

    19. JR

      But what her saying, 'cause it was hate speech. Like, this look in my ... "That's what it is." Do you remember that commercial, uh, where it's like during the drug war, the height of the drug war propaganda, and during the, the height-

    20. MT

      The brain on drugs thing?

    21. JR

      No, no, no. The one where there's a man and a younger man and they're eating dinner and he's saying, "If you buy drugs, you support terrorism." And he's, like, eating his food at a steakhouse. (munching noises)

    22. MT

      (laughs)

    23. JR

      He goes, "What do you mean it supports terrorism?" "It just does. It just does. You're supporting terrorism." It's like this, this no-nonsense guy and then this young, goofy guy, like, "What are you saying? I just like to smoke pot." "If you buy drugs, you support terrorism." You ever seen that commercial?

    24. MT

      No, I, I, I don't remember it, but-

    25. JR

      Watch it. Let's play it. Play it from the beginning.Play it from the beginning, 'cause this is...

    26. MT

      It's a ploy.

    27. What?

    28. This drug money funds terror, it's a ploy.

    29. A ploy.

    30. A, a manipulation.

Episode duration: 2:46:37

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