The Ben Shapiro Show - Matt Taibbi | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 127

00:00:00.000 Our job as journalists, the way I see it, is not to make a pronouncement, not to convince people to think one way or the other, but to explain why things happen.

00:00:10.000 Suddenly they're telling us as reporters, we can't include something that's true because it goes against some kind of narrative.

00:00:18.000 Colorful, sharp, liberal, often satirical, journalist for 15 years at Rolling Stone with famous articles like The Great American Bubble Machine, in which Matt Taibbi refers to Goldman Sachs as a, quote, vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.

00:00:32.000 Yet, Matt and I are finding a rather large common ground in the year 2022.

00:00:35.000 Matt Taibbi writes across the board in finance, sports, international policy, presidential campaign trails, and everything else.

00:00:42.000 He started overseas, specifically in Uzbekistan, until being deported for a piece at the Associated Press that was critical of the country's president.

00:00:49.000 Then in Russia, Matt edited The Exile, an irreverent newspaper for Moscow's expatriate community. 1.00

00:00:54.000 His time there is told in his first book, The Exile, Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.

00:00:59.000 His entire career is branded by this highly subjective, often brazen journalism, and it's done well for him.

00:01:04.000 But as we've seen, the left has now fractured, castigating any and every liberal who doesn't accept their orthodoxy without questions.

00:01:10.000 Liberals like Matt.

00:01:12.000 In 2020, Matt announced the majority of his work would no longer be published at Rolling Stone.

00:01:16.000 He planted his own flag at Substack, continuing journalism independently.

00:01:20.000 In this episode we discuss what's left for liberalism and even journalism now, plus some stories from his time on the presidential campaign trail, and what happened after Matt committed the egregious sin of reviewing Matt Walsh's What Is A Woman.

00:01:30.000 Hey, hey, welcome back.

00:01:43.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

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00:01:51.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Matt Taibbi.

00:01:54.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:01:57.000 Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday and click that link in the episode description.

00:02:02.000 Use code Ben for 25% off.

00:02:03.000 You'll have access to all of the full conversations with everyone Thanks so much for having me, Ben.

00:02:10.000 Appreciate it.

00:02:12.000 So what, why don't we start with the obvious here, Matt, which is that it's super weird that we're talking to each other.

00:02:16.000 So like 15, 15 years ago, this would have been almost unthinkable, right?

00:02:19.000 I was working at Breitbart circa about 2012, 2013, and you were writing for Rolling Stone and it was, you know, pitched battles in the streets and all the rest.

00:02:28.000 And yet now here we are.

00:02:30.000 So what exactly changed?

00:02:32.000 Do you think that it's now made conversations like this possible on the one hand and forbidden on the other?

00:02:38.000 Well, I think there's been a significant changing of what the mentality is on what used to be my side of the aisle.

00:02:45.000 I mean, people like me, I'm basically like a middle-of-the-road, ACLU, old-school liberal.

00:02:52.000 You know, I believe in free speech, civil liberties, due process, all those things.

00:02:58.000 People like me are really Kind of dinosaurs are no longer welcome on the new left, which has taken this dramatic turn towards censoriousness and toward a more authoritarian approach to some problems.

00:03:14.000 I think there's a belief that the old leftist approach or the old liberal approach is ineffective.

00:03:24.000 And so, you know, we've all been sort of kicked out of the club, basically.

00:03:28.000 So without changing any point of view at all, really, suddenly people like you and me are, you know, media bedfellows.

00:03:37.000 Yeah, Matt, this is something that I find just utterly bewildering.

00:03:39.000 Because if you watch sort of the progress of American politics since the 1960s, there's no question that liberalism was winning.

00:03:44.000 I mean, on nearly every front, social front, fiscal front, maybe even the foreign policy front, maybe.

00:03:50.000 But on the first two, for sure.

00:03:51.000 I mean, there's no question that the left had been in the ascendancy my entire lifetime.

00:03:55.000 And so the sort of radical shift to, you guys are wildly ineffective.

00:03:58.000 Stop talking to people on the other side.

00:04:00.000 We can't have free speech.

00:04:01.000 We need to lock this stuff down to avoid offending people.

00:04:04.000 Where do you think this is coming from?

00:04:06.000 I have no idea, but I totally agree with you.

00:04:09.000 When I was growing up, there would have been no thought at all of conservatism as an attractive ideology for a young person.

00:04:17.000 That was completely out of the realm of possibility.

00:04:21.000 I think you see it very significantly with something like humor.

00:04:25.000 There's just no sense of humor on the political left now, and that used to be the exclusive province of the political left once upon a time.

00:04:33.000 I mean, I grew up listening to Richard Pryor albums.

00:04:38.000 Sam Kinison, that was my education growing up.

00:04:41.000 And those were our people, we thought.

00:04:44.000 And now, all of a sudden, there's no joking allowed on this side of the aisle.

00:04:49.000 And that's one of the things that's funny, incidentally, about Matt Walsh's movie, is that it's done with a kind of sense of humor and a satirical bent.

00:05:00.000 That's sort of taboo on our side of the aisle now, which I find really strange because that shift happened almost overnight and imperceptibly.

00:05:11.000 So Matt, you mentioned Matt Walsh's movie, What is a Woman, which is a massively successful documentary for us.

00:05:16.000 I mean, it's an unbelievable business.

00:05:17.000 It hasn't received a single mainstream review.

00:05:19.000 And of course, when we sent out the movie for review to all of the reviewers, we got back just nasty notes, cursing, people saying they definitely would not watch it.

00:05:27.000 Even the prospect of having received the email was apparently some sort of Digital form of bubonic plague to even have been reached out to meant that you are now infected and you had to be quarantined for a particular period of time.

00:05:39.000 You wrote about this.

00:05:40.000 You wrote about the fact that people on the left were either completely ignoring the film or just ripping it without having seen it.

00:05:45.000 And you received an extraordinary amount of blowback.

00:05:47.000 Can you talk about what drove you to write the piece and then what was the blowback like?

00:05:51.000 Yeah, so first of all, I had kind of tried to stay away from the issue.

00:05:56.000 You know, it's complicated.

00:05:57.000 I try to avoid issues that I don't know a whole lot about.

00:06:01.000 But I had done a couple of stories that touched on this basically from the speech angle.

00:06:07.000 And I'd had a really unusual experience.

00:06:09.000 I mean, I've been a reporter for 30 years now, and it's always the same method.

00:06:14.000 You call around a whole bunch of people, you ask them all what they think, and then at the end, you kind of aggregate all the opinions and figure out where the story is.

00:06:23.000 But with the trans issue, what I found is I would call some people and they would talk to me.

00:06:27.000 And then there'd be this other group of people who would be furious that you even called, would refuse to have any kind of discussion, would call you a transphobe for even asking certain kinds of questions.

00:06:37.000 And this is before you even have a point of view on the subject.

00:06:41.000 So I was, you know, I thought that was odd.

00:06:44.000 And then I had done an interview with a woman named Kara Dansky, who is a feminist, a gender critical feminist.

00:06:52.000 And it's not that I purposely shelved it.

00:06:56.000 I just didn't want to deal with the blowback that I knew was going to come.

00:06:59.000 I kept telling myself it wasn't the right time.

00:07:02.000 So I felt guiltier and guiltier about that as time progressed.

00:07:07.000 And when Matt's movie came out, when When as a Woman came out, I realized I thought this was an opportunity to kind of fix that problem of having, you know, not run that interview.

00:07:18.000 So I did both at once.

00:07:20.000 I reviewed Matt's movie and ran that interview at the same time.

00:07:23.000 And the response was unbelievable.

00:07:26.000 Just for reviewing the movie, forget about what I said about it, you know, I lost friends over that.

00:07:32.000 There were people who I've known for decades who have now basically said that I'm a transphobe and I'm kind of out of their loop now.

00:07:44.000 I'm really amazed by that response, and it's not unique to you.

00:07:47.000 I mean, we've seen this.

00:07:48.000 I have, you know, people who I'm friendly with on the left, people like Jessie Singel, who used to write for New York Magazine, and Jessie's had exactly the same issues.

00:07:54.000 Katie Herzog, who is a lesbian, has had exactly the same issues. 0.83

00:07:57.000 Emily Bazelon recently wrote a piece for New York Magazine that I think was actually fairly friendly toward the trans agenda, and she was ripped up and down on that.

00:08:06.000 I'm gonna get some more on this in just one second.

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00:09:21.000 So, unfortunately, I think that what you went through is not a unique experience.

00:09:25.000 It seems like a lot of what's happened in politics, and maybe this is the big difference between traditional liberals and the new left movement, is a question of how people identify.

00:09:34.000 And I don't mean identify in terms of gender.

00:09:35.000 I mean, what people see as the core of them.

00:09:38.000 So when people feel that the core of them is their politics, that the politics is who I am, and then there's an attack on their politics, it's an attack on core identity, it's an attack on me, and that must never be allowed, and to even sit down with anybody who would attack my politics means that you are trying to erase me.

00:09:53.000 A lot of the language that's now applied, that used to be applied on issues that are immutable, like issues of biology, now it's applied to political viewpoint.

00:10:04.000 You don't see me unless you just agree with me.

00:10:06.000 And to sit down with somebody who disagrees is somehow seen as a mark of, as you say, phobia.

00:10:11.000 Yeah, and that's especially problematic in my job, right?

00:10:14.000 If you're a reporter, I mean, your job is to sit down with all types of people, and we're not supposed to render judgment.

00:10:21.000 We're supposed to understand, primarily.

00:10:24.000 One of the first moments when I realized something really dramatic had changed on our side of the aisle came in the 2016 election, and I was doing a campaign story.

00:10:34.000 I had covered the presidential elections for Rolling Stone for Um, five election campaigns.

00:10:42.000 And I interviewed a guy from Wisconsin who said, uh, you know, my whole family was Democrat.

00:10:48.000 Uh, we've never voted for Republican.

00:10:50.000 I'm a union member, but they lied to us about NAFTA and I'm going to vote for Trump because, you know, they lied to us.

00:10:58.000 And I put that in my piece.

00:11:00.000 I didn't have an opinion on it.

00:11:01.000 I just put it in the piece.

00:11:02.000 And I got all this blowback from colleagues who were saying, you're validating the economic insecurity argument.

00:11:10.000 You know, Trump is entirely about race.

00:11:12.000 It's entirely about racism and xenophobia.

00:11:14.000 And, you know, I understood where they were coming from.

00:11:20.000 Our job as journalists, the way I see it, is not to make a pronouncement, not to convince people to think one way or the other, but to explain why things happen.

00:11:30.000 And I think Trump was a phenomenon that had a lot of explanations.

00:11:34.000 And one of them was the one that this guy in Wisconsin was talking about.

00:11:39.000 He felt lied to.

00:11:40.000 And so suddenly they're telling us as reporters, we can't include something that's true because it goes against some kind of narrative.

00:11:48.000 That was crazy.

00:11:49.000 I had never seen that in journalism before.

00:11:51.000 And that was a signal to me that something big was going on.

00:11:57.000 Yeah, Matt, and this is sort of a broader theme that you've been writing about for years, but it's really been exacerbated, I think, on all sides of the political aisle, and that is just institutional distrust.

00:12:04.000 Now, the left had a sort of congenital institutional distrust with regard to, say, corporate America, and the right was more trusting, and now the right is not trusting with regard to corporate America.

00:12:11.000 Or the right had a congenital trust of, say, the FBI, and now the right is not trusting of the FBI.

00:12:17.000 And it feels like there's now sort of a consensus position over the last several years.

00:12:20.000 That's an anti-establishment consensus.

00:12:23.000 It's now a consensus that the institutions have dramatically failed us and that the people who continue to promote those institutions are sort of whistling past the graveyard.

00:12:32.000 And it's creating some very weird political undercurrents and dynamics.

00:12:36.000 Absolutely, and if you didn't see that as a primary driver of what was going on in 2016, you were in a very good campaign report, I don't think.

00:12:47.000 I think it was very obvious in 2016 that what drove both the Bernie Sanders movement and the Trump movement was this enormous groundswell of distrust towards institutional America.

00:13:00.000 And Trump picked up on it very early, whether he went after NATO or the intelligence services and especially us.

00:13:08.000 I remember this.

00:13:09.000 I was in these halls when we'd all be behind the rope line in the press corps and Trump would start to go after us. 0.97

00:13:17.000 And he would say, look at those bloodsuckers. 0.98

00:13:19.000 They hate you, middle America. 0.99

00:13:22.000 They want me to lose.

00:13:23.000 They want you to lose.

00:13:25.000 And people would throw stuff at us.

00:13:27.000 And I, you know, a lot of the reporters didn't understand it.

00:13:30.000 I totally got it, you know, because I what I saw was these are people who felt that the press and all these other institutions had betrayed them, you know, especially after 2008.

00:13:40.000 And it made total sense to me.

00:13:43.000 But I think to a lot of other people, it doesn't that they still don't get it, that this is out there, that middle America has feels this way.

00:13:51.000 And I'm flabbergasted that there are still people who don't see it.

00:13:57.000 It really is kind of amazing because I think that the blinders have really come off to the idea that the people who purport to speak for particular institutions are really just speaking for themselves.

00:14:06.000 And that the institutions in which we place our trust are a guise for their own power.

00:14:10.000 Now this struck me pretty forcibly in the last few weeks actually.

00:14:13.000 when I was looking at what was going on at the World Economic Forum.

00:14:15.000 You had people like Klaus Schwab who was out there saying, we have the power in this room to remake the world in our own image.

00:14:22.000 And I was thinking, wait, hold up a second.

00:14:23.000 You a second ago were talking about the power of laissez-faire economics and the power of capitalism.

00:14:27.000 And as a person who's conservative libertarian minded on economics I was like, OK, well, that part sounds good.

00:14:34.000 But then you immediately shift into, OK, but we and our friends, we who are answerable to no one, can now decide what policies ought to be purveyed to the vast majority of the globe.

00:14:44.000 I feel like you're lying to me.

00:14:45.000 What you're basically saying to me right now is that you want to use the power of institutions you didn't create in order to ram down an agenda that none of us approved.

00:14:52.000 And it feels like that's happening in institution after institution.

00:14:55.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:14:56.000 And this may be something that I had a little bit of a sneak peek look at because I lived in Russia for 10 years before I moved back to the States in the early 2000s.

00:15:07.000 And those meetings at Davos, where officials who were close to the Yeltsin administration, there were lots of backroom deals that were done.

00:15:17.000 you know, in Switzerland that had an enormous impact on the future of Russia at the time.

00:15:23.000 And I had to pay a lot of attention to that.

00:15:25.000 That was not something that I think the average American had to think about ever until very recently.

00:15:31.000 But now we know we do have to think about these sort of unaccountable international institutions or whether, you know, domestically here in the United States, institutions like the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, you know, the sort of permanent bureaucracies, you know, they do have an impact on politics.

00:15:50.000 I think we've seen this very graphically and, uh, the ordinary American is now, I think, more attuned to that than they ever have been before.

00:15:59.000 So what do you think that the solution to some of that stuff is going to be?

00:16:02.000 Because there's one mentality which is, okay, burn it all down, get rid of all these institutions, start ground up, or don't start over at all.

00:16:09.000 And the other is we can kind of correct within the institution.

00:16:12.000 It seems like the natural inclination for people within the institutions is to do neither of those.

00:16:17.000 It's just a kind of turtle.

00:16:20.000 Just go into the shell, claim that everybody who opposes you is obviously some sort of extremist.

00:16:24.000 You see this from big tech, which is trying to shut down opinions they don't like, or you see it from, for example, during COVID, the CDC, which would immediately declare that their public health opinions were the science.

00:16:35.000 And then five months later, they would realize that they were wrong, and that became the new science.

00:16:39.000 But how do you think that that's going to shake out?

00:16:42.000 Because, and what we're talking about in terms of the reaction could be quite dangerous.

00:16:46.000 I mean, some of these institutions are still kind of necessary, and they do need a serious Yeah, it's an enormous societal problem when the public doesn't trust institutions, you know, beginning with the media, frankly.

00:17:00.000 I think it's a huge problem when people don't trust the news that they get over the airwaves.

00:17:07.000 I mean, I've written about this.

00:17:09.000 Walter Cronkite was voted the most trustworthy person in America twice, once at the beginning of the 70s and once in the middle of the 80s.

00:17:17.000 That would never happen today.

00:17:18.000 Like, the most trustworthy person in America being a mainstream news anchor would never happen today.

00:17:24.000 But you need, the public needs to have some faith in the FBI and, you know, in all these other institutions.

00:17:32.000 But I think you're right.

00:17:33.000 I think the inclination of the people who are sitting in those chairs right now is not to fix the problem or not to recognize the problem.

00:17:41.000 The only solution, from where I sit, is they have to govern better.

00:17:44.000 They have to do a better job of providing for the population.

00:17:48.000 And that seems to be the last thing that occurs to them.

00:17:51.000 They all want to get into power through some kind of political machination, whether it's impeaching the people in the other party or using some kind of messaging campaign that they think will temporarily get them over.

00:18:06.000 It's not going to work.

00:18:07.000 The only thing that's going to work is actually delivering for people and getting them better jobs and getting them better lifestyles.

00:18:14.000 And they just don't want to do it.

00:18:15.000 I don't understand why.

00:18:16.000 Yeah, I mean, it is one of the big mysteries is watching as, for example, the Biden administration, which pursues ideological goals over stuff that clearly works, is kind of insane.

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00:19:37.000 So I want to get your opinion on the Biden administration so far.

00:19:40.000 So when Joe Biden won the election?

00:19:42.000 The basic concept was dead person who's not going to do a lot.

00:19:46.000 That was pretty much what he was running on.

00:19:49.000 That was sort of the appeal.

00:19:50.000 It was okay.

00:19:51.000 Yeah, things were going pretty well economically and even foreign policy wise up until the pandemic.

00:19:55.000 And then Trump says crazy stuff on TV and he tweets a lot of crazy stuff and he's incredibly tiring.

00:19:59.000 And so a lot of Americans were like, I just don't want that.

00:20:03.000 So let's find somebody who's Almost inanimate.

00:20:06.000 And we'll put that person in office to basically just kind of leave things alone and bring us back to some sort of stasis.

00:20:12.000 And instead, Joe Biden comes in and he immediately starts talking about world-breaking change.

00:20:16.000 He's going to do Build Back Better.

00:20:17.000 He's going to blow out the spending.

00:20:19.000 He's going to completely remake where we are in terms of foreign policy by both pulling out of Afghanistan and then getting us involved in a pretty protracted conflict in Ukraine.

00:20:28.000 And Americans are looking at all this and going, I don't understand what you are doing or why you are doing it.

00:20:33.000 What could Joe Biden do, do you think, to pull out of the tailspin?

00:20:36.000 Or do you think this was sort of baked into the cake that the establishment politics are just such that this was going to happen no matter what?

00:20:42.000 I think this is going to happen no matter what.

00:20:45.000 You know, I covered Biden's campaign until, of course, he stopped campaigning.

00:20:51.000 And, you know, the obvious idea behind Joe Biden was they looked at what happened in 2016 and they saw Hillary Clinton ran as an insider.

00:21:02.000 Like, her whole pitch to America was, I've been in Washington for 25 years, I know how things work.

00:21:08.000 You know, you can trust me at three o'clock in the morning when there's a crisis.

00:21:13.000 But, you know, that's classic Democratic Party.

00:21:16.000 They had no sense that the entire population, the one thing they hated most at that time, was the political insider.

00:21:22.000 So of course that was a disastrous philosophy.

00:21:25.000 The whole idea behind Joe Biden is he has, like, This sliver of credibility as an ordinary person through his Scranton Joe persona, this idea that he's, you know, he comes from a family that, you know, in some distant way is working class.

00:21:42.000 But he hasn't, he of course hasn't governed that way, right?

00:21:46.000 And he's governed essentially through this I think they're in a lot of trouble.

00:21:52.000 I don't know exactly what they're going to run on.

00:21:55.000 most of America and it doesn't translate well on television and it particularly doesn't translate when the guy is basically a corpse who doesn't understand what he's saying on TV.

00:22:05.000 So I think they're in a lot of trouble.

00:22:07.000 I mean I don't know exactly what they're going to run on.

00:22:11.000 The midterms already look like they're a disaster that is going to happen, but what happens in the next presidential election is an even bigger mystery.

00:22:20.000 I have no idea where they're going with that.

00:22:24.000 I mean, it looks as though what they really want to run on is Trump because Biden beat Trump.

00:22:28.000 And so if he just keeps running against Trump, then he thinks that he's going to win.

00:22:32.000 I think that what he fails to recognize a couple of things.

00:22:34.000 One, Trump actually is not on the ballot in 2022 and who knows whether he'll be on the ballot in 2024.

00:22:38.000 That's becoming more and more of an issue.

00:22:40.000 But, you know, beyond that, the referendum is now on you.

00:22:43.000 You're the President of the United States, and you're not just the guy who gets to sit outside and critique the guy who's tweeting on the toilet.

00:22:49.000 You're the one who actually is in charge of things.

00:22:51.000 And Joe Biden seems to have this tendency to treat his presidency as though he were an observer to his own presidency.

00:22:57.000 He'll say things, And it appears that he's just been made aware of them, or he'll yell at gas companies.

00:23:04.000 He'll be like, why don't you guys just produce more?

00:23:06.000 I don't know how you think government works, but you yelling at people is not typically how government works or how policy works.

00:23:13.000 And so I wonder, you know, they really are doubling down on a lot of the January 6th kind of stuff.

00:23:17.000 I wonder how you think that's playing or what you think that impact has.

00:23:21.000 I don't think that stuff works.

00:23:22.000 Again, you go back to 2016, Hillary Clinton, if I remember correctly, 90% of the money she spent on advertising was on negative ads.

00:23:34.000 They had made a decision, essentially, they were going to run on Trump's negatives.

00:23:37.000 And they thought that was going to get them across the goal line.

00:23:40.000 And it didn't.

00:23:41.000 They spent four years of Trump's presidency essentially doing the Russiagate thing and trying to run against that.

00:23:48.000 And then it was Ukrainegate, and they tried to run against that.

00:23:52.000 And they never came out with a positive plan for what their theory was of how they were going to get ordinary America back on its feet, how they were going to restore Jobs in places that had lost them.

00:24:08.000 And they're still not doing that.

00:24:10.000 They still think it's a political, you know, there's some kind of easy political fix to the question of getting elected.

00:24:18.000 I think they just lucked out, frankly, that the pandemic hit.

00:24:22.000 Had it not been for that, they might even have lost in 2020.

00:24:28.000 And, you know, going forward, if they think they're going to win because of January 6th, Regardless of what I might think about that or anybody else might think about that, I think they're deluded.

00:24:38.000 It's the same delusion that got them into trouble in 2016.

00:24:43.000 One of the fascinating things that I think has happened in democratic politics is, as we started off the conversation with, the kind of unwillingness to run on a broad populist message.

00:24:52.000 Even Bernie Sanders, right?

00:24:54.000 his basic idea, which was this broad kind of socialistic populism, was that it is equally appealing to all racial groups. I'm not going to campaign, he made this pretty clear in 2016, for example, I'm not going to campaign on the basis of race-specific policies. I'm just going to say that a rising tide lifts all boats, and so if we redistribute the way that I want to redistribute, everyone will be helped. My solution to racial inequality is going to be effectively a socialist redistributionism.

00:25:18.000 It's an economic populist message that is not racially specific.

00:25:22.000 And he was hit so hard by the racialized left that he then went woker in 2020.

00:25:27.000 To no effect, by the way.

00:25:28.000 He earned no additional votes based on that.

00:25:31.000 And it feels like that's been the direction of the Democratic Party for quite a while.

00:25:34.000 And it almost feels like it's been that way really since 2012 or so.

00:25:39.000 And then in 2008, Barack Obama ran as a great unifier.

00:25:41.000 We're moving past our racialized moment.

00:25:43.000 We're going to, in my person, I'm a unifying figure.

00:25:47.000 And then he governed to the left.

00:25:48.000 And by 2012, he had basically stopped with a lot of the unifying rhetoric on things like race.

00:25:52.000 And it was about how Trayvon, his son could have been Trayvon Martin.

00:25:56.000 And what happened in Ferguson, Missouri was indicative of broader national trends with regard to race.

00:26:01.000 And the Democratic Party fell in love with this theory that they could replicate what Obama did in 2012, which was actually Not a replicable phenomenon.

00:26:09.000 In 2012, he cobbled together this heavily multiracial, college-educated white ladies coalition. 0.61

00:26:14.000 And the Democratic Party, I think, figured from there on in, this was going to be the coalition.

00:26:18.000 And they failed to recognize a couple of things.

00:26:20.000 One, Barack Obama was a unique candidate.

00:26:22.000 And two, that was a unique point in time.

00:26:24.000 And maybe a third thing, which is that when you create a racialized population, there's going to be a backlash.

00:26:29.000 And that backlash includes a huge percentage of white Americans and maybe people who don't want to identify as racially essential members of a group, as you're seeing with Hispanics now, who are going to say, well, I'm not really interested in this kind of politics.

00:26:40.000 I know Bernie pretty well.

00:26:42.000 I go back with him a long way.

00:26:43.000 Way back in 2005, I did a story with him where he invited me to hang out for a month in Congress.

00:26:50.000 He was still in the House back then.

00:26:51.000 He wanted people to know how the House worked.

00:26:53.000 And he did something that no politician, no normal politician would do, which is just take me on a tour of how everything works.

00:27:00.000 The rules committee, you know, who is influencing what.

00:27:04.000 And you're absolutely right.

00:27:06.000 In 2016, he was drawing blood on Hillary Clinton early in that race.

00:27:10.000 And when he started going after her about her connections to these big banks that were paying her these massive amounts of money for speaking fees, and a lot of these were the same banks that had gotten, you know, people into trouble in 2008, the Democratic Party tried all these responses and none of them worked until Hillary did this thing that I think was Brilliant, but it radically changed the direction of the Democratic Party.

00:27:37.000 She said, well, if we broke up all the banks today, would that end racism?

00:27:43.000 And it just deflected the conversation.

00:27:46.000 And I think for somebody like Bernie, and I don't want to psychoanalyze him, but somebody who's grown up in kind of the left liberal ecosystem, the worst thing in the world is to be accused of being like racially regressive to be or being a bigot.

00:28:03.000 I think it was paralyzing to his campaign.

00:28:05.000 I think he struggled with it throughout the rest of 2016 and he definitely struggled with it in the 2019-2020 race.

00:28:14.000 And it took him away from that message that I think was working.

00:28:18.000 You know, he was saying a lot of the same things, oddly enough, that Donald Trump was saying that year.

00:28:24.000 Trump even said that on the stump.

00:28:26.000 I remember listening to Donald Trump saying, you know, Bernie and I, you know, we have a lot in common.

00:28:30.000 We're saying a lot of the same things.

00:28:33.000 And, you know, there's, I think the media is trying very hard to prevent people from realizing that that populist message If somebody were to try it, it would really work, you know?

00:28:46.000 And Bernie made a big mistake, I think, tactically, by going away from that.

00:28:50.000 So in a second, I'm going to ask you about that sort of populism and the populist message and whether horseshoe theory is real or it's just that the critique is the same, but the solutions are very, very different.

00:29:01.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:29:03.000 First, let's talk about your sleep quality.

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00:30:19.000 Okay, so I want to talk about that sort of populist message, because you're exactly right.

00:30:23.000 I mean, and you see it across the board, right?

00:30:25.000 You see Donald Trump praising, for example, Bernie Sanders, or Tucker Carlson praising Elizabeth Warren's economic plan, right?

00:30:31.000 That actually has happened on the air at Fox News.

00:30:34.000 And you start thinking to yourself, okay, well, that's an interesting sort of horseshoe, or is what we're really seeing just Kind of back to what we were talking about before that the critique of the institutions is clearly correct.

00:30:44.000 It's just that everybody has wildly variant solutions to the critique on the institutions, meaning that I look at Wall Street and I say, listen, I love capitalism.

00:30:51.000 I'm a huge capitalism fan.

00:30:53.000 Wall Street is not engaging in capitalism.

00:30:55.000 They're engaging in a sort of predatory practice whereby they work hand in glove with the government and then use their power to promote ESG ideals within the corporations in which they invest.

00:31:05.000 And people on the left say, well no, the corporations are the bad guys, and if there were more government control to break up those corporations, then this would somehow foster greater fairness.

00:31:14.000 I wonder whether, in fact, sort of the temporary agreement is false, is I guess what I'm asking.

00:31:19.000 No, I think you're right.

00:31:21.000 I mean, I covered the aftermath of 2008 for nearly a decade, and I watched numerous scenes.

00:31:31.000 One comes to mind.

00:31:32.000 I covered a foreclosure court in Jacksonville, Florida.

00:31:35.000 If you remember, they were foreclosing on so many people, they had to bring judges out of retirement to do these things called rocket dockets, where they were—essentially, you would go into a conference room, and a judge would would throw somebody out of a house every three minutes or so, and there would be these old, doddering, 80-year-old judges.

00:31:55.000 Well, the people in those rooms, they weren't left or right.

00:31:57.000 They were both Republicans and Democrats.

00:32:00.000 The victims of the 2008 crash, and I think you, I actually agree with your analysis.

00:32:07.000 I think it was a perversion of capitalism.

00:32:09.000 Most of my sources back then were Wall Street people.

00:32:13.000 They were people who were saying the real problem is that the bailouts are picking winners and losers.

00:32:22.000 They're giving unfair advantages to these gigantic too-big-to-fail banks, and they're letting these mid-sized regional banks fail.

00:32:31.000 And that's not really capitalism, right?

00:32:33.000 That's not the Adam Smith ideal.

00:32:35.000 We should let failures fail and let the chips fall where they may.

00:32:41.000 But it's definitely true that people on both the left and the right, poor people, middle class people, working class people, They've both gone through the same things.

00:32:53.000 They've both been affected in the same ways, and they have a lot of the same common interests.

00:32:57.000 The critique and the answers may be different according to whatever politicians they follow, but I think they have a lot in common.

00:33:04.000 And I think there's one of the main motives of kind of the divisive media model that we have today is to keep people from realizing it, that they have those common interests.

00:33:17.000 So let's talk about the media for a second because I mean I totally agree obviously with your critique of the media.

00:33:23.000 I do wonder whether when we talk about you know media figures being widely trusted it may be that that's impossible simply because the internet basically ended that era.

00:33:29.000 That it was it was easy to say I trust Walter Cronkite when he was one of three people on TV who was talking about news.

00:33:35.000 It's a lot harder to say here is a guy I trust when you have a hundred different sources and they're all critiquing each other and usually There's something to many of the critiques.

00:33:44.000 And so, you know, listen, we have Daily Wire.

00:33:46.000 We are obviously a right-wing company.

00:33:48.000 We make no bones about that fact.

00:33:49.000 At the bottom of every one of our articles, literally every one, we have a disclaimer at the bottom saying we are a conservative media company.

00:33:55.000 Everything that we do is through the lens of our values, which frankly, I think is significantly more honest than most of the other media companies that claim that they have no bias whatsoever, but that they are just speaking the pure, unadulterated truth.

00:34:06.000 And then you have like Brian Stelter promoting whatever on CNN.

00:34:10.000 That, the breakdown in the media, I agree with you that it's, it is so important that there's not even a common, they always say there's not a common set of facts, but there really is not a common set of facts.

00:34:22.000 I mean, and that is not because people on the right are lying about the facts invariably.

00:34:28.000 That is because very often the mainstream sources are obscuring the actual facts in paragraph 17 of a New York Times article where the headline is actually wrong.

00:34:35.000 They'll put the facts in, but it's buried in paragraph 17.

00:34:39.000 Yeah, I agree with you.

00:34:40.000 I mean, I'm kind of the inverse of what your model is, right?

00:34:44.000 Like, I grew up reading Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe, and I always thought... My father was a newsman, by the way.

00:34:52.000 He was a TV reporter, and he was like a straight news reporter.

00:34:54.000 He did one editorial his entire life.

00:34:57.000 everything was sort of just the facts, man, with him.

00:35:00.000 I went the other way.

00:35:01.000 I liked the idea of being an editorializing, funny writer, but letting people know exactly what I thought about things at all times.

00:35:10.000 I always thought that was more honest than like the New York Times model where, you know, the biases are frankly hidden, right?

00:35:16.000 Whether they put a headline on page four or page one, or whether it's in a big font or a little font, these are all editorial decisions.

00:35:24.000 They matter.

00:35:25.000 And it's a signal telling you what the organization thinks about the subject.

00:35:30.000 However, I do think we lost something when those companies went away from the Let's just say the objectivity as an aspiration.

00:35:40.000 I think that was important when news companies tried at least a little bit to be down the middle, to present both sides of an issue, to not care so much about what the impact of a news story was.

00:35:55.000 I think that was important.

00:35:56.000 I think you need to have both kinds of media, right?

00:35:58.000 You need to have the overtly subjective media that tells you exactly what they think.

00:36:04.000 And then I think there's value to that other kind that says, look, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this.

00:36:10.000 Here, I'll tell you this fact and that fact, and then you decide for yourself what you want to do about it.

00:36:15.000 And we've lost that.

00:36:16.000 I think in the modern media landscape, that doesn't exist anymore, and that's a big problem.

00:36:22.000 Yeah, I think one of the analogs in the modern media landscape where there actually is, you know, open bias, is one of the things that I say on my show all the time, and I literally say this, I would say at least once a week, is I'll get a question from somebody, how do I ascertain the truth about a particular story?

00:36:35.000 What I say is I want you to listen to my podcast, and then I want you to listen to Pod Save America.

00:36:39.000 And where we agree on the facts, that's gonna be the common core of facts, and everything else is gonna be the opinion that is drawn therefrom.

00:36:45.000 And that seems like a fairly, you know, okay, where the lines intersect, that dot is gonna be the common core of facts.

00:36:51.000 The problem is, Dan Pfeiffer goes on MSNBC, and he literally says on MSNBC that Facebook should shut down all of our traffic to Daily Wire.

00:36:58.000 So, well, so the feeling that I get is, like, well, I'm trying to say, you know, fine, listen to anything, you know, I'll talk to any, I'll go on Bill Maher's show, and Bill Maher will come on my show, and it'll be great.

00:37:07.000 There's a whole side of the aisle that's like, no, it is a false objectivity to even promote the idea that there is another idea.

00:37:14.000 So there should not be another idea.

00:37:16.000 And so whatever we say goes, and if you controvert that narrative, then you are immediately barred from the club.

00:37:21.000 Yeah, and that's just a losing argument with most audiences.

00:37:25.000 I mean, people implicitly distrust anyone who doesn't want you to listen to someone else's argument, right?

00:37:32.000 And that used to be something that attracted me, frankly, to, you know, liberalism, was this idea that, I don't care what that person says, I believe what I believe, and you can Watch that or listen to that if you want.

00:37:43.000 It doesn't bother me, right?

00:37:45.000 Well, that's not the attitude anymore.

00:37:47.000 The attitude is we have to do everything we can to stamp out disinformation or misinformation or whatever it is.

00:37:54.000 That's going to change something or that's going to have a positive impact on audiences.

00:38:00.000 It has the opposite.

00:38:02.000 I think it has a tendency to inspire audiences to trust People in the opposite direction, if you do that.

00:38:10.000 So this censoriousness, this new idea of kind of stamping out the other side completely in the hope that you'll be the last opinion standing, that's a losing strategy, I think.

00:38:23.000 And it's incredible to me that it's been adopted.

00:38:26.000 So what do you think?

00:38:28.000 There's a lot of rot in our institutions, obviously.

00:38:30.000 One of the institutions you focused on a lot in your writing is the FBI, the National Security Infrastructure, the NSA, the CIA.

00:38:38.000 Where did that rot start?

00:38:40.000 Has it always been there and we're only just noticing it now?

00:38:42.000 And how deep do you think it goes?

00:38:46.000 You know, I don't know.

00:38:47.000 I mean, I think if you go back, I think there was a moment in history in the mid-70s when, you know, you had the church committee hearings, you had Seymour Hersh doing that extraordinary story about a domestic surveillance program that was being cooked up, and Americans for a long time had this incredible distrust of the intelligence agencies because of what they heard at the church committee hearings.

00:39:11.000 And then, There was another moment after the Iraq war when all these revelations started to come out about illegal surveillance programs, about the NSA's Stellar Wind program, you know, the Snowden revelations.

00:39:27.000 You had heads of the intelligence agencies perjuring themselves openly in testimony before Congress.

00:39:34.000 And if you remember, it wasn't that long ago, just before Donald Trump got elected, there was tremendous animosity across the board in America and distrust towards those institutions.

00:39:45.000 And then what happened was I think Donald Trump got elected and a lot of the people in those institutions presented themselves as the defenders of democracy.

00:39:53.000 We're the ones who are going to save you from Donald Trump.

00:39:55.000 And suddenly they got all this great press.

00:39:58.000 And they revived themselves.

00:39:59.000 It was kind of this amazing media comeback story in a way.

00:40:04.000 But I think what we've seen is that the rot goes pretty deep.

00:40:07.000 To me, that's the headline story from Russiagate, is this sort of casual corruption that pervaded the entire system throughout that narrative, which ought to have been shocking, I thought, to reporters across the spectrum.

00:40:25.000 Clearly was not.

00:40:27.000 But I think it's a big problem.

00:40:29.000 I think most of America, especially on the right now, they have no belief in those institutions anymore.

00:40:37.000 I will admit that I feel like I was late on the Russiagate story, not because I didn't think that there was something fishy going on.

00:40:43.000 I said very early on I thought there was something fishy going on.

00:40:46.000 I didn't actually believe that the rot could possibly go as deep as it ended up going.

00:40:51.000 I mean, when there were allegations, for example, that the FISA court had not even been informed that the Carter Page stuff was basically a scam, or that the Steele dossier was basically a bit of OPPO research, and they went ahead and they signed this FISA warrant for Carter Page, or when I was when I was being told that the entire FBI infrastructure, all the way up to James Comey, was basically attempting to oust Donald Trump by jerry-rigging together a crap dossier and then laundering it into the media

00:41:20.000 by having a meeting with Trump.

00:41:21.000 I thought, oh, this stuff is pretty far-fetched.

00:41:23.000 And then as it began to materialize, I can see why it broke people's world.

00:41:28.000 Like, there are all these moments in people's lives where they're sort of politically defined.

00:41:28.000 I can see why.

00:41:33.000 And for some people, it was 9-11, and for some people, it was the Clarence Thomas hearings.

00:41:38.000 And for a lot of people, in the last five years, it's really been, I think, maybe three things.

00:41:44.000 I think maybe in the last five years, it was Russiagate, and then it was the...

00:41:49.000 Kyle Rittenhouse situation.

00:41:51.000 And then it was the Kavanaugh hearings.

00:41:52.000 And that kind of triple whammy, I think, has destroyed so much trust, not just in the media, but in virtually every major institution.

00:41:59.000 And then you pile on top of that the insanity of the entire COVID institutional ram down, which that's the biggest one of all.

00:42:06.000 I want to talk to you about COVID in just one second.

00:42:08.000 First, let's talk about your investment strategy in a rough market.

00:42:11.000 You may have noticed that fear of out-of-control inflation is hammering the stock market.

00:42:14.000 The S&P 500 is having its worst start to the year since World War II.

00:42:18.000 Thanks, Joe Biden.

00:42:18.000 So not only are your savings worth less, now you have less of those savings.

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00:42:42.000 Amazon stock is down 37% in the first half of the year.

00:42:44.000 Tesla is getting just smashed. 0.84

00:42:46.000 They're down 40%.

00:42:47.000 Cryptos are getting slammed.

00:42:48.000 A lot of people fear hawkish moves by the Fed could actually stall out the economy and the possibility of a stock market increase.

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00:43:03.000 Okay, so I want to talk to you about, you know, each one of those things in turn.

00:43:05.000 Why don't we start with the big one?

00:43:07.000 So, COVID, if anything has completely disrupted any remaining institutional trust that has existed, it is COVID.

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00:43:16.000 Okay, so I want to talk to you about each one of those things in turn.

00:43:19.000 Why don't we start with the big one?

00:43:20.000 So COVID, if anything has completely disrupted any remaining institutional trust that has existed, it is COVID.

00:43:27.000 I mean, COVID was just, the stuff that we were told throughout was just not true.

00:43:32.000 It was exaggerated.

00:43:33.000 It was this exoteric, esoteric attempt to say, well, what we tell you, the public, that can't be what we behind closed doors. 1.00

00:43:40.000 We know the actual, but you're too stupid to handle that. 0.99

00:43:42.000 So we're going to tell you something that's false for your own good. 1.00

00:43:44.000 We're going to tell you a platonic lies that you feel better about things.

00:43:48.000 And to me, everything exploded for me when it came to the COVID narrative.

00:43:52.000 The minute that in June, there were riots in the middle of the streets and giant protests with 21 million people involved.

00:43:57.000 And we were being told by our health officials, you had to quarantine in your home and not send your kids to the park.

00:44:02.000 But if you were twerking for George Floyd, then suddenly everything was fine, right?

00:44:06.000 COVID just went away.

00:44:07.000 It was the wokest virus in all of human existence. 0.76

00:44:09.000 At that moment, I think a lot of people just broke.

00:44:12.000 Yeah, there were a lot of things that made no sense about that story from the very beginning.

00:44:18.000 You know, I think for me as a journalist watching it, I was in shock.

00:44:22.000 Pretty early on, you know, an important characteristic, I think, of any good reporter is to have humility about any story that you're covering, particularly a technical or a scientific story, you know, where your knowledge level is zero going in, right?

00:44:38.000 So, you're completely relying on your sources to tell you the truth about something.

00:44:45.000 Well, when they ruled out instantaneously the idea that this could possibly have originated in a lab before they had a definitive idea of how it actually had originated, that told me something significant had changed in the media landscape.

00:45:03.000 Like, if you don't have humility about the possibility that it could have Could have occurred this way.

00:45:09.000 And you're absolutely sure that it didn't happen that way, and it must have been this other thing.

00:45:14.000 You know, that doesn't work with audiences.

00:45:18.000 You can't just be absolutely certain all the time before you have a definitive answer in front of you.

00:45:25.000 And that was a pattern throughout COVID.

00:45:28.000 They would tell you something with absolute certainty, and then a few months later they would You know, turn around and say, oh yeah, actually, we were wrong about that.

00:45:36.000 You know, masks do work.

00:45:39.000 We do need them.

00:45:41.000 That's after we told you they didn't work and you don't need them, or ventilators are necessary, then they're unnecessary.

00:45:48.000 And I think that stuff was all unhelpful, right?

00:45:51.000 I think if you were trying just to be an honest promoter of good health habits, You would at least leave some doubt in your recommendations, saying, this is our best guess right now, right, as to what you should do.

00:46:06.000 But that's not what they did.

00:46:07.000 They essentially commanded people to behave a certain way, and that tone was very off-putting and resulted in a lot of negative outcomes.

00:46:18.000 It was also maddening because, I mean, some of us could just read basic statistics.

00:46:22.000 You didn't have to be, like, it's true, none of us were epidemiologists, but you could see from the first few weeks of the pandemic that this was killing old people and it was doing nothing to young people.

00:46:29.000 And you could see, you could read basic stats and then you'd have public experts who are just contravening the stats.

00:46:34.000 They'd just be out there saying, no, no, no, it's a serious risk to everybody.

00:46:37.000 You can't have your kids out there.

00:46:39.000 You got to make sure that the schools are closed.

00:46:40.000 And not only are the schools closed, you as a young, healthy person, you are definitely not allowed to, you know, go outside and walk literally where we were in California.

00:46:49.000 The rule was that you had to walk six feet apart from other human beings when you were literally outside.

00:46:53.000 They shut down the beaches.

00:46:54.000 They poured sand over the skate parks in Venice while we were in California.

00:47:00.000 Meanwhile, I remember, you know, May, June of the pandemic.

00:47:04.000 This is basically what caused us to move to Florida.

00:47:07.000 This triple whammy of, okay, well, we are going to shut down all of human society.

00:47:12.000 Also, we're going to confine you to your home because there are riots outside.

00:47:14.000 We're not going to do anything about those.

00:47:16.000 And then also, we're going to make sure that we do nothing about the massive homelessness problem that has now destroyed quality of life in Southern California.

00:47:24.000 And I just thought to myself, this is all nonsense.

00:47:26.000 I can't in all good conscience pay taxes to a state that does this.

00:47:30.000 My wife, who is way less politically active than I am, when all this broke, she was like, I don't know how we're supposed to raise kids under these circumstances.

00:47:39.000 And yet you were being told that if you asked any of these questions that social media would Would prohibit you from asking any of these questions.

00:47:46.000 Like I said, I think it led to a level of madness in politics that, frankly, you know, I think we're suffering with today.

00:47:53.000 Everything is now so reactionary that if somebody says something, you don't even try to ascertain whether it's true or not.

00:47:57.000 You just immediately react based on who they are and say it's false.

00:48:00.000 Or if it's somebody who's giving you this sort of counter narrative, you immediately assume that because everything was a conspiracy, this is also a conspiracy.

00:48:08.000 Yeah, and we saw, you know, there were a couple of reporters at the New York Times who tried to do some, I think, earnest and good reporting about the fairly minimal risks to children that the disease posed.

00:48:21.000 And then there were some other reports where they tried to talk about, you know, basically how safe you were being outside and that you didn't really need to wear a mask.

00:48:34.000 But you can't be wrong about those things and tell people we're the people who believe science, you know what I'm saying?

00:48:40.000 You can't be in the middle of what's clearly a mania and then denounce everybody else as being anti-science.

00:48:48.000 I think that stuff doesn't work.

00:48:50.000 There were people clearly on the right who had some other ideas, I think, that were not right about the virus.

00:48:58.000 The messaging from the mainstream media was inconsistent at best, I thought, condescending, and contradictory, often.

00:49:10.000 So I think this drives into a larger conversation about the simple fact that now, you, Matt Taibbi, you're a right winger, and you didn't know it.

00:49:19.000 So, I mean, congrats.

00:49:20.000 But this is how it seems to work these days, is Joe Rogan, who I know well and is definitely not a right winger, is a right winger, because he was telling people during COVID, maybe you should think about exercising.

00:49:31.000 This makes him a right winger, or because he took Ivermectin, which is apparently a horse dewormer, not the human kind, the horse dewormer.

00:49:38.000 And this means that he is obviously a right winger.

00:49:40.000 I mean, frankly, the fact that he even has me or Jordan Peterson on his show means he's a right winger, according to The Left.

00:49:45.000 You're a right winger now because you're going on shows like this one or because you've been on Tucker's show.

00:49:49.000 This means that you're a right winger.

00:49:50.000 Bill Maher is now a right winger.

00:49:52.000 Everybody is a right winger.

00:49:55.000 Number one, Don't understand how that happened, but number two, I don't understand why anybody on the left thinks that it is a winning strategy to wish literally everyone except yourself outside into the cornfield, and then you're surprised when you're alone in the house and everybody outside has a pitchfork.

00:50:08.000 Well, it's clearly a propaganda tactic to try to dismiss any legitimate criticism from within your own tent by essentially saying these people are, you know, they're not one of us, they're right-wingers, they're Trumpers, really, in disguise.

00:50:27.000 The seminal moment for me came when Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders.

00:50:33.000 And there were these stringent calls, even from Sanders supporters, for Bernie to reject the endorsement.

00:50:39.000 Remember, he was trying to win the election at this point.

00:50:42.000 And Joe Rogan's one of the most influential media figures in the country.

00:50:46.000 And they said, y'all, you have to reject that endorsement because Joe once said something about MMA fighters, maybe, who were born male, not Not being a good idea that they fight natal females, right?

00:51:03.000 That's crazy.

00:51:04.000 Joe Rogan is to the left of probably 80% of this country, and if he's too extreme for you, that's probably an indication that there's something going on in your own political bubble that's awry.

00:51:20.000 To me, he's no right-winger.

00:51:25.000 He's got opinions that sort of are like the average person, basically, right?

00:51:31.000 And that's how he presents himself.

00:51:32.000 And that's why he's successful, I think.

00:51:34.000 That's why his show is successful.

00:51:35.000 He doesn't try to pose as anything other than what he is.

00:51:39.000 And yet he's denounced.

00:51:41.000 And that's, again, I just think it's a losing strategy.

00:51:44.000 And one of the things that they always say about Joe is that they're always saying, well, you know, he has people on and they purport to be experts, and then he doesn't ask them questions from a position of expertise.

00:51:52.000 It's like, that's his whole shtick.

00:51:53.000 I mean, Joe's whole thing is, I don't know anything about this topic.

00:51:56.000 Now I'm going to ask you the questions.

00:51:57.000 He's like a great sort of proxy for the everyman.

00:52:00.000 I'm gonna ask you a question that a person off the street who knows nothing about this topic would wanna know from you.

00:52:05.000 And that is why people listen to his show.

00:52:07.000 And it's the thing that the media refuse to do because they hand choose their experts.

00:52:10.000 This is one of my least favorite things that I see in the media is the laundering of expertise.

00:52:14.000 You'll see an article that's highlighted on Twitter, experts say X.

00:52:18.000 And you'll say to yourself, well, hold up.

00:52:20.000 What are the experts?

00:52:21.000 What do they know about this topic?

00:52:22.000 And why are they saying X?

00:52:24.000 And it's always like, I can find five experts in the country who say almost anything.

00:52:28.000 Who you choose as your base for an article, I mean, you talked earlier about the fact that when you know nothing about a topic as a reporter, you try to go get a wide variety of sources, and then you try to figure out what is the common thread or where is the battle happening.

00:52:41.000 But it seems like very often in the media, instead, there's a preset narrative.

00:52:44.000 I'm going to go find five people who agree with that narrative and have a PhD next to their name.

00:52:48.000 And then it's experts say X, when it's really I say X, and I just found these experts to back me up.

00:52:53.000 Right, and it's also a school of journalism that's just rapidly disappeared.

00:52:58.000 I mean, I think there's a variety of interview techniques.

00:53:04.000 Once upon a time it was pretty standard for somebody like Charlie Rose to do this this style of interview where the whole idea was to build a rapport with somebody, make them feel comfortable, and let them express to you what they're all about in their own words so that they would be understandable to a mass audience. It wasn't your job to pin them down or to prove them wrong or to score points against them or to own them, right?

00:53:31.000 So that you could put a little video up on Twitter.

00:53:34.000 This is where I got this person, right?

00:53:36.000 That's not what the job was.

00:53:38.000 The job was, it's an informational job.

00:53:40.000 You're trying to learn what this person is all about.

00:53:43.000 That's why we, that's why Mike Wallace interviewed the Ayatollah Khomeini, right?

00:53:46.000 Like, he did ask tough questions, but part of it is just trying to understand the phenomenon, right?

00:53:52.000 And that journalistic curiosity has kind of been replaced by this new phenomenon of it's a mix of advocacy and I would call it almost like performative journalism where you're trying to show that your side is winning.

00:54:16.000 It doesn't do a whole lot for audiences in terms of educating them about a subject.

00:54:20.000 So, you know, I want to talk about kind of the futures of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

00:54:25.000 So people who are conservative, people like me, will look at the Democratic Party and will say, it looks frankly like they're in a heap of trouble.

00:54:33.000 It looks like the people who are the supposed moderates are falling to the wokes.

00:54:36.000 I mean, Joe Biden being just a perfect example of this.

00:54:38.000 He's just saying things from his face all that he clearly does not understand, but he has been told by his advisors who are very online that this is stuff that he should say.

00:54:46.000 It feels like the older guard of the Democratic Party is now kind of squiring around a far more radical young guard that is kind of using them in order to achieve mainstream status.

00:54:57.000 And then, you know, people on the left, they'll look at the right and they'll say, you guys are becoming ever more extreme.

00:55:01.000 You're a Trumpist party.

00:55:02.000 You're a party that refuses to acknowledge the results of elections.

00:55:05.000 Do you think that there is... Let's go party by party.

00:55:08.000 What do you think the future of the Democratic Party is?

00:55:10.000 Do you think that there is going to be any sort of backlash here?

00:55:12.000 A rising wave of people who say, you know, enough is enough.

00:55:15.000 Let's get back to the brand of sort of almost John Edwards-esque mainstream populism that was the bread and butter of Bill Clinton or the Democratic Party for years and years.

00:55:24.000 Well, I think one of the major underreported stories in politics in the last 20 years or so has been the dramatic shift in the makeup of the Democratic Party, where their base is.

00:55:36.000 If you look at the last time I looked at this, I think 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts in America had Democrats in those seats, and I think it was all of the top 10.

00:55:49.000 And if you go back as recently as 1992, it probably would have been more like a 50-50 split or even a 60-40 split in favor of Republicans.

00:56:01.000 This idea that you're affluent, upper-class suburb is now You know, somewhere between a 70 and 90 percent Democratic vote in most places.

00:56:13.000 That's a dramatic shift in the composition of the Democratic Party.

00:56:18.000 I think this goes back even before Clinton.

00:56:20.000 I think it goes back to 84 after Walter Mondale, when the DLC stepped in and said, we can't have unions being the main supporters of the party anymore.

00:56:32.000 We have to get away from that.

00:56:33.000 We have to have more of a pro-growth strategy.

00:56:35.000 And they lost touch with people who were shipbuilders or who had manual labor jobs or work construction.

00:56:43.000 There are no people like that who rise within the Democratic Party anymore.

00:56:47.000 They don't know what ordinary people think about, what they're like, you know?

00:56:53.000 And so I think that's a huge problem for the party, that there's no feeder system that brings in people who, you know, in the past might have come from unions.

00:57:05.000 You know, those people just, they're not there anymore.

00:57:09.000 I mean, one of the things that that brings up is the fact that it seems like when you look at it economically, it makes no sense, right?

00:57:14.000 From an economic perspective, if supposedly Republicans are the party of free markets and big business and all the rest of this, why are all these affluent areas going blue?

00:57:24.000 And all of the lesser affluent areas are starting to trend red, even including in many Hispanic districts now.

00:57:29.000 Even the black vote is starting to move a little bit.

00:57:32.000 from the Democratic Party. It used to be like a 90 to 95 percent black vote for the Democratic Party. Now it seems to be moving into sort of like the 85 to 90 percent range. And a lot of these polls, maybe even 80 to 85 percent, which is just the death knell for the Democratic Party, demographically speaking. You know, if you look at it from a pure sort of either Marxist perspective or a pure, you know, economically conservative perspective, the economics don't tell the whole story. There is a culture war here that is happening. And I think people in the media refuse to acknowledge the culture war because there are

00:58:01.000 such participants in it that the other side doesn't exist. But it shows you that like what Trump really was, the giant middle finger to the institutions. But he was also saying to a bunch of people who had been attacked by the cultural institutions as regressive and non-tolerant and bitter clingers. He was saying to them, no, there are a lot of people out there who are exactly like you. And look at me. I'm a New Yorker. I don't even agree with a lot of the stuff that you guys believe socially, but I'm going to treat you with a certain level of baseline respect as a human being.

00:58:26.000 And a lot of people went, wow, that's kind of a refreshing prospect. I mean, you're not even like Mitt Romney from Bain Capital telling me this. You're somebody who has that. It was such a weird thing to get it from Trump because he is an elite by every standard, by every economic standard, by every educational standard, but he didn't play like that. He He played like Archie Bunker more than he played like Mitt Romney did, even though he's much more like Mitt Romney in terms of, you know, personal, you know, economic lifestyle than Archie Bunker.

00:58:52.000 That social battle, that seems to be the most telling part of the modern political discourse.

00:58:58.000 And maybe the current conflict is not predominantly about economics, it's about levels of respect for people who actually have different values than your own.

00:59:06.000 I think there's a lot to that.

00:59:09.000 Another major underreported story was one you just referenced, which was the fact that in 2020, the constituency that really elected Joe Biden was white guys.

00:59:21.000 Donald Trump actually outperformed his expectations from 2016 with every other demographic, including women, including black women, black men, especially Hispanics.

00:59:37.000 And what does that tell you?

00:59:38.000 That tells you that, you know, that there's something that's more important to these voters than what the traditional mainstream media would have you believe.

00:59:48.000 I mean, I think there's a widespread belief among people in the press that if you're black, you just automatically are going to vote Democratic because that's what you do, right?

01:00:00.000 Like civil rights issues or, you know, George Floyd, that's the most important thing to you.

01:00:05.000 Well, not necessarily.

01:00:06.000 Like, people are different.

01:00:08.000 That's one of the things you learn as a campaign reporter is that there's a million reasons why people vote for people.

01:00:13.000 They're all over the map.

01:00:14.000 You know, when I covered Trump, I had people who were.

01:00:19.000 far to the right who said things that were, you know, kind of deeply offensive to me, you know, on the race front.

01:00:25.000 And then I had other people who said, who were like just elderly ladies from Cincinnati who said, yeah, I really like this TV show, you know.

01:00:31.000 And like there are different reasons why people vote for people.

01:00:35.000 You can't just make assumptions.

01:00:37.000 And when you see those statistics, I think there is something going on there where, you know, there's a battle between sort of ordinary people, working class people, middle class, formerly middle class people who just don't see their values reflected in like the mainstream press and from prominent Democratic Party politicians.

01:01:01.000 And I think they're defecting.

01:01:03.000 And that's a big problem for the Democrats.

01:01:07.000 So let's shift to the other side of the aisle.

01:01:09.000 So obviously you're still somebody who identifies as liberal.

01:01:12.000 I don't know how you vote now because it's sort of, I would assume, heterodox.

01:01:16.000 It sort of depends, but you can tell me sort of if you're comfortable with that, you know, how you voted in recent elections or maybe not.

01:01:21.000 I didn't vote last time.

01:01:23.000 Yeah, okay, fine.

01:01:24.000 So, you know, you look at the Republican Party.

01:01:28.000 What direction do you think the Republican Party is moving in?

01:01:31.000 Because there is this huge international war, you know, Trump, non-Trump, nationalist, conservative versus libertarian.

01:01:37.000 Like, where do you think the party is going there?

01:01:39.000 And what are the big problems facing it?

01:01:41.000 Well, I think the Republican Party is in an interesting spot because of the incompetence of the Democratic Party.

01:01:50.000 There are all these doors that are open to them that have never been open to them before.

01:01:55.000 You mentioned before that the conservatives never won the Cultural War before.

01:01:59.000 It was never even an option.

01:02:01.000 They were always dominated on that front.

01:02:04.000 Not true anymore.

01:02:06.000 There are issues where Republicans can win, particularly on things like free speech and civil liberties.

01:02:14.000 They can represent themselves as champions of that.

01:02:17.000 However, I think that happens to be undercut when you pass laws banning certain kinds of speech in some places.

01:02:26.000 There are different laws.

01:02:29.000 Some of these responses to CRT and to trans care, I think there are different approaches that they could take that would allow them to still be champions of free speech and to also stand up for their values there.

01:02:47.000 But yeah, I think that's a major dividing line within the Republican Party, is do we want to be kind of traditional libertarians and laissez-faire capitalists, or do we want to be something else?

01:03:01.000 And I don't think they've settled on the formula yet.

01:03:04.000 I'd be interested to hear what you think.

01:03:06.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a lot of appetite for the culture war right now by the right because the left is pushed so far.

01:03:13.000 And so things that were not even considered remotely controversial five seconds ago are now considered wildly controversial.

01:03:18.000 So I'm a very pro-free speech person.

01:03:21.000 I also am not in favor of public schools Teaching kids sexual orientation at the age of five.

01:03:28.000 I just don't think that that's an appropriate thing.

01:03:29.000 And so, you know, I think that that's the left by pushing so far.

01:03:33.000 My theory basically here is that liberals got so successful in the culture war that they didn't know when to just say, OK, we got most of what we wanted.

01:03:40.000 and now we're just gonna sit here for a little while.

01:03:42.000 It turned into, what's the way that we get our base out?

01:03:44.000 And the way we get our base out is we have to have the next civil rights movement.

01:03:48.000 We had black Americans, excellent civil rights movement.

01:03:50.000 Now we have gay Americans.

01:03:52.000 That's the next round of the civil rights movement.

01:03:53.000 And then it turned into men who believe that they're women.

01:03:56.000 And people started to go, well, hold up just one second.

01:03:58.000 Now you're running up against some actual hard realities.

01:04:01.000 And when you start saying that, it's not just that we want gay and lesbian Americans to be able to live as they wish to live in a free society.

01:04:09.000 We want to mandate that your children learn about that value system from a public school teacher and that your business have to basically enforce anti-discrimination laws that we feel are appropriate. 0.98

01:04:22.000 I think you're now entering, it went from leave us alone in the privacy of our home to you will do what we want or we will burn you to the ground.

01:04:29.000 And when that happened, I think the right was suddenly left with this huge swath of land that it could claim, which was we'll leave you alone, but you guys got to leave us alone.

01:04:37.000 And the fact that you haven't left us alone means that we can now fight back.

01:04:39.000 Now, I think there's a danger that the right will go too far and that the right will start saying, okay, we're going to carry this flag all the way back to the top of that hill.

01:04:45.000 I don't think that's where things are going.

01:04:47.000 But the fact that the left has become so wildly radical on this stuff.

01:04:51.000 So many of the predictions that a lot of people were making about where same-sex marriage would end up, which were seen as completely outlandish when these predictions were made in 2004, 2005, are now being effectively advocated by the White House.

01:05:03.000 And that's, you know, I think, given a lot of ground to conservatives and to moderate people.

01:05:11.000 I mean, a lot of, listen, the so-called Don't Say Gay Bill in Florida is widely popular with Democrats in the state of Florida.

01:05:16.000 Right.

01:05:16.000 Because, again, it was targeted at, you don't get to do this to kids.

01:05:20.000 You want to do this when you're an adult?

01:05:21.000 Fine.

01:05:21.000 You don't get to do this to kids.

01:05:22.000 And the left just pushed too far.

01:05:24.000 So I think that that's going to be fertile ground until it isn't.

01:05:26.000 And I think that may be the message of the politics right now.

01:05:28.000 Everything is fertile ground until the moment you push too far, in which case it becomes incredibly inhospitable.

01:05:33.000 Yeah, and just quickly, I covered the Virginia governor's race and the election of Glenn Youngkin.

01:05:41.000 And Democrats traditionally have held anywhere from a 20 to 30 point lead on the education issue.

01:05:48.000 It's one of the reasons that they've always done so well in congressional races, because this was an issue where they were overwhelmingly trusted more than Republicans were.

01:06:00.000 You know, what I saw just in that one county in Virginia, Loudoun County, was this dramatic change in where people felt that the politicians were that they could trust.

01:06:16.000 They saw the local Democratic Party infrastructure as being on the side of this Sort of non-transparent cabal that was trying to impose something.

01:06:27.000 And the fastest way to lose support is to get between parents and their kids.

01:06:33.000 I think you see that in places all over the country where, you know, now if you look at the polls, that once 30-point lead, and that wasn't that long ago, that was in the Obama years, it's evaporated to three or four points.

01:06:47.000 And I think it's going to keep going in that direction unless they fix it.

01:06:51.000 So Matt Taibbi, I want to ask you a few final questions, starting with you live in New Jersey, so how's that treating you?

01:06:57.000 And when are you moving to a better state?

01:06:59.000 Plus, I also want to ask you about 2024 and Trump versus Biden redux and all the rest of it.

01:07:03.000 Well, if you'd like to hear Matt Taibbi's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.

01:07:06.000 Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday.

01:07:09.000 You can click that link in the episode description.

01:07:11.000 Use code BEN for 25% off to hear the rest of our conversation there.

01:07:15.000 Folks, that is Matt Taibbi.

01:07:16.000 Everyone make sure to check out Matt's Substack TK News by Matt.

01:07:19.000 Taibbi, always a great read.

01:07:20.000 Get full access to his features, columns, and creative writing.

01:07:22.000 Matt, thanks so much for joining the show.

01:07:24.000 It's been a pleasure.

01:07:25.000 Thanks so much, Ben, for having me on.

01:07:26.000 on. I really appreciate it.

01:07:27.000 It's been a pleasure.

01:07:38.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

01:07:40.000 Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.

01:07:42.000 Associate Producer Justine Turley.

01:07:44.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:07:45.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

01:07:47.000 Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.

01:07:49.000 Title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:07:51.000 Production Assistant Jessica Crand.

01:07:52.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 26, 2022

Matt Taibbi | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 127

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