Matt Taibbi: How Intel Agencies Control the Media, Putin’s Rise to Power, and 2024 Predictions

My mother's Irish, he was adopted. oh, my dad was adopted too, really, yeah.

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Okay, so here's my question. Your reporter, you've been a reporter your entire life. Your dad was a reporter, well-known reporter, so you grew up in journalism? Journalism is now, justly, I would say, the most hated profession.

The Sackler family is more popular than NBC News at this point, right? And Congress is more popular.

Yeah, people like, you know, maybe a child molester can be fixed. We don't need to execute them. But NBC News Okay, so, but um, so, that's bewildering, I'm sure for you. But for those of us who have having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in, like, 1990? When you're finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism? what did you think you were getting into when you started?

He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is, you know, I would say, probably the most important thing, which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective. He could, he would be able to go to, um, you know, any scene of fire or murder or whatever. Instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him. And um, where does that skill come from? I think you just gotta have to be born with it.

Yeah, there's a certain like, sort of gregariousness, right? That some people have. Likes people. Yeah, he likes people, he's he. He's able to, you know, sort of strike up conversations quickly. And I was very shy growing up.

So the first thing I concluded was, I'm never going to be able to do that, right. So this is, you know, this is like a superpower that he has, that I don't, and I thought I would have to go in a different direction. I also grew up wanting to be a fiction writer, right? I was really obsessed with that growing up. And then when I got out of college, I realized that the only thing I really knew how to do was his job.

Because I had watched it so much growing up and so it was something that would keep me, at least tangentially, in the writing business. So I got into it, and only over time that I really appreciate. Um, the way they did reporting back then, it was a much different thing than what people do now.

Uh, just reflexively. And they were, you know, they told the news from that perspective very often, right? And it was the classic, uh. Editorialist at the time was somebody like, you know, Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko, the sort of voice of the people, kind of a thing. And so I grew up always imagining that the reporter was somebody who was on the side of ordinary people. Uh, because he was one, right? Yeah, exactly. And you know, my father carried it that way, for sure, and, uh, so I did your father never go to college.

No, he did, he went to, he went to Ruckers. um, he had me while he was at Ruckers. That's why he had to go into reporting.

Uh, he worked at the Home News, and, uh, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and um, and then, you know, as soon as, as soon as he graduated, he went to the TV. But um, but no. I always had this vision of of journalism as this thing that, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't for intellectuals, it wasn't for the, you know, people who had graduate degrees.

It was for people who hustled, who who worked hard and had, you know, kind of a common touch, right? Like, that's kind of the key to the job is being willing to listen to people and all that. So I had a a very specific idea of what journalism was when I went into it.

Um, I just thought I wasn't going to be particularly good at it. Uh, because because of that, you know, uh, deficit, right? Like, I didn't have that gift that he had, um, but I started overseas in Russia, and because I was able to, I spoke Russian already early. I had an advantage over other American reporters at the time.

What year did you go to Russia? So I studied in 89 and 90, when it was still Soviet. Uh, you know, it was. I, like, took a year and a half abroad and, uh, then went back. As soon as I graduate, actually, I went back before I graduated and started stringing and working for, um, a bunch of different organizations there, and finally got a job at an expat. So 91 ish, yeah, 91 ish, 92, right after the revolution, basically, which was 91 August, yeah, summer, August, 91..

Yeah, so shortly after that.

Of all these people, I wanted to learn the language. Uh, then when I got there, I had been a very depressed teenager, had, you know, struggled socially, behaviorally, all these other things. I got to late Soviet Russia and everybody's depressed, and, you know, nobody's happy. And I thought, this is amazing, I fit right in, and, uh.

And, uh, and so.

Oh, um, so one day I was walking past one of the colleges and I saw people playing baseball and I was gonna keep walking. And then I thought, I'm in Uzbekistan, what the what, what is that? Uh, it turned out that, uh, there was, I think it was like a refrigeration school, and there were a whole bunch of students from Cuba. And you know, those guys could really play, right? Um, so I just went and asked, You guys mind if I play with you?

And uh, so I ended up being a catcher on a team full of Cubans with a Russian coach, and, uh, we played other central Asian countries and it was hilarious. Yeah, yeah, we had.

We had ground rules. This is gonna sound like a fake story, but it's true, we had ground rules when we played in a pasture. Uh, if you hit a sheep, it was a double, I'm sorry.

If you hit a cow, it was a double, if you get a sheep, it was a triple. Uh, that is a true story that anyone ever hit a coward. No, no, no, not.

We only played like two games in that place, so, but um, but that actually happened. I was actually playing baseball.

So, um, it was a troubled place. uh, there was a war going on in Tajikistan right next to us, uh, and so it was an interesting place to be. Um, but, you know, it was sort of my first experience. What does your parents think? My mother was terrified.

Um, when I, when I got thrown out of the country, uh, I got a visit by these people who are, I guess their word for. It was the SNB, the the Slujba Nazionali and Bezapaznosti, which is just the U.m. their version of the KGB. And, uh, they asked me for my papers, I had the wrong papers. I was there in a student visa that I'd kind of, you know, it was kind of phony and um. But I had to send a telegram, uh, telling my parents that I'd been kicked out of the country.

So I wrote, KGB kicking me out, um, will call from Moscow, but she got KGB kicking me gut, uh, will call when I get to Moscow.

So, uh, she was worried, but um, but no, it was fine, but your dad was for it. Yeah, I think he, he, he thought the whole, you know, adventure thing was interesting. And then when he finally visited Russia in the mid 90s, um, you know, and saw what the place was like. At the time, he thought it was, you know, a paradise for journalists, which it was because there was so much crazy stuff going on. Um, and um, it was a great place to learn the profession, really.

Yeah, what was press freedom like then? It was really interesting. There was a very vibrant community of, um, really hardcore, great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Because, remember, the The Press had been suppressed almost completely. For, you know, 80, 80 years, right? And after, as soon as there was a, you know, a little bit of an opening to do real reporting, there were suddenly these very brave, uh.

Reporters who showed up, and you know, they were, they were risking their lives every time, they wrote. Because the the way the system was set up was that every newspaper was basically owned by a different gangster. Um, and you would get material, they called it selling genes over there, right? So somebody would get. Give you a, uh, a packet of information, you would write it up about the rival gangline figure or politician. And then. But if they wanted to you to pay the price, you would, you know, you might get shot in a doorway or something like that, uh, so there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases.

For instance, there was a guy named Dima Holodev who worked for, Uh, Moscow's. He comes to Mullets when I was there, who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister. He got blown up on a train station. Um, but you know, the Russians, those guys were my heroes. I. I tagged on to a bunch of those people really early, and that's where I kind of really learned the whole investigative journalism thing was from those people.

Um, you know, not all of whom stayed in the business for very long, sometimes not voluntarily. You stayed 10 years. Yes, yeah, how come? I mean, I love the place.

I was planning on staying forever really. Um, you know, then things definitely turned weird. Uh, when the transformation from Yeltsin to Putin happened, yes, um, you know, we all none of us had any illusions about who Putin was.

Putin was a known quantity. He was the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg when I was a student in Saint Petersburg. Uh, he, he was kind of known as, um, well, I mean, he. There were all sorts of stories that were told about him back then. And when he first came to UM to power in Moscow, it was sort of widely understood that he was doing it. And Yeltsin even writes about this in his biography because Yeltsin needed help getting out of the country and escaping prosecution.

And um, there. There had been some indication that Putin had done that for his previous boss, the the mayor of Saint Petersburg, Anatoly Subchak. So, you know, the sort of investigative journalism community was very suspicious of Putin when he when he first arrived, um, but the Western journalism community loved him. And this was Putin. Yeah, yeah, and this was, you know, I had already become disillusioned with American journalism before that, for because they had misreported a lot of things about post-communist Russia.

But that was kind of like the last straw for me, I think.

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Wherever you get your podcast, it's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Yes, um, all kinds of horrific things that they weren't telling people back home. And so because the the the expat community, and you know, I, I don't really know exactly how this works. But the there was a monoculture about the reporting there that is very similar to what it's like now in America. Um, but there it was sort of cartoonized. It's a very small community.

Everybody knew everybody else, and, you know, whatever the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote about, um, pretty much everybody else followed their lead. There was almost nobody, um, among the reporters who even spoke Russian, right? That was totally.

Um, but for the most part, you know, people came in and they they just treated it as a, you know, as a third world backwater. It's like, you know, if you read the quiet American, right?

It's just too complicated, right? But if you can't speak the language, you just don't understand it at all. You have no hope of understanding it, do you?

So, um, to not to not understand the place that you're reporting on.

I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide. And I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was. I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places like I. I was worked as a bricklayer in Siberia. Really, yeah, I, I did.

Um, I, I worked at a monastery in Mordovia. what did you do in the monastery at Construction, you know? Um, so well. Just tour the country and kind of find out exactly how people were doing, what, what the situation was like. And it was an amazing discovery. Because every every place I went, I learned about a new lie that was being told, you know, to people back home. And it. It was deeply disillusioning for me. I mean, I I know you've had experiences like this in journalism too, right? Where you find out that something you thought is totally wrong. And um, and that was a real eye-opener for me, like, completely wrong, completely wrong. Yeah, exactly.

And and more of what that was proven relatively quickly, right? There was a massive financial collapse in in 98, and then Putin came in. Uh, and there was a huge popular repudiation of, you know, so, the American style UM version of managed democracy that existed under Yeltsin. And that was real, I mean, Putin for all, for all of his, uh, problems, and I was a real critic of Putin's. When I was there, uh, there was no question that he was much more popular than than Yeltsin.

I've been, you know. The country was very embarrassed by Yeltsin. Um, because he was publicly drunk all the time, he was dysfunctional. I mean, I think we're, we're living through some of those emotions now. Yes, we are.

That's right, it's shameful, yeah. And and so they they wanted to, you know, that their word was assume the other car, right? They wanted a strong hand. Uh, who would come in and kind of set things right and and compete with the Americans, and they did.

They didn't like being thought of as a vassal state to the west. This is an ancient conflict for Russia and America. This goes back to the days of Peter the Great. Uh, you know, the Slavophiles versus the roof, uh, yeah, the Western, uh, you know, the people, the pro-western crew and it.

The pendulum swung the other way while I was there, you know, and um, that was, you know, fascinating to watch. But it had some pretty serious consequences, too.

Like, if you, if you go to a scene that's funny. Like, for instance, I had to cover this ridiculous press conference where Prince Philip appeared for, I think, the World Wildlife Fund or something like that. And he's giving a speech to all these Russians about, you know, their backward attitudes, about conservation and everything. And in the middle of his speech, the. The hotel brings the spread, which includes booze, and all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself. Well, they just eat all the food and drink and drink all the booze, and to me, that's the story. Yeah, yeah, you know, so I, I went home and I wrote that up. And they, you know, they kind of wanted me to do something else, like pretend it didn't happen.

Right, exactly. And I thought, Well, this isn't right, you know? I mean, I was just a kid, I didn't really know, but I thought there's something not quite right about this. To what extent? In retrospect?

Really, absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you go back and look at the coverage of, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you know some other organizations. You know. The current deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Christia Freeland, was sort of a colleague at the time.

She was part of that whole crew of Western journalists there. What was she like? Well, they were all doing kind of the same thing. Like the. The basic line was that there was a new group of robber baron capitalists who had appeared. Um, and yes, it was messy.

It was a messy transition to capitalism, was that was the word they used for it now? Actually, it was just pure gangsterism, and most of the people who got rich did so through absolutely corrupt privatization. Yeah, schemes were like, for instance, there was a thing called loans for shares. But the government was literally lending the money to cronies so that they could buy companies like Exxon for pennies on the dollar. You know, I mean, like, Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth.

They bought it for nothing, basically for for a pittance, because they were pals of the people in government. So they created an instant billionaire class and that was completely passed over. Nobody reported on that. Um, then once these people had money, uh, they were treated as sort of legitimate wealth creators, and, you know, entrepreneurs.

Yeah, exactly, they didn't, they weren't, even with the robber barons, who, at least, like, built railroads, exactly right, you know, like these guys didn't do anything except steal, you know they, they were wealth extractors.

And um, and it was amazing watching the hype of, uh, of these figures. The the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his, um, you know, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, right? I mean, like, the. There was a ton of that going on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office. And really infamous from Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed before Putin came along under Yeltsin. Yeah, the guy I mentioned, only Putin kills journalists.

No, that's what I heard. This, this started, this started from the very beginning. They were doing this. I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase.

That was 1994 when that happened. Um, you know, there were, there were a lot. I had a friend, not exactly a friend, somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinstein, who also worked for a newspaper there. He got thrown in a mental institution. Uh, in the Yeltsin years, um, there were.

There were all sorts of reporters shot if you go in and and shot, shot, killed, beaten. Um, you know, I had another friend named, Uh, Leonid Khrutakov, Uh, who was not only fired every time he did an expose. But, you know, he, he would be attacked. He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly, um, so, it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office.

Now, obviously, it went to a new level. Once he came in. And you know, there were people I knew who died, right, you know, in the years after he, he became president. But it wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists. The difference? The difference was that they that Putin concentrated.

Yes, government authority, in a way that had not been done previously before, it was more of like a gangland, free-for-all. Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station, Uh, and TV. Um, he had the one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gucinski, and, you know, the the owner of Bank Menatee, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, famously, famously put in jail. You know, they were sponsors of media as well, so, uh? But the only thing that was different is that the government was exerting sort of overt control over over media. And they were.

They were stamping out the individual pockets of opposition, so during the Yeltsin years, it was very dangerous. You, just you. You did still have some freedom to do really good work, and and that's why those those people were amazing. Like, you know, they were risking everything every time they did a story and they were still doing it. They just had, they had such balls.

It was, it was incredible to watch. It's just interesting. Um, and then the contrast, by the way, with between that and the Americans right was was just so striking.

The few reporters who, you know, spoke the language and, or, you know, married Russian women, right? or were Russian men? Um, they were better, right, because they were at least in tune to what was going on in the country. But Moscow was still, and St. Petersburg were like a different country compared to what was going on in the rest of Russia.

Yeah, you could be in Moscow, and it would seem like a more or less functional place. You go 40 miles outside the city and again, there's subsistence farming, you know, and or there's whole stretches where there's no government and people are just setting up toll roads. Uh, you know, they're, they're putting on camera, uh fatigues and creating their own toll booths. Um, so it's like, Beirut, Yeah, exactly, and. And. But if you didn't know, if you didn't go out, you wouldn't see it, you know?

So I think that was it was a problem of perception for a lot of these folks. And um, but I thought it was inexcusable. Because, you know, as a reporter, your first job is to is to find out, you know, to check for yourself.

So even though we were in in English, we were regulated by, uh, you know, the the Russian government. Um, we got visited every now and then by the tax police asking for bribes, and then, um, after after I left, they eventually shut the paper down. Uh, so uh. But they, you know, they paid attention to us, but it wasn't the same as, um, the way they paid attention to. You know, the New York Times and other reporters. I mean, there were people who were Paul Klebnikoff, remember that name?

Yeah, yeah, so he got, he got shot, right. Um, while he was there, and I don't, I don't know that. It was a Russian government interest that that did that, but they were paying attention to coverage that went out overseas, they weren't. They didn't care so much about what I was doing. Which was writing for people who were in Russia. And, uh, and also we were writing in English, so that God knows how many Russian officials even understanding what we were doing so.

Uh, you know, some of the people who I knew, I like I. I vaguely knew Anna Politikovskaya, for instance, who got killed while I was there. And there was another reporter who was sort of a mentor to me, this guy, Yuri Shikachikin, who became a a Duma deputy. Uh, he died under mysterious circumstances. Some people said it was a poison telephone, I mean, who knows?

Right, but um, it got kind of unpleasant, um, and you know, I the. The community was just not as as big as it had been in in the in the 90s. I mean, Moscow in the late 90s was an incredible scene, it was like Chicago in the 30s, it's.

It's very difficult to describe what it was actually like. Um, you know, gangsters everywhere, bodies, you know, all over the place, people being thrown out of windows. There were terrorist explosions happening all the time. It was, it was a wild place to be.

Uh, and you know that that story kind of ran a court, its course while I was, while I was there. And the city started to transform into what you saw when you went. Yeah, the most functional city I've ever been, which is so it's so amazing for me to hear. She was certainly shocking for me.

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Yeah, so you missed in the 10 years you were gone, the entire span of the Clinton years. Yep, um, in 9, 11, 9, and. And so I think it's fair to say it was a completely different country in 2002 from what it had been in 1992.

Mm-hmm. what did you think when you got back?

Stuff just happens out in the open there, right? And I always had this image that well, in America, that doesn't go on. Um, and then I come home to post 9 11 America and the whole vibe is well. We have to start throwing all of our Democratic guarantees overboard, because, as I think, as Dick Cheney put it, we have to start exploring the dark side. Um, because, you know, the Bill of Rights is inadequate to keep us safe, we we need to start doing. You know, all these things that I thought were crazy, you know, the Patriot Act, the the authorization to use military force, right? Like so.

Moving the authority to declare war out of Congress to basically to the White House. Mass surveillance. You know of Guantanamo Bay? All these things were were really shocking to me, and it was it was kind of I thought. It was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation.

And um, so what years you get back?

And and when, oh, Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer, came along, and there was this belief that a transformation, he would usher in a transformative presidency. That would undo, you know, this Cheney vision which scared me, you know? Uh, which I thought was was sort of going to undo this schoolhouse rock version of America that I grew up believing in. Um, and uh, I believe I, I believed it. I'm kind of embarrassed now. I. I actually thought that was going to happen, that when Barack Obama got elected, that all that would would turn back, um.

But in hindsight, you know, they never had any intention. It seems that, uh, you know, of changing anything. If you go back and look at the statements, you know they. They were saying things like, Well, we're not, we're not. We might not change the status quo right away, right? Um, and I, I had, you know, I had been very positive about Barack Obama.

I covered him on the campaign trail, um, because my job, by the way, I. When I came back, I lucked into getting the greatest job in journalism, which is covering campaigns for Rolling Stone, right? And um, and I. I was very impressed by Barack Obama, I thought he was incredible, uh.

And and um, even though Rolling Stone couldn't, they were over the moon about Obama. Right? The that was true love, I remember that, right? Yeah, it was almost erotic, yeah.

Oh yeah, I mean, everybody in in liberal media loved Obama, um, but particularly at our magazine where, uh, you know, the the people who owned it were, they were, they were just delirious about Obama. And so when I came to them and I and I said, Look, I have to do this story about how this, this bailout situation is corrupt. Um, they weren't pleased, but they ran. If you can go back and look, you'll see there's a story called Obama's Big Sellout. Uh, it was like a 9, 000 word feature that they let me run.

And um, so that was like a year after he got into office, but that was kind of the beginning of what did the piece say? It basically said that, uh, that the Obama had run as an economic populist, um, and had talked a lot about reforming, uh, certain things that had gone on Wall Street. That had allowed, um, you know, the excesses of the the mortgage bubble to happen, yes, and then as soon as, um, he got elected, he brought in all these acolytes, um, of, uh, sorry, the Clinton's former Treasury secretary.

Ruben I'm Bob Rubin. Uh, so they're, they're all these. Ruben was that city group. Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government. And you know, these were the same kind of people who had caused the crash.

Yes, right, so to me, I wrote it as kind of a bait and switch. You know, he, he ran as somebody who was going to change the system, he brought in people who were the system. And in addition, uh, there was this bailout deal with City, with City Group in particular, that was that was kind of malodorous. And um, there were, there were people who ended up paying fines in that situation.

Um, but it was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy. And the idea was he had run as one thing, and he was really another thing. Um, so that was one of the first stories of that type. How did the Obama administration react to the peace? Um, they weren't happy.

Uh, if you go back and look there, there's, there's an interview with Obama. They did an official rolling stone interview with him years later, where he, uh, he sort of brought up the fact that even your magazine talked about how I didn't do enough. Um, and this was like, years after the fact. And then, by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him while he was running, right? So of all the things that that had been written about him, what he remembered was this one slight, you know? which I thought was a very telling sign of his character, you know? And uh? But at the time, I wasn't paying attention to the other things. Like about, you know, the continued prosecution of the War on terror, you know the drone assassination thing, the kill list, you know, Terror Tuesdays, all that stuff. I didn't really.

And you know, if you go back and look they, they basically invented. I mean, I don't know how disillusioning this was for you, but they just made up on the fly. Legal, legal justifications for what they were doing that weren't grounded in any law that was passed or any any court case. They just sort of wrote themselves white papers, giving themselves permission to do this stuff, which I think is crazy to this day. I think it's crazy.

Who's a citizen? So the idea that you could kill an American citizen, and the the first time, I mean, I think they've actually killed quite a few American citizens. It turns out. I didn't know that, but the first time I became aware of it, it was. It was a effectively a foreign national with the U.S.

There was another white paper I'm trying. I believe Leon Panetta was involved where the the concept was. Yes, um, due process is required, but it doesn't have to involve the defendant, right, as long as there is a process, right.

Uh, it can be unilaterally, us just talking about it, and it can be post-execution. Right, exactly, yeah, but that stuff's all. it's all madness and I don't know.

I mean, I'd be curious to hear what you think. I mean, I I think when we, when we did those things and didn't make a big stink about it psychologically, we just crossed a line. Yes, into something else. And, uh, I feel like there's no going back once you once. So we were talking about this at dinner last night.

In other words, you can't treat American citizens like you would, you know, the hoothies or something, right? It's like there's one set of standards for the way we deal, conduct our foreign policy with foreigners. And a completely different standard for the way the U.S government treats its own citizens. Who own the government, it's their government. Right, right, right, exactly.

I guess what I didn't realize, because I was morally deficient and young and dumb, was that once you start doing really evil things abroad, you're going to do them at home.

You're diluting it once you, once you start murdering people without due process, you know, it's not democracy anymore. I mean, that they use that term in a very facile way now, constantly. Oh, we have to protect democracy. Well, what do you mean by that?

Are you? You're going to protect democracy by censoring, right? Like this is? This is the whole thing that I've spent the last two years on. Um, if you, if, if that's what you mean, that's contradictory, right? And you know that thing.

Contradictory? In what sense? Well, the First Amendment says that we don't do that right. Well, like it, you can't protect the Bill of Rights by violating it, right? And you know this, this whole switch and I was, I think I like most Americans.

I was like, you, I, I. We all knew that America, the United States, was whacking people all over the world, right? I mean, even though the church committee hearings came along and we basically said we weren't going to do that anymore. Of course, we were doing it right. We were doing all kinds of horrible things. We were probably, uh, fixing elections, you know, in half the places on Earth, but not here, right? Like that was a a bright line for Americans.

Now maybe that's chauvinistic to to believe in that, but I was like, you, I didn't. I didn't think they would ever cross that line. Uh, and come and and bring these ideas home. But you know, this is what we're finding out now. I mean, this was the big theme of the Twitter files was, you know, when we tried to figure out where, so what are the Twitter?

Can you explain for people who didn't follow it at the time? So, uh, in late 2022, after Elon Musk acquired, um, Twitter, you know, there started to be rumors that he was going to open up the internal communications of old Twitter. And sort of give them to the world, right? And it turned out to be true. I, uh, he, I got a call one day, or I got a note, um, sort of summoning me to San Francisco and whom? From somebody at Twitter, let's put it that way.

And um, and so I was the first person, uh, who was put on this project of looking, rummaging through old Twitter's, you know, correspondence. And I, you know, I. I think he said that. Elon said that his idea was that he wanted to restore trust in the platform by telling people about the different kinds of censorship techniques that were going on. It's not clear exactly what, what he was up to, but um, you know, he seemed sincere at the time.

Uh, he brought in me, he brought in Barry wise, Barry brought in a couple of other people, like Michael Schellenberger, Li Fong ended up being involved. Another reporter, Really good young investigative reporter, maybe the last one, right? Probably, uh, you know, he, he appeared. And so there was a group of us. And for about three months, we got to look through, um, the internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest, you know, communications companies. And the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the internet platforms.

Uh, and they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content, uh, in a variety of different ways. And when? When we started to try to figure out first of all, this was shocking to us. We seeing all these documents that said, flagged by FBI, flagged by that.

Like, how did this start? And when we started asking questions, you know, it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas.

Counterterrorism sort of messaging programs, right? So the State Department, for instance, has a has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now.

Very much interested in speech, both abroad and at home. But they were once exclusively a sort of counter ISIS, uh, platform. In fact, they had a they had a different name. Back then, they were called the CSCC. But in 2016, Obama rechristened them the Global Engagement Center, and they started to look inward.

And when I asked people who, um, I managed to talk to a couple of sources, who, who worked, um, at that agency. One phrase really stuck out. It was CT to CP. So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism, and the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

Contracting wise, it was kind of drying up, right? Because those threats had been somewhat neutralized. Um, but populism, you know, uh, was now a very serious. It was viewed as a very serious threat after, um, occupy Wall Street, the tea party, the Arab Spring was something that maybe they didn't see as a bad thing, but they certainly saw the.

Transformative power of the internet platforms. I think that freaked them out. And the virus is communicable exactly exactly. Then there was Brexit, then then I think Trump was the last, you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks. And that's when you started to see all these communications like, we, you know, we have to.

We need to get a more formalized, um, you know, control over these platforms. And so, yeah, I that. That's when the War on Terror mission turned inward. And I think that's a huge story, right? Uh of, well, it's the it's the end of the country. We grew up, right? Yeah, you, you would think, you know, and and that's, um, you know, for me, it's been, and I think probably for you too. The the this new theme of this sudden explosion of a liberal tactics in politics, um, that, even if they're directed at somebody that, you know, liberals hate, like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon.

How can you not be freaked out by stuff like that? We haven't used contempt of Congress to jail people since the UNAmerican Affairs Committee in 1947, right? This is like, third world kind of stuff that we're seeing, uh, you know.

Accusing the the front runner in a presidential campaign of a hundred different felonies. Is that happening if he's not running for president? I mean, who could honestly say that, right? Um, it's, but you can't talk about it now. I mean, if you, if you mention it, you're, you're out of the club and and mainstream press now, which is.

That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. Go to Tucker carlson.com podcast, our entire archive. Is there a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running? Tucker Carlson?

Um, when I was at the The Moscow Times and the people there, you know, they would tell me stories about what their jobs were in the 80s. And that was like, there was like taking dictation, there were clerks, basically, right, yes, you know, they. They would get the whatever the message of the day was, and they would do it and then go home to their wives. And they would go fishing on the weekends. And there was no, you know, intellectual, anything involved with it. Um, you couldn't take it in that direction.

It would be hazardous to your, to your health if you, if you did. Well. That's what journalism is now in America. I mean, we look what just happened with the Nordstream thing, Just take an example, right? Uh, Nordstream happens, and there's no investigation whatsoever in in any of the major newspapers. How can that happen?

It's this major consequential thing that might have an impact on, you know, starting a war with a nuclear power.

Yeah.

Phil Donahue's getting good ratings, but he's bounced, right? I was there for that. Yes, um, uh, Chris Hedges, you know? Um, I know. And Chris Chris was sort of a classic example of a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky once wrote about in manufacturing consent. Which is that they don't fire you necessarily. But, like, you just don't get promoted if you're considered the wrong kind of personality. Which is weird. Because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right? If they're not, they're probably not good reporters, you know? I mean, just look at who who are.

Great reporters are, um, they're independent-minded people, independent-minded people, and you, and you know you, you want to experience them in little bursts, yeah.

It was in late 2016, is right after he had gotten elected. You remember that list that came out, prop or not? Um well, the Washington posted this story about this weird blacklist that, uh, they had discovered of people who the Russians were supposedly in league with. And it was this shadowy organization called Prop or not. And they linked to this list of UM sites, and, you know, without any evidence at all, they were. They were linking all kinds of independent journalists to to Russia. And I thought, Well, that's crazy. And then then there was this whole thing about, um, I, I actually had to do a segment, um, on MSNBC with Chris.

Hayes. The other guest was Malcolm Nance of All People. And it it was all about, you know, is, is Trump in league before he got inaugurated? Is Trump, Um, you know, in league with the Russians? Uh, there have just been a big leak about that.

And I thought, Well, there's no evidence for this, right? Like we, we just had a catastrophic episode in journalism with the WMD thing, where anonymous sources get us in a lot of trouble. Um, if you can't recreate the experiment in the lab, you got to be careful of that story, right? And that's all I said I wasn't like.

He's innocent, you know? Like, I just thought, this is a dangerous story. Let's all be careful with this. And immediately there was this reaction that was just shocking to me. It was it was like, this shunning thing, it happened to me.

It happened to, you know, Greenwald, obviously, Aaron, mate. At the Nation, there was like a group letter that was written by the rest of the staff. Um, you know, denouncing him, uh, the, you know, the husband of the editor of the of the Nation, also the the Stephen Cohen. They didn't want him around. Um, wonderful man he was.

Yeah, absolutely, he was a good friend of mine. Um, but it was crazy because this was so early in the process and everybody had already predetermined that. That's not. This thing was true, this extraordinary complicated thesis.

Um, they had somehow already arrived at the conclusion that it was proven, and at this point, you didn't know either way. I didn't really know either way, but I had a strong suspicion that it was wrong. Right, like this, this, you know, journalists have a sense, or the sixth sense. It doesn't smell right, right, like, it's kind of like the French connection where, where.

Um, you know, Gene Hackman looks over and he says, That's a wrong table, right? like this was a wrong table, it didn't look right. And I felt the same way. Yeah, and it was too complicated for me to see. I wish I I had known at the time, even in.

I was like, Okay, um, by the way, I'm. I try to be very open-minded, like, I don't know, right? Maybe you're actually a space alien? I don't know. Prove it to me, right?

I really try to keep every possibility open, but I kept asking people like, what, okay, how do we know this, right? Everybody believed it.

Yeah, why?

I'd believe that Donald Trump being James Bond and involved in a five-year conspiracy with, uh, the Russian government, you know what, what? Did Steele call it a well-developed conspiracy of five years? That's ridiculous. This is a guy who can't.

If you've been to any of his campaign speeches, he can't get through the first sentence of one of his scripts. Like his brain is already off in another direction. How is that guy going to keep a secret? Um, it didn't make any sense and nobody had any evidence. Um, and then, even when things came out, that should have been fatal to the story. Like when it finally came out in October of 2017 that the Clinton campaign had funded the steel dossier. Um, I thought, Well, that this, it's over now, right?

It's a Republican donor, too. Well, yes, yeah, sort of previously, right? Steel, Um, didn't come on until till later. But still, once that came out, and you know, you knew that campaign research had ended up in an intelligence assessment.

Um, that should have been it, I, I thought, and everybody just plowed ahead like it was still a thing.

People start shunning you. Where does it go from there?

Like, you know, it just happens that way. But I, I went to Rolling Stone at one point. Um, I had really good editors there for the most part. But I went to them and I and I said, Um, look, this story's wrong, right? And it's gonna come out that it's wrong. Give me eight weeks to chase this down. And let's let's be the first mainstream organization to get it right. And and put it to bed, and it'll be a coup for us, right?

You know, let me, let me do my thing on this. And they said no the first time they ever said no to me on, you know, like a an investigative project. To restate, you speak Russian.

When it first came out, it was obvious. This is either the biggest intelligence uh coup in history, right? The Russians getting a Manchurian candidate in the White House, or it's the biggest fake in history, right? The biggest setup in history. Somebody's either telling the biggest whopper ever, or or the Russians have just pulled off this, the most amazing thing it can't, there's.

There's no other option. Yes, right? So if it's not this, it's that, and we might as well be the first to report that, right, yes.

They have a they have an audience that has certain expectations, but that was a that was a big moment for me, you know, I mean, I was naive. I. I actually thought they, you know, that, that the the magazine would be interested in in going there. Because they had let me, you know, go against Obama before they let me do other things. But not on this, so.

He was a racist, right? Glenn's a racist. I actually had the physical copy of the New Yorker when I came out. Say that they did, yeah, and it was. It was an on the record quote by one of his former editors of All Things.

Of course not.

Um, but there was no way I was going to be able to stay under those circumstances. How long did you last until? um, 2020? I guess so, 15 years, roughly? um, you know, maybe maybe 16, I guess, um.

So it was, it was a great time, so when it became clear that.

Yes.

I mean, um, I'd been in journalism for 30 years and had never seen it as anything but a dying business, right?

Uh, that people aren't getting because they don't trust regular media. So I, I was, I was an early beneficiary of that whole thing, but it was a default, though.

You know, I stuck up for them always, even when they were wrong, even during the UVA thing, you know. I said, Look, they made a mistake. But we're doing the right thing, we're audit, we're self-auditing. Like, you know, this is a great magazine.

We have a great history, tradition, etc. etc. I was kind of a company man, in an embarrassing kind of way. Um, but when the the Russia thing happened, you know, all bets were off and I wasn't the only one there were, there were.

You know, there were other people in the business, this, this also happened to So.

Journalism, I I learned to really love it while I was at, while I was at Rolling Stone, you know? and um, uh, and then, you know, now, um. Additionally, I think the country needs journalists, they need, and and they're the thing that that you need most of all in journalism. To be good at it is you need to be, you need to have some bravery. Yeah, that wasn't true in American journalism for a long time. Um, probably, you know, not not since the Vietnam days or or the Red Scare, you know. Was there a situation where there was a real social price to pay for?

For taking, you know, a certain stance on things, um, now there is right. And if you're going to do certain kinds of reporting, um, you're gonna lose all your friends. But that's the job, you know, and not many people are willing to do that. I am willing to do that because because I never expected to keep friends in this business. So, um it, I think it's an. It's unfortunately an exciting time to be a journalist. But um, you know, I, I would feel wrong to quit now, you know?

Yeah, that's right. If you're in it to make friends, you're probably, you know, yeah, probably the wrong business. Go to church, right? Yeah, exactly.

But um, tell us about, like, having been in institutional journalism, you know, at the top of it really, and then finding yourself like, having to.

Work for yourself like, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

I I thought it was really funny at the beginning of Trump's reign, when a couple of the reporters were, uh, complaining about losing their White House press credentials. It's like, who cares, right? You're? you're supposed to be on the outside, exactly right, like, what are you whining about?

You know, do the job.

You're captive, you eat lunch out of a vending machine. Everybody has got, like the most distorted value system. Like, they're so impressed by their hard passes and they're all such losers. Like, if you would, you would quit the business, right? if you had to do that.

Absolutely.

So, of course, the New York Times gets to sit in the front. And then they, they kind of, it's almost it's like Heathers or mean girls. You, they, you know, according to how, how well known you are in the business, you. You have to sit further and further back in the plane, right or farther back in the plane. Um, and at the very back. Or the cameraman. Yeah, exactly. And and at the time, they were angry at Alexander Pelosi because she had filmed some of them.

So she was in the back with a bunch of count, a bunch of piles of equipment. But um. But I got frustrated very quickly by the fact that all they were doing all day long was just taking, um, you know, press releases from Flax. And then they would eat they were, they would be given these macaroni and cheese butterfingers. Yeah, here. So I went on a hunger strike.

Uh, and my first trip I, I had this like epiphany that they're just giving me too much stuff. I'm just not going to take anything from any of these people. And I stopped eating, I stopped taking the press releases. Um, she's the only one who didn't get fat on a campaign.

Yeah, exactly right, um, and and when we got to the events, I would not go to the events. I would run a mile in any direction and just talk to anybody about anything but the campaign. Um, because the like this isn't journalism, you're sitting there, just being, just taking something and then converting it into a press release.

Like, what is that, you know? But the White House is even worse because they have, they have airs about it, right? Um, and you know, even though I haven't done that beat, you know, for, I think it's an important beat like you have to. Somebody has to ask the president questions, but they don't for the most part, right? I know they. I've never seen it, right?

Including some I've worked with, but I'm a journalist. Okay, tornado comes to Trailer Park. Give me 750 words on that. Like, I don't think they're capable of writing a story. Do you ever think that like?

Could Jim Acosta actually just write, like a news story or even an expository essay?

I covered, you know, the police, beat fires, stuff like that. You have to be able to do that stuff, and that's the basics of the job. Is, you know, showing up, talking to people on the street, talking to this person, that person. You have to be able to do crime reporting, you know, um, and you got to talk to people who are on the other side of the law, all that stuff. I don't think they can do that.

I mean, I remember seeing somebody, I forget what organization it was, but somebody one of the kind of mainstream sort of web only sites. One of their columnists was talking about how much, um, he hated the telephone, and I thought, What journalist hates the telephone? How can you do this job if you hate the telephone? Right? If you? And. And it's because the the new thing is, they decide what they think, they find links that support their ideas, and then they just type the thing. Whereas you know what you're supposed to do is talk to everybody, then figure out what the story to add information to the story.

Exactly.

So you get out of that, you go. So the business model works in independent media.

That's, you know, every couple of days. And even when you do, it's not always the stuff that people like, people like reading, you know, op-eds. That with strong takes that you can make money doing that right.

If it comes from the HHS, it's going to come through the FBI, right? Like, so they had a very organized system of flags that, um, where you, you would see the FBI say, you know, for your consideration. Uh, here are some accounts that may violate your terms of service. And there'd be an attached spreadsheet with, you know, 400 account names on it. And that was just happening constantly. It was a an industrial process that they had worked out.

Um, I thought, that's a huge story, right? Like this, here's the F.B.I. That's devoting resources to looking at social media accounts of ordinary people and worrying about terms of service violations. Like, what is that? Why are they not looking for child predators and stuff like, Right, um, and so what was that?

Well, it's. It's part of this sort of spiraling, sprawling thing where a whole series of government agencies are very intensely interested in what's online and who's reading what. And and in developing new ways of, um, you know, suppressing content, de-amplifying other things. And with Covid, there was a really, really intense effort to, um, to create rules about what could and could not be seen. What would you know they were? They would decide that things were. Um, one of the key concepts that I thought was really, really disturbing was, uh, this whole idea that anything that promotes vaccine hesitancy is a kind of disinformation, even if it's not factually incorrect.

So if somebody dies after they get the shot right, that may be true. Um, but the internally at the company, they, uh. But knowing that might convince other people not to take the shot exactly. And so they looked at that as a kind of disinformation, even though it's true.

It's just material, it's true, but kind of politically wrong, right? Um, or inconvenient. This, and that could be something that, you know, promotes vaccine hesitancy, or, um, you know. We have the Supreme Court case now, Murphy v. Missouri. That's partly related to the Twitter files. And the plaintiffs in a couple of. The three of the plaintiffs in that case are doctors who were who had published true research about Covet.

Um, but were suppressed, were de-amplified, they were put on, you know, in Twitter, they were put on trends, blacklists. Because, you know, their research tended to go against federal policies about lockdowns and vaccination and all kinds of things. So I to me, that's what the First Amendment is therefore right. Like, we do not want the government in in a role of deciding what's true and untrue. Because once you do that, the government has a monopoly on misinformation, right? The only protection against that happening is absolutely unfettered free speech. And they're messing with that, you know? Um, because I I think there's just this gradual moving away from belief that all the concepts in the Bill of Rights work.

And so this, but we what we looked at in terms of the censorship, um, we. It's very much in evidence there, where they just don't believe that the First Amendment works, I don't think.

They were really much more about this process, which is just so scary, right? And nobody, nobody in the regular press, really picked it up. And that was a shocker to me because I thought, well, somebody's got to be interested in this, you know? Um, and they weren't, you know how long were you there? Um, at Twitter, doing the story.

Um, you know, three and a half months. I would say, uh, so we got a lot of stuff we got, you know, probably, I mean, not a lot, you know, 200 000 emails, something like that, attachments we have. We still haven't gone through all of it. But, uh, the big thing was that there's just lots of evidence of this.

What value add do they bring to a tech company? A tech company? I couldn't understand that, but they're actually working there as employees, yeah, and they were making a lot of the big decisions about content, too. Um, in fact, one of the biggest emails that we found was there was a debate about whether or not Twitter had the ability to say no to.

In this case, it was a State Department request about content. And the the former C.I.A. employee says, You know, our window on that is closing. Um, as our government partners become more aggressive in their attributions, right? So what they were basically saying is we're running. Our ability to, like, push back is is evaporating, you know? And that I think has turned out to be true with these platforms, I think they're, they're increasingly just sort of intertwined with the government of the state.

Yeah, so state media, yeah, and and and this is another continuation of the war on terror thing. Because they. They began by demanding that these companies fork over, you know, information about geolocation of users and other places around the world, even in the United States. Um, but now they're venturing into content, right, the content domestically that people see, so Google's the biggest.

Now you'll see MLB.

Com Come up first, right? And um, you know, you've probably noticed this when you when you do a Google search, you know the first 40 or 50 results will all be of a certain type. And you'll have to. It's much, much harder to find kind of this counter-narrative, uh, version of reality now, even if you you know exactly what you're looking for. Or type in the the title of the of the story.

Uh, it's made reporting harder, Don't you think? you know? Yeah, I mean, it's, uh, yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know, I I think it's scary.

Um, talking to the agencies again. This was after, uh, the Supreme Court held a hearing, you know, the hearing on that case, and it didn't look so good for the free speech advocates afterwards. So, um, you know, that that tells me that they're already, you know, thinking of coming up with another program. I know, for a fact, um, for stories, that I'm, that I'm working on that. There are a couple of different contracting ideas for new, uh, sort of content review programs that would be partnerships with government. In the same way that there there were. The last time around, like the last time around, we had this thing called the election integrity. Partnership was run out of Stanford. But it was done in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, which is at the State Department. UM, and University of Washington and some other partners. But that was a, you know, a thing where there was a big organized content flagging operation that involved the government. They're going to do something like that again.

It's just a question of, like, who's going to do it, what the method is going to be? And my understanding is that they're, you know, it's going to be more aggressive this time around.

Right, where academics, NGO officials, government officials, it's all sort of this blob. It's kind of hard to disaggregate it, but um, have gamed out various election scenarios and it it does. It sounds a little more to me like contingency planning than than like an academic exercise, but tell me what you know about that.

But this is, uh, something that somebody tipped me off to now. This is not like a like, a secret. It's actually public, although nobody has brought it up. There is a website that's out there. Uh, but this is, um, a game.

It's basically elections and dragons. It's made by in Q Tell. You can see the IQ T here, which is the venture capital arm of the CIA. And it is a wait stop.

This is real, this is real. Haywire is the name of the game, and, um, if you roll the INQ tell symbol, right? it says, Oh, I'm laughing, so dark it's, it says on the back, Um, if you roll basically the whole. The premise of the game is that you are trying to avoid a haywire situation, meaning a an AI-induced disaster. Where the voters get what they want. Basically, yeah.

So if if you roll the INQ Tell logo, it says Haywire reverted, so basically if you roll CIA, you win, right?

Suggest discuss your response plan and draw two injects. Uh, so it's just full of stuff like this and this, you know? We started to hear about this idea that there were people in this information management slash, censorship, slash, content moderation space that were deeply involved with, you know, finding new ways to manage, uh, information that people see. Um, you know, back in 2010, the army actually, uh, got rid of the term psyop because they thought it had negative, common connotations. They brought it back in 2017 because there there was a widespread belief that, um, we have to engage in, uh, influence operations. That because Russia is already doing it, because China is already doing it, we need to do it, and it's it's the same, aimed at our own population.

Yeah, and that's the thing we. We did this before. Previously, we we created phony social media accounts in Arabic and Pashto, right? And that that's something that we've understood. What's different is that they're now doing this in English, right? And they're now aiming this at domestic population. I thought that was illegal, is it?

I would think it's illegal. Um, I think a lot of this, this behavior is just unregulated, not looked at. I mean, who's who's gonna go in and tell them they can't do this? Um, what body is going? I mean, it's The New York Times, The Washington Post.

He wrote a book called Information Wars that we all had to read when we were doing the Twitter files because we didn't know about this organization. And, you know, talked openly about how he thought, Uh, the Trump campaign, he in it, he recognized the same techniques that he saw from ISIS and from Russia. So they're, they're.

Now they see all this is all part of a piece, you know? And that is what I think is dangerous is that we're sort of bringing the ethos of military counter messaging from the War on terror. We're bringing that home, and the enemy is now the domestic voter. But right, okay, so.

Um, the the more modern belief is that that's outdated, that because the Russians don't do that, that we have to. Um, we shouldn't have those restraints. So we have to worry now about sort of phony influence operations in the United States. And if you look at it in that things through that lens, suddenly things like Russia start to make a little bit more sense. Right? Because you can imagine somebody in the intelligence service is saying, Well, Donald Trump is part of this, uh, nexus of, um, anti-American forces and anything's fair game against that kind of person.

And but I just, I'm an adult man and I don't want to be told what to think. And I'm not going to be, period, under any circumstances, because I'm not a slave. So, but unanswered is the question, like, why, why? why? Is that a requirement of living in the United States, where I've lived my whole life, hating Russia, like?

What does that have to do with anything like, how do we get there of all countries?

Especially compared to when Russia actually was a major. I mean, it wasn't nearly this intense in the 70s and 80s. I was here. It was not right. Well, of course, not in fact, people said.

Of course, no one's pro-Soviet in normal person world, but it would be kind of nice to be at peace. The nuclear war is really scary and like, let's avoid that. I mean, that was the view that I remember as a child, right?

It feels a lot like the Soviet government of the early 80s, right? Where, you know, Joe Biden would would have fit in perfectly. Uh, in the politburo of the early, right. Many times, yeah, I mean, he's, he's the doddering old, yes, physically dead leader, uh, who is who still has a a title? Because, you know?

Um, and his corporate driver is drunk, passed out in the back, um, so he had to drive himself. He gets stopped by the police and the cop sees him, salutes, goes back to the car, and the other cop says, Who is that? and he goes. I don't know, but garbage office is driver.

Uh, and that's how you feel about America now. Who's who's running this country? Does anybody know who is running the country? Is it Jake Sullivan?

I mean, I mean, you'd have to make a guess, would you? wouldn't you? I mean, somebody has to have the final say about these things, and it can't be Biden. I just think that's a very weird thing to not know, and no one seems curious about it either, right? Where are the stories about that? Who's that?

Well, I mean, then what? The Wall Street Journal just did a story about that, read it.

It's so bizarre.

And if the commander-in-chief is non-compass menace, and I mean, we're, the ship is listing, it's on its side. Where are the people saying? You know, I hate Trump, I love by politics don't even matter. At this level, we're on the verge of nuclear war.

That's not acceptable, let's pull back. I have not even heard any person say that.

And you know, people would be panicking, right? Because at any minute, you know, we're all relying on somebody like Putin being rational, which is already. You know, I made that mistake in thinking that he would never invade Ukraine. I thought that too. And um, so what are we banking on? The on? The idea that if, you know, we, if we launch some kind of a weapon into the Russian territory, that they're not gonna hit us? What do you think?

I mean, I I think the people who are who are prosecuting the conflict from our side. I'm. I'm very familiar with their mindset because I I knew a lot of these folks when I was in Russia. They're not. It's kind of like all the president's, president's men.

These aren't very bright guys, yeah, and things have gotten out of hand and I I think that they. They have no idea what they're doing. And this could easily get out of hand very, very quickly. Because they're messianic about this, they know they, they think they think they must, um, continue this conflict. Whereas the one thing that I thought Barack Obama was sensible about was like, you know, when the Crimea thing happened, I agree. Look, it's not, you know what? It's always going to be more important to them than it is to be, yes.

Uh, and that again, I don't have strong feelings about Crimea. I've never been there. But I I think I know as a factual matter that that is a trigger for nuclear war right there.

They created the territory as, um, sort of on a whim, you know, in the middle of the Soviet period. Uh, the lines are very arbitrary, they're not drawn along, you know, real linguistic or cultural lines. And if you're, if you've been to the place, you'll find that it's. It's very Russian in some parts, and very Ukrainian and others. I'm sure that's changing now, but um, but the people who are who are pushing this, they they have no knowledge of that whatsoever.

It's the same thing as when I, when I was in Russia. They they've been told one thing, and so, you know, Ukraine to them is like Switzerland, and we're saving it from Russia. Whereas the reality is that it's, it's nothing like that in reality. And I, I don't know how dangerous do you think that? Do you think they are?

I think they're crazy.

They're criminals, they know that they will be exposed as such, and they've also reached kind of the apogee of American empire. Anyway. It's all downhill from here. I do think that they feel this and and I think they want to extinguish the society and I. That's such an incredibly dark thing to say.

I hesitate even to say it, but I don't see a rational explanation for any of this behavior at all. I don't think it advances anyone's aims, including their own right. I don't believe that Larry Fink is like, orchestrating all this so Blackrock can get even richer. I think they want to get richer. I think Larry Fink's a bad guy, obviously, but I don't think it's. Or Lockheed Martin, that's exactly right.

The defense contractors. That's all true on one level, but that's not the explanation. No, no, it's way deeper than that. I think this is a spiritual thing, and I do think societies, um, kill themselves just as people do. And I think that's what we're, clearly, that's what we're seeing.

I mean, tell me how. That's not what we're seeing, and I think that's just such an ugly idea. Again, it, it hurts me to articulate it, but you asked, so that's what I honestly think, well, I mean.

That's how I thought, you know, like, there's got to be some end game that they're going for. Um, and the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think. And because, um, there's something darker going on, yes, in the culture of people who run this country, that it's inaccessible. If you're trying to, like, assign motives to it, right? They could easily, like, just take the problem with Donald Trump.

They could easily defeat Donald Trump as a political entity if they just if they were thinking as political consultants did in the 90s or 80s, right? Like they would just make some subtle adjustments, they would throw a bone to to working people. And and um, you know, they would put a forward, a candidate who isn't, you know, physically dead, and and they would win, right? Uh, but no, that for them. I think it's a principle that a certain kind of voter not have a say in things, and I don't. That's just totally counterintuitive to me.

I don't, I just don't understand that, you know, um, but.

Whereas it's, it's incredibly obvious if you go out in the campaign trail and talk to people who who vote for Trump, that they do it for a million different reasons, right, you know, ranging from, you know, the the town that I live in used to be a booming economic center, and now it's it's dead, right? It, you know, it looks, it looks like a a third world country.

To there, there isn't a functioning hospital. Within 300 miles of where I live. The Walmart is now the only place where you can buy anything for 50 miles. Like, there's a million reasons. Um, and then there's some social issues, too.

Uh, but once upon a time, I mean, I. I remember not so long ago even Bill Clinton talking about trying to reclaim some of those working class voters.

That's every county in West Virginia in 1992, and of course, I think he lost California. Wow, and so imagine a Democrat winning any county in West Virginia.

Well, they wouldn't want to win, no, they.

As you know, if you've covered campaigns, you cannot win if you, if you, if you have hostility towards the voters.

He probably does the same thing in the spare time, he goes to the same websites and we eat to the same restaurant. We know that, right, exactly. And and you know, so when he opens his mouth, people think, Yeah, you know, I can connect with this guy now. It's a lot of it is fake, right? And and the policy prescriptions may not make any sense.

And the thing that shocks me most is the actual hostility that people in D.C. were, effectively I'm from have for the rest of the country. Like they hate the people in the country, they do, they don't just look down on them. I thought it was just like looking down on them in a snobbish way, right?

No, it's like a hostility, right? When they die, and you saw this during Covet. Oh, he didn't get the vaccine, he died. I'm glad he died.

Like, I'm glad he died, right, American, right, right, right. I'm not happy when a gang member dies in the south side of Chicago. No, I'm sure I'm serious.

I couldn't be more opposed to gang members outside of Chicago, but like, I don't know, it's like, a, it's a human being, right American like.

I think it's sad, actually.

And and they they hate these people, right? But why I, I don't understand, you know. Like once upon again, not long ago, entertainers wanted to connect, yeah, with ordinary people, now they they don't like that audience.

They wouldn't want to get applauded from that audience, audience. Um, and politicians don't either. They they, they want to be elected by the right people, or, um, they want. They want to do it without the help of the wrong kind of voters. But they can't because they're outnumbered, you know, um, so I. It's a crazy time, but. But. But I do think you're right that if you try to figure this out by assigning rational motives wOUlD to any of this. It doesn't make any sense. It won't work, so we're on a slide, as you said at the very outset.

Slow it down. Is it inevitable? Like, what if you could project, what would?

What do you see?

And, uh, they don't come back, that's true, isn't it, right? And, and, you know, in the United States, uh, there was a reverence once for for, um, the First Amendment, for the whole Bill of Rights, that it just doesn't exist anymore. There's this kind of like, defeatist or unbelieving attitude about it. And that's been another revelation of, you know, working on stories like the Twitter files is finding out that people don't really. They don't have the same feeling about the First Amendment that people did in the 80s and 90s, or even the early 2000s.

I mean, even Rob Reiner does the American president, right? And it's all about how, um, you know, the ACLU, and, you know, being allowed to burn the flag. And yes, and he's, you know, he's on the other side of this thing now, right? Like, and and so what happened to all those people, what happened to that that belief?

And and, uh, the system, I mean, for all of them. You know, you mentioned that you and I came from probably from different political, uh, places at one point in time. I, I. I think we probably both share a belief that America on some level worked right. It had, well, it had all kinds of flaws. Um, but you know, immigrants came here from all over the world, they built good lives, and they chose to stay here.

I mean, my family, you know, came from different parts of the world. And um, this this country is screwed up. I like the fact that it's screwed up, uh, but it works. This, this system, um, has has been a great thing and people don't believe that. I think they've lost that belief. I think, um, which is so sad, uh.

I just didn't, you know, because, like, yeah, America screwed up in a lot of ways. Of course. First of all, it's huge, so of course it's screwed up. everything big is screwed up.

Actually, you can't allow that. I mean, if you're in a battle and the officers desert, they get shot for that and allowed to do that. Like, you need leadership in order to preserve whatever it is that you have right, right, and so I blame the leaders 100. And without leadership, of course, things fall apart. And no one's willing to stand and be like, No, you know, the dignity of the average person is not just a good thing.

It's the core of the enterprise, it's essential you give that up, we're done.

And um, you're not allowed to do this period. Yeah, I, I agree.

I don't know, but the only thing I know is, I think, you know, you have to keep doing this stuff and telling people about it. And in the hopes that it will get turned around. So last question, you um?

Yeah, try that in Mexico. Yeah, exactly, see what happens, you know? Yeah, um, you know, but it's gotten weird here.

I mean, even, look, even even the Bannon story. There's an element of that where it may not be as much about him as a political figure as it is about War Room, necessarily.

They were kind of saying that out in the open, you know? And um, and even even my experience. Look, look, you had the Faiza thing happened. Um, when I. When I did the Twitter files, an IRS agent showed up in my house while I was testifying to to Congress. Um, so that's absolutely crazy, yeah.

No, I, I thought it had to be a coincidence, but I don't think I now. No, no longer think it is, and I do worry about it. I mean, I, I haven't even shared this with my wife yet. But I thought it might be time for us to get another a house and some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty. Yeah, well, there aren't many, you know? Um, yeah, which is a problem, all right.

I'm aware of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um, I, I never had those thoughts, even even a year ago, but, uh, you must have had them.

A lot of them are out of the country, or running from the law, or on the wrong side of the intelligence services. And, um, you know, there's no way that somebody's not.

Aware of what's going on, you know of what I do, and that's that's unnerving on one level. But yes, this, this, this recent thing about, you know, even even the stuff involving the epic times. And um, Alex Jones, you know, I was never a fan of his. He had some choice things to say about me, but I think this whole thing started with, uh, the decision to take him off, um, the internet, and.

That's troubling, you know? Like they, they clearly see in journalists and information as a threat. And, um, I don't think it's an accident that there aren't that many places left to publish, and, uh, there aren't that many people left doing real journalism.

I listened to those conversations, they, they, they were very resentful, the fact that they. He didn't have to go through their approval system. You know, um, but he's not on Twitter anymore. And, you know, did? I mean, it's extraordinary that Joe Biden's the only candidate in this election who hasn't been censored in some way.

RFK has been censored. Promise Swami's got to have been booted off LinkedIn for periods of time. I mean, like Jill Stein, for that matter, Jill Stein, we found her in the Twitter fellas.

She was on a on a list called Is Underscore Russian, which was Jill Stein. Yes, yes, her, she and they hear themselves. I mean, can they?

To them Assange, Jill Stein, you know, isis, whatever, they're all lumped together. Yeah, yeah, so Snowden, Exactly. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's. These are crazy times.

Um, what is there anything that can get you to stop? Uh, no, I mean, I've got kids, so I'm obviously not completely invulnerable, right? But um, but I I think, I think the world, America needs journalists, and again, our first. The first thing that we have to be is, um, you know, tough about it, right? And so you got to get knocked off before you you give up, I think it would you, you shouldn't give up, right?

I mean, all my heroes and journalism didn't, didn't do that, so I'm not gonna do that, I don't think.

I appreciate it.