The Tucker Carlson Show - Matt Taibbi： How Intel Agencies Control the Media, Putin’s Rise to Power, and 2024 Predictions

00:00:00.000 I'll tell you he's Italian.

00:00:01.840 It's Italian by way of Lebanese. 0.61

00:00:05.460 It's like Sicilian.

00:00:06.840 It's Arabs and Sicilian. 0.50

00:00:08.080 Sicilian, yes!

00:00:08.580 Yeah, but I'm neither.

00:00:09.960 My father's Filipino.

00:00:11.320 My mother's Irish.

00:00:12.320 He was adopted.

00:00:13.240 Oh, my dad was adopted too.

00:00:14.480 Really?

00:00:14.920 Yeah.

00:00:15.360 Oh, wow.

00:00:27.040 Welcome to The Tucker Carlson Show.

00:00:28.680 We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else.

00:00:32.880 And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers.

00:00:36.120 We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly.

00:00:41.380 Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com.

00:00:44.380 Here's the episode.

00:00:45.960 Okay, so here's my question.

00:00:47.820 You're a reporter.

00:00:49.400 You've been a reporter your entire life.

00:00:51.100 Your dad was a reporter, well-known reporter.

00:00:53.520 So you grew up in journalism.

00:00:55.440 Journalism is now, justly, I would say, the most hated profession.

00:00:59.100 The Sackler family is more popular than NBC News at this point.

00:01:02.980 Right.

00:01:03.860 Congress is more popular.

00:01:05.300 Congress is literally right.

00:01:07.120 Yeah.

00:01:07.460 People are like, you know, maybe a child molester can be fixed.

00:01:09.720 We don't need to execute them, but NBC News, okay?

00:01:13.000 So that's bewildering, I'm sure, for you.

00:01:15.940 But for those of us who are having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in, like, 1990, when you were finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism?

00:01:26.600 What did you think you were getting into when you started?

00:01:28.740 So I grew up around my dad's work.

00:01:33.600 He was a TV reporter in kind of the heyday of local affiliate news, like, as portrayed in Anchorman.

00:01:42.280 Yeah.

00:01:42.460 The bad facial hair, all that stuff.

00:01:45.460 So I used to hang around the newsroom all the time.

00:01:47.680 And my father is sort of a reporter's reporter.

00:01:50.740 He's very gifted at striking up conversations with people.

00:01:54.540 He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is, I would say, probably the most important thing, which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective.

00:02:03.440 He would be able to go to, you know, any scene of fire or murder or whatever, instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him.

00:02:13.980 Where does that skill come from?

00:02:16.540 I think you just have to be born with it.

00:02:18.500 Yeah, there's a certain, like, sort of gregariousness, right, that some people have.

00:02:22.120 He likes people.

00:02:22.720 Yeah, he likes people.

00:02:24.000 He's able to, you know, sort of strike up conversations quickly.

00:02:28.040 And I was very shy growing up.

00:02:30.700 So the first thing I concluded was I'm never going to be able to do that, right?

00:02:34.300 So this is, you know, this is like a superpower that he has that I don't.

00:02:38.920 And I thought I would have to go in a different direction.

00:02:41.440 I also grew up wanting to be a fiction writer, right?

00:02:45.920 I was really obsessed with that growing up.

00:02:48.220 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.

00:02:59.220 And so it was something that would keep me at least tangentially in the writing business.

00:03:05.980 So I got into it.

00:03:07.420 And only over time did I really appreciate the way they did reporting back then.

00:03:15.060 It was a much different thing than what people do now.

00:03:17.700 Did you think it was honorable?

00:03:18.900 Like when you were a kid, did you think like my dad does something embarrassing or my dad does something important and useful?

00:03:23.860 No, I thought what he did was important, useful and honest.

00:03:29.620 And, you know, there was something very egalitarian about the way reporters carried themselves once upon a time.

00:03:36.840 They, you know, only now are journalists, you know, universally called from the Ivy Leagues and these upper class schools.

00:03:46.020 In fact, you know, I was part of that generation of sort of rich kids who went into journalism.

00:03:50.840 When my father went into it, he started when he was 18.

00:03:55.140 Journalism was more of a trade than a profession.

00:03:58.840 It wasn't necessary to have a college education.

00:04:01.280 And most of the people who went into it, they had kind of a natural antipathy for people in power.

00:04:08.420 Yes.

00:04:09.120 They overwhelmingly sided with the ordinary person just reflexively.

00:04:15.140 And they were, you know, they told the news from that perspective very often, right?

00:04:20.800 And it was the classic 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.

00:04:31.220 And so, I grew up always imagining that the reporter was somebody who was on the side of ordinary people.

00:04:38.540 Because there was one.

00:04:39.560 Right.

00:04:39.960 Yeah, exactly.

00:04:40.960 And, you know, my father carried it that way for sure.

00:04:44.640 And so, I...

00:04:46.200 Did your father never go to college?

00:04:47.800 No, he did.

00:04:48.320 He went to Rutgers.

00:04:51.100 He had me while he was at Rutgers.

00:04:53.000 That's why he had to go into reporting.

00:04:54.600 He worked at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

00:05:01.300 And then, you know, as soon as he graduated, he went to the TV.

00:05:06.140 But, no, I always had this vision of journalism as this thing that, you know, it wasn't for intellectuals.

00:05:14.680 It wasn't for, you know, people who had graduate degrees.

00:05:19.060 It was for people who hustled, who worked hard and had, you know, kind of a common touch, right?

00:05:26.240 Like, that's kind of the key to the job is being willing to listen to people and all that.

00:05:30.160 So, I had a very specific idea of what journalism was when I went into it.

00:05:35.640 I just thought I wasn't going to be particularly good at it because of that, you know, deficit, right?

00:05:42.820 Like, I didn't have that gift that he had.

00:05:45.520 But I started overseas in Russia.

00:05:49.260 And because I was able to, I spoke Russian already early, I had an advantage over other American reporters at the time.

00:05:57.120 What year did you go to Russia?

00:05:58.760 So, I studied in 89 and 90 when it was still Soviet.

00:06:02.720 You know, I took a year and a half abroad and then went back as soon as I graduated.

00:06:10.420 Actually, I went back before I graduated and started stringing and working for a bunch of different organizations there and finally got a job at an expat paper.

00:06:19.900 So, 91-ish?

00:06:21.360 Yeah, 91-ish, 92.

00:06:22.980 Right after the revolution, basically.

00:06:25.700 Which was?

00:06:26.580 91.

00:06:27.460 August.

00:06:27.940 Yeah.

00:06:28.220 Summer.

00:06:28.600 August 91.

00:06:29.560 Yeah.

00:06:29.740 So, shortly after that.

00:06:31.480 What was it like?

00:06:32.720 It was amazing.

00:06:34.320 It was the Wild West, you know.

00:06:36.080 I mean, the funny thing for me is people ask me why did I love Russia so much.

00:06:40.220 I mean, the first reason was is that all my favorite writers growing up were Russians and my, you know, Nikolai Gogol was my hero.

00:06:47.060 I wanted to be a comic novelist and the Russians have so many amazingly funny writers, as you know, right?

00:06:54.060 From Bulgakov to, you know, to Dovlatov, all these people.

00:06:57.980 I wanted to learn the language.

00:07:00.500 Then when I got there, I had been a very depressed teenager, had, you know, struggled socially, behaviorally, all these other things.

00:07:08.680 I got to late Soviet Russia and everybody's depressed.

00:07:12.580 And, you know, nobody's happy.

00:07:16.480 And I thought, this is amazing.

00:07:18.060 I fit right in.

00:07:19.520 And, uh...

00:07:20.240 You had a dark Slavic zone.

00:07:21.580 You didn't even know it?

00:07:22.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:07:23.480 And, you know, in America, there's this incredible pressure on young people.

00:07:27.540 You have to succeed right away, right?

00:07:29.580 Be cheerful.

00:07:30.080 Yeah, be cheerful, look good, be in shape, like all these other things.

00:07:34.420 Russians, no way, there was none of that attitude. 0.67

00:07:37.320 Nobody was going anywhere.

00:07:39.600 And when I got there, that was just incredibly attractive to me.

00:07:43.980 And so, you know...

00:07:46.820 Well, I've never heard that take before.

00:07:49.400 That is awesome.

00:07:50.260 No, it was really funny.

00:07:51.900 And because of that, you know, I got along with Russians in a way, probably, that other Americans didn't.

00:07:58.400 You know, I think there was a connection there that was very natural.

00:08:02.620 And I really took to the place early on.

00:08:05.200 How did you speak the language?

00:08:07.860 Well, I mean, it's like anybody who...

00:08:09.780 You come to the United States, if you have no choice and you have to speak English, you learn it pretty quickly.

00:08:14.300 Um, so, uh, I studied in St. Petersburg, but then I briefly went to Uzbekistan, uh, because I had this idea that there weren't that many stringers in Uzbekistan, so I would get more work.

00:08:29.820 For those who don't notice, I don't know that there are stringers anymore.

00:08:32.100 What's a stringer?

00:08:32.840 So a stringer is like a person who, um, is not on staff for a newspaper, but just sort of sits in a place and waits for something to happen.

00:08:41.860 And then, you know, like the New York Times or the AP will call them and say, hey, can you, can you chase down that, you know, thing that happened?

00:08:49.920 In my case, an earthquake that happened in Kyrgyzstan gave me an early chance to write a couple of stories, right?

00:08:57.000 And, um...

00:08:57.600 Who'd you write them for?

00:08:58.820 I think I wrote one for AP, uh, in 1991.

00:09:03.940 Um, I ended up, uh, getting thrown out of Uzbekistan because I had a bad visa.

00:09:09.860 But while I was there, uh, I, I really learned Russian because nobody there spoke English.

00:09:15.840 And I also, uh, was on the Uzbek national baseball team, which was hilarious.

00:09:20.880 Wow.

00:09:21.440 Um, so one day I was walking past one of the colleges and I saw people playing baseball and I was going to keep walking.

00:09:27.940 And then I thought, I'm in Uzbekistan.

00:09:29.480 What the, what, what is that?

00:09:31.060 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.

00:09:38.800 Uh, and, you know, those guys could really play, right?

00:09:42.900 Um, so I just went and asked, um, you guys mind if I play with you?

00:09:47.080 And, uh, so I ended up being a catcher on a team full of Cubans with a Russian coach.

00:09:53.900 And, uh, we played other Central, uh, Asian countries and it was hilarious.

00:09:58.740 Come on! 0.61

00:09:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:59.860 We had, we had ground rules.

00:10:01.120 This is going to sound like a fake story, but it's true.

00:10:03.600 We had ground rules when we played in a pasture.

00:10:06.900 Uh, if you hit a sheep, it was a double.

00:10:09.700 I'm sorry.

00:10:10.020 If you hit a cow, it was a double.

00:10:11.300 If you hit a sheep, it was a triple.

00:10:13.080 Uh, that is a true story.

00:10:15.140 That actually happened.

00:10:15.380 Did anyone ever hit a cow or a sheep?

00:10:16.740 No, no, no.

00:10:18.320 Not, we only played like two games in that place.

00:10:20.600 So, but, um, but that actually happened.

00:10:23.000 I was actually playing baseball, um, when I, when I got thrown out of the country.

00:10:26.900 So Uzbekistan in 1991 was not a first world place.

00:10:30.760 No, Uzbekistan was, you know, it's kind of a typical Soviet, Soviet satellite country.

00:10:37.160 It was really struggling economically.

00:10:38.900 It had all kinds of problems, you know, uh, environmentally, uh, you know, used to be the big cotton producer for the Soviet Union.

00:10:47.560 And then, uh, you know, they, that sort of dried up for a variety of reasons.

00:10:52.440 The sea of Azov is, is now gone.

00:10:54.440 Right.

00:10:54.620 So, um, it was a troubled place.

00:10:58.540 Uh, there was a war going on in Tajikistan, right next to us.

00:11:02.780 Uh, and so it was an interesting place to be.

00:11:06.800 Um, but, you know, it was sort of my first experience.

00:11:10.020 What did your parents think?

00:11:11.760 My mother was terrified.

00:11:13.160 Um, when I, when I got thrown out of the country, uh, I got a visit by these people who were, I guess their word for it was the SNB.

00:11:23.000 The, uh, the, uh, which is just the, um, their version of the KGB.

00:11:30.200 And, uh, they asked me for my papers.

00:11:33.560 I had the wrong papers.

00:11:34.620 I was there in a student visa that I'd kind of, you know, was kind of phony.

00:11:38.700 And, um, but I had to send a telegram, uh, telling my parents that I'd been kicked out of the country.

00:11:44.380 So I wrote KGB kicking me out, um, we'll call from Moscow, but she got KGB kicking me gut, uh, we'll call, uh, when I get to Moscow.

00:11:54.800 I'm being beaten to death by the KGB.

00:11:56.580 Yeah, so, uh, she was worried, but, um, but no, it was fine.

00:12:02.060 But your dad was for it?

00:12:03.600 Yeah, I think he, he, he thought the whole, you know, adventure thing was interesting.

00:12:08.340 And then when he finally visited Russia in the mid nineties, 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.

00:12:19.540 Cause there was so much crazy stuff going on, um, and, um, it was a great place to learn the profession, really.

00:12:28.640 Yeah.

00:12:29.040 What was press freedom like then?

00:12:31.620 It was really interesting.

00:12:33.120 There was a very vibrant community of, um, really hardcore, great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

00:12:42.100 Cause remember the, the press had been suppressed almost completely for, you know, 80, 80 years, right?

00:12:49.600 And after, as soon as there was a, uh, 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.

00:13:10.780 Um, and, uh, you would get material.

00:13:14.020 They called it selling jeans over there, right?

00:13:16.600 So somebody would get, give you a, uh, a packet of information.

00:13:20.660 You would write it up about the rival gangline figure or politician.

00:13:26.540 And then, but if they wanted you to pay the price, you would, you know, you might get shot in a doorway or something like that.

00:13:32.440 Uh, so there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases.

00:13:36.620 For instance, there was a guy named Dima Holodov who worked for, uh, Moskoski Komsomolets when I was there who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister.

00:13:45.180 He got blown up on a train station.

00:13:47.680 Um, but you know, the Russians, the, those guys were my heroes.

00:13:51.740 I, 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.

00:14:02.240 Um, you know, not all of whom stayed in the business for very long, sometimes not voluntarily.

00:14:08.120 But you stayed 10 years?

00:14:09.800 Yes.

00:14:10.420 Yeah.

00:14:10.880 How come?

00:14:12.360 I mean, I love the place.

00:14:13.580 I was planning on staying forever, really.

00:14:16.840 Um, you know, then things definitely turned weird, uh, when the transformation from Yeltsin to Putin happened.

00:14:25.900 Yes.

00:14:26.420 Um, you know, we all, none of us had any illusions about who Putin was.

00:14:30.960 Putin was a known quantity.

00:14:32.100 He was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg when I was a student in St. Petersburg.

00:14:35.360 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.

00:14:44.300 And when he first came to, um, to power in Moscow, it was sort of widely understood that he was doing it.

00:14:51.600 And Yeltsin even writes about this in his biography, uh, because Yeltsin needed help getting out of the country and escaping prosecution.

00:15:00.480 And, um, there, there had been some indication that Putin had done that for his previous boss, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak.

00:15:09.320 So, you know, the sort of investigative journalism community was very suspicious of Putin when he, when he first arrived.

00:15:18.140 Um, but the Western journalism community loved him.

00:15:23.180 And this was Putin.

00:15:24.220 Yeah.

00:15:24.720 Yeah.

00:15:25.100 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.

00:15:34.660 So, but that was kind of the last straw for me, I think.

00:15:38.180 Traditionally, think tanks do a lot of thinking and the Heritage Foundation still does that, but it also, thankfully, has begun doing.

00:15:45.280 Heritage has built a massive investigative and litigation operation out of its headquarters to save this country from the corruption that is taking it over.

00:15:55.180 Both actual, literal corruption, financial corruption, there's a lot of that, but also ideological and moral corruption.

00:16:01.460 And to fight back, Heritage is engaging in almost 50 separate lawsuits against various government entities to try and pry out information to bring a little sunlight to the process that even Congress can't get.

00:16:12.800 And it's been working.

00:16:14.020 They produce documents exposing the Biden crime family to the rest of the world.

00:16:18.120 You've read those stories.

00:16:19.460 And help kill the sweetheart deal that Biden's DOJ tried to make with his son, Hunter Biden.

00:16:24.720 Heritage has also developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the deep state, the swamp, by staffing the next administration with people who know what they're doing.

00:16:34.160 Thousands of Americans who, on day one, can start to make this country better.

00:16:39.160 So it's important work.

00:16:40.860 Again, it's not just thinking, it's doing.

00:16:42.800 And if you want to support it, go to heritage.org slash Tucker.

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00:17:20.020 That's Tucker, F-O-R, Hillsdale.com.

00:17:36.400 Tucker says it best.

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00:18:35.940 Can you just back up one click?

00:18:41.060 What did they misreport?

00:18:42.860 So they would send somebody out to some provincial town like Samara with an assignment, find the thriving, emerging middle class, right?

00:18:57.920 And so you'd go out to a place where there's like a barter economy, right?

00:19:02.240 And people are doing subsistence farming, you know?

00:19:05.340 And they would ask around until they found somebody who had, you know, a VCR or who had been on a vacation to Ibiza once or something like that.

00:19:15.080 And then they would do a whole story like, you know, transition to capitalism, you know, flourishing, you know, the emerging middle class is, you know, everything's happening right on schedule.

00:19:26.420 And meanwhile, the country was really, in the Yeltsin years, was really doing very badly, right?

00:19:31.580 It's in contrast to now, you know, Russia was experiencing sort of record levels of early deaths.

00:19:40.120 Yes.

00:19:40.680 All kinds of horrific things that they weren't telling people back home.

00:19:46.960 And so.

00:19:48.700 Because the expat community and, you know, I don't really know exactly how this works,

00:19:54.320 but there was a monoculture about the reporting there that is very similar to what it's like now in America.

00:20:01.900 But there, it was sort of cartoonized.

00:20:05.060 It's a very small community.

00:20:06.600 Everybody knew everybody else.

00:20:08.880 And, you know, whatever the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote about, pretty much everybody else followed their lead.

00:20:16.380 There was almost nobody among the reporters who even spoke Russian, right?

00:20:21.800 I think that was totally discouraged.

00:20:23.940 How can you cover a country if you don't speak the language?

00:20:26.420 Because that was the tradition.

00:20:27.920 I mean, if people would come in, they would cycle in there for a few years.

00:20:31.500 They would work with translators.

00:20:33.060 They stayed in a little compound on Kutuziski Prospect, which is, you know, right near the center of the city.

00:20:39.560 In the Soviet days, it was sort of walled off by design.

00:20:43.040 But they continued living there for some reason that I didn't really understand.

00:20:48.120 And with a couple of exceptions, you know, I can think there was a Boston Globe reporter who was fantastic, right, while I was there.

00:20:54.600 But for the most part, you know, people came in and they just treated it as a, you know, as a third world backwater.

00:21:01.660 It's like, you know, if you read The Quiet American, right?

00:21:04.320 It was that attitude toward...

00:21:06.040 But I don't understand, so if you don't speak a language, I mean, I've lived here for 55 years, I speak English as a native speaker, barely understand the country.

00:21:16.000 It's just too complicated.

00:21:17.200 Right.

00:21:17.540 But if you can't speak the language, you just don't understand it at all.

00:21:21.320 You have no hope of understanding it, do you?

00:21:24.520 That's what I thought, right?

00:21:26.120 And this was not just the journalists, but also the diplomats there.

00:21:30.920 But, you know, this was...

00:21:31.780 The diplomats didn't speak Russian.

00:21:32.760 Diplomats didn't speak Russian.

00:21:33.980 You're, you know, we have the ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.

00:21:39.400 He could barely put a sentence together in Russian.

00:21:42.740 So it was...

00:21:44.400 What is that?

00:21:45.200 That just seems like a baseline requirement.

00:21:46.980 So the way it was explained to us was that this was something that was a hangover from the American diplomatic experience in China before the Maoist revolution, where the diplomats were deemed to have been too close to the local population, didn't warn the people back home what was happening.

00:22:08.080 So they made a habit out of cycling people from spot to spot so that they wouldn't become too accustomed to the culture or too acculturated, right?

00:22:20.860 Which I can maybe see the rationale for a diplomat, maybe.

00:22:25.280 But for a journalist, it makes no sense at all, right?

00:22:28.440 So to not understand the place that you're reporting on.

00:22:35.900 So by then, I...

00:22:37.440 It doesn't make sense to not understand the place you're reporting on that.

00:22:40.780 I think we can agree on that.

00:22:42.060 Right?

00:22:42.580 Yeah.

00:22:42.960 But so it was a strange activity that a lot of them were involved in, where they mostly interviewed the English-speaking officials in the Yeltsin government, right?

00:22:55.400 A lot of them had gone to Harvard, and they were getting one very specific version of what Russia was going through, what its challenges were.

00:23:05.360 And by then, I had already branched off.

00:23:09.320 I had left the expat paper of the Moscow Times.

00:23:13.540 I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide.

00:23:16.660 And I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places.

00:23:25.300 Like I worked as a bricklayer in Siberia.

00:23:29.040 Really?

00:23:29.700 Yeah.

00:23:30.060 I worked at a monastery in Mordovia.

00:23:35.480 What did you do in the monastery?

00:23:37.020 At construction, you know?

00:23:39.200 So we just tore the country and kind of find out exactly how people were doing, what the situation was like.

00:23:46.520 And it was an amazing discovery because every place I went, I learned about a new lie that was being told, you know, to people back home.

00:23:57.260 And it was deeply disillusioning for me.

00:24:00.260 I mean, I know you've had experiences like this in journalism too, right?

00:24:03.960 Where you find out that something you thought is totally wrong.

00:24:08.280 And that was a real eye-opener for me.

00:24:12.100 Like completely wrong.

00:24:13.160 Completely wrong.

00:24:13.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:14.860 And more of what that was proven relatively quickly, right?

00:24:18.980 There was a massive financial collapse in 98.

00:24:21.860 And then Putin came in and there was a huge popular repudiation of the American-style version of managed democracy that existed under Yeltsin.

00:24:41.360 And that was real.

00:24:42.720 I mean, Putin, for all of his problems, and I was a real critic of Putin's when I was there, there was no question that he was much more popular than Yeltsin.

00:24:54.480 You know, the country was very embarrassed by Yeltsin because he was publicly drunk all the time.

00:25:00.260 He was dysfunctional.

00:25:01.380 I mean, I think we're living through some of those emotions now here in the States.

00:25:04.420 Yes, we are.

00:25:04.860 That's right.

00:25:05.280 It's shameful.

00:25:05.720 Yeah, and so they wanted to, you know, their word was a seal-nail-ruka, right?

00:25:11.420 They wanted a strong hand who would come in and kind of set things right and compete with the Americans. 0.77

00:25:18.880 And they didn't like being thought of as a vassal state to the West.

00:25:22.360 This is an ancient conflict for Russia and America.

00:25:26.060 This goes back to the days of Peter the Great, you know, the Slava Files versus the Western, you know, the pro-Western crew. 0.84

00:25:36.580 And the pendulum swung the other way while I was there, you know.

00:25:40.720 And that was, you know, fascinating to watch, but it had some pretty serious consequences, too.

00:25:47.860 Well, yeah, that turned out to be right.

00:25:50.020 Yeah.

00:25:50.300 So, but as for journalism, like, you began to become disillusioned with the American version in the 90s.

00:25:58.000 Yes.

00:25:58.660 Yeah, absolutely.

00:25:59.620 While I was in Russia, I became disillusioned both with the format of it, you know, the kind of neutral third person.

00:26:10.720 A version of reporting where we pretend we're not having a point of view.

00:26:16.240 I didn't like that, you know, like, for instance, I would get sent out when I was at the Moscow Times, which was a paper I loved.

00:26:23.320 But they would send me to all these events where funny things would happen.

00:26:27.300 I would come back and write it up with humor, and they would tell me to take out the humor and write it in some other way that was, like, more serious.

00:26:34.360 And I think that's a lie, right?

00:26:36.740 Like, 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.

00:26:47.860 And he's giving a speech to all these Russians about, you know, their backward attitudes about conservation and everything. 1.00

00:26:54.720 And in the middle of the speech, the hotel brings the spread, which includes booze.

00:26:59.940 And all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself while they just eat all the food and drink all the booze.

00:27:07.800 And to me, that's the story.

00:27:09.880 Yeah.

00:27:10.120 You know, so I went home and I wrote that up and they, you know, they kind of wanted me to do something else.

00:27:15.220 Like pretend it didn't happen.

00:27:16.240 Right, exactly.

00:27:17.400 And I thought, well, this isn't right, you know.

00:27:20.240 I mean, I was just a kid.

00:27:21.100 I didn't really know, but I thought there's something not quite right about this.

00:27:24.880 So to what extent, in retrospect, do you think that Western news organizations were taking their cues from Western businesses or Western governments?

00:27:33.960 Oh, I mean, 90%, 95%.

00:27:37.920 Really?

00:27:38.900 Absolutely, yeah.

00:27:39.800 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, Chrystia Freeland, was sort of a colleague at the time.

00:27:56.060 She was part of that whole crew of Western journalists there.

00:27:58.980 What was she like?

00:28:01.200 Well, they were all doing kind of the same thing.

00:28:03.880 Like the basic line was that there was a new group of robber-bearing capitalists who had appeared.

00:28:11.340 And, yes, it was messy.

00:28:14.860 It was a messy transition to capitalism was the word they used for it.

00:28:18.520 Now, actually, it was just pure gangsterism.

00:28:20.920 And most of the people who got rich did so through absolutely corrupt privatization schemes.

00:28:28.460 Like, for instance, there was a thing called loans for shares.

00:28:30.800 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.

00:28:37.600 I mean, like Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth.

00:28:46.120 They bought it for nothing, basically, for a pittance because they were pals of the people in government.

00:28:52.680 So they created an instant billionaire class, and that was completely passed over.

00:28:57.200 Nobody reported on that.

00:28:58.400 But then, once these people had money, they were treated as sort of legitimate wealth creators and, you know.

00:29:11.320 Entrepreneurs.

00:29:11.880 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:12.760 They weren't even the robber barons who at least, like, built railroads.

00:29:17.360 Oh, exactly.

00:29:18.180 Right?

00:29:18.520 You know, like, these guys didn't do anything except steal, you know.

00:29:22.240 They were wealth extractors, and it was amazing watching the hype of these figures, the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his, you know, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, right?

00:29:45.440 I mean, like, there was a ton of that going on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office and became infamous from it.

00:29:51.420 Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed before Putin came along.

00:29:55.520 Under Yeltsin, yeah.

00:29:56.640 But only Putin kills journalists. 0.58

00:29:58.600 No, no, no.

00:29:59.860 This started from the very beginning they were doing this.

00:30:03.760 I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase, that was 1994 when that happened.

00:30:07.920 And, you know, there were, there were a lot, I had a friend, not exactly a friend, somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinchstein, who also worked for a newspaper there.

00:30:19.100 He got thrown in a mental institution in the Yeltsin years.

00:30:24.060 There were, there were all sorts of reporters shot. 0.83

00:30:27.000 If you go in and shot, shot, killed, beaten.

00:30:30.580 Putin, you know, I had another friend named Leonid Krutakov, who was not only fired every time he did an expose, but, you know, he, he would be attacked. 0.56

00:30:40.440 He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly.

00:30:44.960 So it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office.

00:30:49.040 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.

00:31:01.100 But it wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists.

00:31:05.360 The difference was that they, that Putin concentrated government authority in a way that had not been done previously.

00:31:14.160 Before it was more of like a gangland free-for-all, Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station, NTV.

00:31:23.980 He had the, one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gusinsky.

00:31:29.780 And, you know, the, the owner of Bank Manatep, Mikhail Khodakovsky.

00:31:37.440 Famously.

00:31:38.080 Famously put in jail.

00:31:39.840 You know, they were sponsors of media as well.

00:31:41.900 So, but the only thing that was different is that the government was exerting sort of overt control over, over media.

00:31:50.460 And they were, they were stamping out the individual pockets of opposition.

00:31:54.820 So during the Elsin years, it was very dangerous.

00:31:56.980 You just, you, you did still have some freedom to do really good work.

00:32:00.600 And, and that's why those, those people were amazing.

00:32:03.160 Like, you know, they were risking everything every time they did a story and they were still doing it. 0.90

00:32:08.140 They just had, they had such balls. 0.51

00:32:09.840 It was, it was incredible to watch. 0.92

00:32:11.200 It's just interesting.

00:32:13.080 And then the contrast, by the way, with, between that and the, and the Americans, right, was, was just so striking for me.

00:32:19.760 But why would American journalists be providing cover for Yeltsin or ignoring the downside of Yeltsin?

00:32:27.880 So some of it was cultural, you know, you, you come in, you don't speak the language.

00:32:32.600 It's a temporary assignment.

00:32:34.280 You're hanging around with a bunch of other Westerners.

00:32:36.600 And so you don't see, right?

00:32:38.400 Like that, that was a very typical thing.

00:32:40.320 The few reporters who, you know, spoke the language and, or, you know, married Russian women, right?

00:32:47.540 Or, or were Russian men.

00:32:49.120 They were better, right?

00:32:52.520 Because they were, they were at least in tune to what was going on in the country.

00:32:55.420 But Moscow was still, and St. Petersburg were like a different country compared to what was going on in the rest of Russia.

00:33:01.720 You know, you could be in Moscow and it would seem like a more or less functional place.

00:33:07.640 You go 40 miles outside the city.

00:33:10.100 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.

00:33:19.820 You know, they're, they're putting on cam of fatigues and creating their own toll booths.

00:33:26.640 So it's like Beirut.

00:33:27.520 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:28.220 And, and, but if you didn't know, if you didn't go out, you wouldn't see it, you know?

00:33:33.100 So I think that was, it was a problem of perception for a lot of these folks.

00:33:37.140 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.

00:33:49.960 And how were you treated by government there?

00:33:51.920 So the, we had a unique position because we were publishing in Russia.

00:33:59.500 So unlike all those other reporter, American reporters, I was technically a Russian news organization.

00:34:05.640 We had a Russian newspaper.

00:34:08.000 We had a Russian business, right?

00:34:10.060 So even though we were in, in, in English, we were regulated by, uh, you know, the, the, the Russian government.

00:34:17.380 Um, we got visited every now and then by the tax police asking for bribes.

00:34:22.160 And then, um, after, after I left, they eventually shut the paper down.

00:34:27.160 Uh, so, um, 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.

00:34:41.140 I mean, there were people who were Paul Klebnikoff, remember that name?

00:34:44.340 Yeah.

00:34:44.800 Yeah.

00:34:45.060 And so he got, he got shot, right.

00:34:47.520 Um, while he was there.

00:34:49.380 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.

00:34:58.280 They weren't, they didn't care so much about what I was doing, which was writing for people who are in Russia.

00:35:02.720 Uh, and, uh, you know, and also we were writing in English, so God knows how many Russian officials even understanding what we were doing.

00:35:12.260 So, yeah.

00:35:13.420 So how did, um, well, first of all, why'd you leave?

00:35:18.500 Well, um, it became harder and harder.

00:35:21.980 The expat community shrank, uh, when Putin came to power, which killed our advertiser base.

00:35:29.080 Um, and, uh, I, I, we had a humor newspaper that was sort of loosely based on like a cross between spy magazine and screw.

00:35:40.840 And I, I kind of thought that we had, you know, run the course, uh, creatively while I was there.

00:35:48.720 Um, and, you know, I, at some point I just wanted to come home, but, um, but also, you know, it had kind of turned nasty, uh, you know,

00:35:59.080 some of the people who I knew, I, like, I, I vaguely knew Anna Polikowska, for instance, who got killed while I was there.

00:36:07.100 And there was another reporter who was sort of a mentor to me, this guy, Yuri Shikachikin, who became a, um, a Duma deputy.

00:36:14.300 Uh, he died under mysterious circumstances.

00:36:18.120 Some people said it was a poison telephone.

00:36:20.280 I mean, who knows, right?

00:36:21.660 But, um, it, it got kind of unpleasant.

00:36:25.100 Um, and, you know, I, the, the community was just not as, as big as it had been in, in the, in the nineties.

00:36:34.920 I mean, Moscow in the late nineties was an incredible scene.

00:36:37.680 It was like Chicago in the thirties.

00:36:39.160 So it's, 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.

00:36:49.640 There were terrorist explosions happening all the time.

00:36:52.320 It was, it was a wild place to be.

00:36:55.900 Uh, and you know, that, that story kind of ran its course while I was, while I was there and the city started to transform into what you saw when you went.

00:37:04.940 Yeah.

00:37:05.120 The most functional city I've ever been in.

00:37:06.700 Yeah.

00:37:07.020 Which is so, it's so amazing for me to hear.

00:37:09.280 It was certainly shocking for me.

00:37:11.380 So this winter, I'm standing in the kitchen with my dogs and my wife comes in. 0.89

00:37:15.060 She's just come back from a long walk and she has this look on her face, this look of tranquility and joy and peace.

00:37:23.520 And I said, what have you been doing?

00:37:24.800 And she said, I was praying.

00:37:26.340 And I said, where?

00:37:27.000 She said, on my walk for an hour and a half.

00:37:30.620 And it turns out she was listening to something I'd never heard of before, which is an app called Hallow.

00:37:35.240 Hallow, H-A-L-L-O-W.

00:37:38.740 Hallow, like Hallowed.

00:37:40.560 And a friend of hers gave it to her.

00:37:42.400 And this set off a chain reaction in my family where pretty much everyone in my family started to listen to Hallow every day.

00:37:48.120 It's a prayer app.

00:37:49.040 And it's the best way, as you know, to find peace.

00:37:52.140 And this makes it very easy to set aside the time to deeply pray every single day.

00:37:58.740 And I was so impressed by Hallow that I tracked down the number of the CEO and I called him and I said, I want to advertise this on our podcast because it's something that I really believe in.

00:38:07.440 And I think you do an amazing job.

00:38:08.820 And it's basically non-denominational Christian.

00:38:11.360 You don't have to be Catholic or Protestant.

00:38:12.560 You can be any kind of Christian.

00:38:14.860 But Hallow will help you focus your prayer in a way that will be very obvious to your husband when you walk into the kitchen.

00:38:22.020 I can promise you that.

00:38:24.060 It's an amazing, amazing resource.

00:38:25.960 They've got like 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations, Bible studies.

00:38:30.920 Famously, Mark Wahlberg leads one of them.

00:38:33.620 It's just really, really good.

00:38:35.360 You can download it for three months free at Hallow.com slash Tucker.

00:38:39.960 And I strongly recommend that you do that.

00:38:55.960 So you missed, in the 10 years you were gone, the entire span of the Clinton years.

00:39:03.540 Yep.

00:39:04.520 And 9-11.

00:39:05.840 And so I think it's fair to say it was a completely different country in 2002 from what it had been in 1992.

00:39:12.740 Mm-hmm.

00:39:13.220 What did you think when you got back?

00:39:14.560 Well, I mean, I was shocked when I got back.

00:39:21.420 And I was thinking about this just the other day because, you know, I think a lot now about kind of America's slide toward autocracy.

00:39:29.100 Because I had this vision the whole time I was there.

00:39:31.440 You know, watching the Russian government in action was like getting this incredible advanced education into autocratic methods and how things work, right?

00:39:43.780 You know, the jailing of political opponents, you know, on trumped-up charges or, you know, blackmail and how things are leaked by the intelligence services.

00:39:53.520 Like that stuff just happens out in the open there, right?

00:39:56.060 And I always had this image that, well, in America, that doesn't go on.

00:40:00.020 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.

00:40:12.820 Because I think as Dick Cheney put it, we have to start exploring the dark side because, you know, the Bill of Rights is inadequate to keep us safe.

00:40:23.900 We need to start doing, you know, all these things that I thought were crazy.

00:40:28.380 You know, the Patriot Act, the authorization to use military force, right?

00:40:33.100 Like, so moving the authority to declare war out of Congress to basically to the White House, mass surveillance, you know, Guantanamo Bay, all these things were really shocking to me.

00:40:50.680 And it was kind of, I thought it was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation.

00:40:57.240 So what year did you get back?

00:40:59.460 2002.

00:40:59.980 So was it clear to you then where the trajectory was headed?

00:41:05.380 Well, I thought there would be, I was really naive in retrospect.

00:41:09.460 I thought there, I took all of my sort of fellow political liberals seriously when they said they were, you know, ardently opposed to this secretive revolution, right?

00:41:22.760 And the spy state and drone warfare and all these other things.

00:41:26.800 And when 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, which I thought was sort of going to undo this schoolhouse rock version of America that I grew up believing in.

00:41:49.140 And I believed it, I believed it, I'm kind of embarrassed now.

00:41:55.740 I actually thought that was going to happen that when Barack Obama got elected that all that would turn back.

00:42:02.740 But in hindsight, you know, they never had any intention, it seems, of changing anything.

00:42:09.880 If you go back and look at the statements, you know, they were saying things like, well, we're not, we're not, we might not change the status quo right away.

00:42:17.720 Right.

00:42:19.220 And I had, you know, I had been very positive about Barack Obama.

00:42:24.760 I covered him on the campaign trail 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.

00:42:35.380 Right.

00:42:35.860 And, and, and I, I was very impressed by Barack Obama.

00:42:40.860 I thought he was incredible, but it was disillusioning to see what happened afterwards.

00:42:46.640 At what point did you realize he wasn't what you thought he was?

00:42:49.960 So, right after he got elected, I got assigned to cover the causes of the financial crisis.

00:42:56.160 And, which was funny because I had no background in finance.

00:42:59.560 I didn't have any clue what a mortgage-backed security was or how any of that works.

00:43:04.280 But one of the first things that happened was that, you know, I got calls from people in the Democratic Party who said, you should look at the president's relationship, the Citigroup, and, you know, how the Citigroup bailout happened.

00:43:19.660 You know, he put a Citigroup executive who had been a college buddy of his in charge of his economic transition, during which they gave a very, you know, a sweetheart bailout deal to, to Citigroup.

00:43:33.420 And this was an early indication that, you know, this president was maybe not exactly what I thought he was.

00:43:40.960 Not transformative in the way you imagined.

00:43:42.840 Right.

00:43:43.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:43:44.240 And, and even though Rolling Stone couldn't, they were over the moon about Obama, right?

00:43:50.620 That was true love.

00:43:52.220 I remember that.

00:43:52.880 Right?

00:43:53.420 Yeah.

00:43:53.580 It was almost erotic.

00:43:54.760 Yeah.

00:43:55.140 Oh, yeah.

00:43:55.620 I mean, everybody in, in liberal media loved Obama, but particularly at our magazine where, you know, the, the people who owned it were, they were, they were just delirious about Obama.

00:44:09.400 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.

00:44:17.200 They weren't pleased, but they ran.

00:44:19.140 If you can go back and look, you'll see that there's a story called Obama's big sellout.

00:44:23.080 It was like a 9,000 word feature that they let me run.

00:44:26.400 And, um, so that was like a year after he got, uh, into office, but that was kind of the beginning of, um, what did the piece say?

00:44:35.680 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.

00:44:58.260 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, Rubin, Bob Rubin.

00:45:14.200 Uh, so there, there are all these Rubin was at Citigroup, uh, Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government.

00:45:24.680 And, you know, these were the same kind of people who had caused the crash, right?

00:45:31.660 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.

00:45:37.660 He brought in people who were the system.

00:45:40.140 And in addition, uh, there was this bailout deal with city, with Citigroup in particular, that was, that was kind of malodorous.

00:45:48.420 And, um, there were, there were people who ended up paying fines in that situation.

00:45:55.120 Um, but, uh, it was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy.

00:46:03.860 And the idea was he had run as one thing and he was really another thing.

00:46:08.880 Um, so that was one of the first stories of that type.

00:46:11.320 How did the Obama administration react to the piece?

00:46:13.340 Um, they weren't happy.

00:46:17.180 Uh, if you go back and look there, there's, there's an interview with Obama.

00:46:21.920 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.

00:46:32.980 Um, and this was like years after the fact.

00:46:35.420 And, and by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him while he was running.

00:46:40.860 Right.

00:46:41.340 So of all of 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?

00:46:50.720 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, the drone assassination thing, the kill list, you know, terror Tuesdays, all that stuff.

00:47:05.560 I didn't really clue into that.

00:47:07.660 Killing an American citizen with a drone.

00:47:09.480 Yeah, no, exactly. 0.87

00:47:11.260 That, that whole thing was incredible.

00:47:13.580 You know, when you, I mean, I, I did a story later about another American who sued the government for, cause, cause he thought he was on the kill list.

00:47:21.680 Um, and you know, the, the government's response was, you're not entitled to find out whether you're on it or not.

00:47:30.020 Uh, you're on the kill list.

00:47:31.920 Yeah.

00:47:32.320 And the, the, the, the, the whole idea that we even have something called like lethal action, that it might apply to an American citizen, that you can do that without due process.

00:47:43.240 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.

00:47:54.660 Right. Legal, legal, legal justifications for what they were doing.

00:47:58.260 That weren't grounded in any law that was passed or any, any court case.

00:48:02.840 They just sort of wrote themselves white papers, giving themselves permission to do this stuff, which I think is crazy.

00:48:09.280 To this day, I think it's crazy.

00:48:10.540 Well, I found it totally shocking.

00:48:11.640 And I'm, I think I'm basically opposed to the death penalty anyway, but you know, I think reasonable people can support the death penalty.

00:48:19.140 Absolutely.

00:48:19.420 If there's a trial.

00:48:20.800 Well, that's the point.

00:48:22.000 Right.

00:48:22.240 But there's a trial.

00:48:23.100 And the one thing you can never do is murder your own citizens because you exist to help your citizens.

00:48:29.040 That's the only reason we have the government.

00:48:30.500 Right.

00:48:30.880 Why do we have government as a collective action on everyone's behalf?

00:48:34.580 Who's a citizen?

00:48:35.300 So the idea that you could kill an American citizen and the first time, I mean, I think they've actually killed quite a few American citizens.

00:48:42.820 It turns out, I didn't know that.

00:48:44.300 But the first time I became aware of it, it was, it was effectively a foreign national with the U.S. passport.

00:48:51.120 The Al-Awlaki case. 0.82

00:48:52.000 Al-Awlaki.

00:48:52.580 Mm-hmm.

00:48:53.360 And then, you know, Spartan was like, well, is he really an American?

00:48:56.300 Well, yeah, actually he's an American citizen.

00:48:58.040 Yeah.

00:48:58.280 Like that's the whole point.

00:48:59.720 You're either a citizen or not.

00:49:01.000 Right.

00:49:01.620 And I remember being really shocked by that.

00:49:04.320 But it was glossed over in this weird way, right?

00:49:07.420 People were like, eh. 0.81

00:49:08.500 He's a terrorist. 0.98

00:49:09.380 Yeah, he's a terrorist. 1.00

00:49:10.540 Or terrorist adjacent. 0.99

00:49:11.860 Right.

00:49:12.460 Terroristy.

00:49:13.240 Yeah.

00:49:13.840 I mean, you could probably call him a terrorist, but they killed a 16-year-old son too.

00:49:20.280 So how did Obama explain that?

00:49:23.680 So, I mean, I remember he gave a speech.

00:49:25.960 I was looking at this just the other day where he talked about, among other things,

00:49:31.460 they said that Al-Awlaki had been tied to the coal bombing.

00:49:36.960 And I remember reading that and thinking, okay, well, he's saying that this is punishment

00:49:41.660 for a crime, but there's no trial, right?

00:49:46.440 We're pronouncing him guilty and just executing the guy for something that we say he did.

00:49:53.300 That seemed crazy to me, you know?

00:49:56.680 Oh, yes.

00:49:57.800 And I remember there was another white paper.

00:50:00.860 I believe Leon Panetta was involved in it where the concept was, yes, due process is

00:50:08.880 required, but it doesn't have to involve the defendant, right?

00:50:13.480 As long as there is a process, right?

00:50:15.940 It can be unilaterally us just talking about it, you know?

00:50:20.320 And it can be post-execution.

00:50:21.720 Right, exactly, yeah.

00:50:24.660 But that stuff, it's all madness.

00:50:26.900 And I don't know, I mean, I'd be curious to hear what you think.

00:50:29.080 I mean, I think when we did those things and didn't make a big stink about it, psychologically,

00:50:37.080 we just crossed a line into something else.

00:50:40.180 And I feel like there's no going back once you...

00:50:45.860 So we were talking about this at dinner last night.

00:50:47.200 I mean, obviously, you're coming from different polls, I guess, you know?

00:50:52.200 Well, it turns out not.

00:50:53.600 But in 1995, we would have been on exactly opposite sides.

00:50:58.660 But I think we both, given our similar age, had the same sort of gut-level belief, which

00:51:04.980 is whatever the U.S. does abroad is in a completely different category from the way the government

00:51:10.060 conducts itself domestically.

00:51:11.360 In other words, you can't treat American citizens like you would, you know, the Houthis 1.00

00:51:15.660 or something, right?

00:51:17.000 It's like, there's one set of standards for the way we deal, conduct our foreign policy

00:51:20.280 with foreigners, and a completely different standard for the way the U.S. government treats

00:51:23.920 its own citizens who own the government.

00:51:25.620 It's their government, right?

00:51:26.720 Right, right, exactly. 0.98

00:51:28.140 And I guess what I didn't realize, because I was morally deficient and young and dumb, was 0.64

00:51:34.000 that once you start doing really evil things abroad, you're going to do them at home, 0.87

00:51:37.780 actually.

00:51:38.360 Absolutely.

00:51:38.760 And you can't defend democracy by subverting democracy.

00:51:42.500 No.

00:51:43.060 And also, you're basically denaturing the whole idea of democracy.

00:51:50.900 You're diluting it once you start murdering people without due process.

00:51:58.480 You know, it's not democracy anymore.

00:52:00.600 I mean, they use that term in a very facile way now, constantly.

00:52:04.900 Oh, we have to protect democracy.

00:52:06.400 Well, what do you mean by that?

00:52:07.820 Are you going to protect democracy by censoring, right?

00:52:10.820 Like, this is the whole thing that I've spent the last two years on.

00:52:15.240 If that's what you mean, that's contradictory, right?

00:52:20.200 And, you know, that thing is...

00:52:22.240 Contradictory in what sense?

00:52:23.700 Well, the First Amendment says that we don't do that, right?

00:52:27.620 Well, like, you can't protect the Bill of Rights by violating it.

00:52:32.920 Right.

00:52:33.040 And, you know, this whole switch, I think, like most Americans, I was like you.

00:52:42.400 We all knew that the United States was whacking people all over the world, right?

00:52:48.420 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?

00:52:55.440 We were doing all kinds of horrible things.

00:52:57.240 We were probably fixing elections, you know, in half the places on earth, but not here, right?

00:53:05.060 Like, that was a bright line for Americans.

00:53:07.880 Now, maybe that's chauvinistic to believe in that, but I was like you, I didn't think they would ever cross that line and bring these ideas home.

00:53:20.820 But, you know, this is what we're finding out now.

00:53:22.840 I mean, this is the big theme of the Twitter files was, you know, when we tried to figure out where...

00:53:29.860 So what are the Twitter...

00:53:30.360 Can you explain for people who didn't follow it at the time?

00:53:32.780 So in late 2022, after Elon Musk acquired 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?

00:53:49.800 And it turned out to be true. 0.81

00:53:52.260 I got a call one day or I got a note sort of summoning me to San Francisco.

00:53:58.820 From whom?

00:53:59.820 From somebody at Twitter, let's put it that way.

00:54:01.560 And so I was the first person who was put on this project of looking, rummaging through old Twitter's, you know, correspondence.

00:54:17.720 And, you know, 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.

00:54:30.520 And it's not clear exactly what he was up to.

00:54:33.980 But, you know, he seemed sincere at the time.

00:54:37.920 He brought in me.

00:54:39.120 He brought in Barry Weiss.

00:54:40.980 Barry brought in a couple of other people like Michael Schellenberger.

00:54:44.920 Lee Fang ended up being involved.

00:54:47.200 Another reporter, really good young investigative reporter, maybe the last one, right?

00:54:52.100 Probably.

00:54:52.360 You know, he appeared.

00:54:56.040 And so there was a group of us.

00:54:57.880 And for about three months, we got to look through the internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest communications companies.

00:55:07.280 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.

00:55:18.440 And they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways.

00:55:29.860 And when we started to try to figure out, first of all, this was shocking to us.

00:55:34.240 We were seeing all these documents that said flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS.

00:55:39.420 Just to be clear, that's a crime.

00:55:40.820 They're committing a crime by doing that.

00:55:42.220 That's illegal.

00:55:43.280 Probably.

00:55:43.640 On the Bill of Rights.

00:55:44.440 I mean, it just really couldn't be clearer.

00:55:45.740 Yeah, you would think, right?

00:55:48.100 You know, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it looked bad to me, right?

00:55:52.340 Certainly, it looked like a story.

00:55:54.760 Yeah.

00:55:54.960 No question, right?

00:55:57.140 But we had to figure out, where did this come from?

00:55:59.920 Like, how did this start?

00:56:01.380 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,

00:56:13.520 sort of messaging programs, right?

00:56:16.700 So the State Department, for instance, has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now very much interested in speech, both abroad and at home.

00:56:28.420 But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS platform.

00:56:35.680 In fact, they had a different name back then.

00:56:37.740 They were called the CSCC.

00:56:39.380 But in 2016, Obama rechristened them the Global Engagement Center, and they started to look inward.

00:56:46.860 And when I asked people who, I managed to talk to a couple of sources who worked at that agency, one phrase really stuck out.

00:56:57.080 It was CT to CP.

00:56:59.060 So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism.

00:57:01.560 And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or Al-Qaeda, contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up, right?

00:57:12.620 Because those threats had been somewhat neutralized.

00:57:16.440 But populism, you know, was now a very serious, it was viewed as a very serious threat.

00:57:22.960 But after 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.

00:57:38.600 I think that freaked them out.

00:57:39.980 And the virus is communicable.

00:57:41.820 Exactly, exactly.

00:57:43.160 Then there was Brexit.

00:57:44.420 Then I think Trump was the last, you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks.

00:57:48.440 And that's when you started to see all these communications, like, you know, we have to, we need to get a more formalized, you know, control over these platforms.

00:58:00.760 And so, yeah, that's when the war on terror mission turned inward.

00:58:06.240 And I think that's a huge story, right?

00:58:09.320 Well, it's the end of the country we grew up in.

00:58:11.520 Right?

00:58:11.900 Yeah.

00:58:12.500 You would think, you know, and that's, you know, for me, it's been...

00:58:18.440 And I think probably for you too, this new theme of the sudden explosion of illiberal tactics in politics 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?

00:58:41.940 And we haven't used contempt of Congress to jail people since the Un-American Affairs Committee in 1947, right?

00:58:50.300 This is like third world kind of stuff that we're seeing, you know, accusing the front runner in a presidential campaign of a hundred different felonies.

00:59:02.080 Is that happening if he's not running for president?

00:59:04.260 I mean, who could honestly say that, right?

00:59:07.920 It's, but you can't talk about it now.

00:59:10.560 I mean, if you mention it, you're out of the club in mainstream press now, which is incredible to me.

00:59:17.620 You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists, right, left.

00:59:26.880 The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.

00:59:33.280 It's between good and evil.

00:59:35.040 It's between honesty and falsehood.

00:59:37.700 And we hope we are on the former side.

00:59:39.780 And that's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.

00:59:42.940 And we invite you to subscribe to it.

00:59:44.720 Go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast.

00:59:47.600 Our entire archive is there.

00:59:49.120 A lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running.

00:59:55.160 Tuckercarlson.com slash podcast.

00:59:58.840 You will not regret it.

01:00:09.780 So, I mean, it raises so many questions, but most obviously then, if uncovering the abuse of power by the powerful, particularly by government, isn't the point of journalism, it's clearly not the point of journalism anymore, what is the point?

01:00:30.980 Well, I mean, then you become courtiers, right?

01:00:34.160 I mean, I think that's, again, what's ironic for me is that, you know, this is, I saw this process happening full circle.

01:00:44.120 You know, when I first got to Russia, the first reporters I met had worked at places like Komsomolska Pravda in the 80s, right?

01:00:52.820 Which were, at one time, it was the world's largest newspaper.

01:00:56.100 It had a circulation of 21 million or something like that.

01:00:59.260 And, you know, I worked in the old Pravda building when I was at the Moscow Times.

01:01:04.800 And the people there, you know, they would tell me stories about what their jobs were in the 80s.

01:01:09.520 And that was like taking dictation.

01:01:12.300 They were clerks, basically, right?

01:01:14.120 You know, they would get 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.

01:01:22.500 And there was no, you know, intellectual anything involved with it.

01:01:26.580 You couldn't take it in that direction.

01:01:28.280 It would be hazardous to your health if you did.

01:01:31.920 Well, that's what journalism is now in America.

01:01:35.260 I mean, look what just happened with the Nord Stream thing.

01:01:38.400 Just take an example, right?

01:01:40.660 Nord Stream happens, and there's no investigation whatsoever in any of the major newspapers.

01:01:47.980 How can that happen?

01:01:49.180 It's this major consequential thing that might have an impact on starting a war with a nuclear power.

01:01:56.940 Oh, and it just wrecked the economy of Western Europe.

01:02:00.300 And it's a major ecological disaster, which you claim to care about.

01:02:04.220 It's the largest man-made emission of CO2 in history.

01:02:07.940 Right?

01:02:08.420 So, and if you think CO2 is driving the greatest threat that we face, the existential threat of climate change, then you kind of want to know how that happened.

01:02:17.360 Right?

01:02:18.020 Wouldn't you?

01:02:19.140 Right?

01:02:19.980 Right.

01:02:20.540 You would think, you know?

01:02:21.780 So, why wouldn't, I mean, it is, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because, you know, I was like the only person in mainstream news to point out that, no, Russia did not blow up Nord Stream and was attacked for it.

01:02:32.580 But I was wondering, like, if I'm at the New York Times, like a lot of people I know, why would I just, like, try to report that story out?

01:02:38.980 It's so interesting.

01:02:40.180 Right.

01:02:40.380 Why wouldn't they?

01:02:41.560 Yeah.

01:02:42.160 I have no idea.

01:02:44.020 You know, I mean, obviously, you're getting a signal from down on high that, you know, that's not wanted.

01:02:51.120 But it's different.

01:02:53.340 Okay.

01:02:53.580 So, in the early 2000s, yes, there were high-profile instances where people like Jesse Ventura were unhired from MSNBC because they mistakenly thought he was pro-war when they hired him.

01:03:05.960 Right.

01:03:06.120 Right.

01:03:07.820 Phil Donahue is getting good ratings, but he's bounced, right?

01:03:10.760 I was there for that.

01:03:11.560 Yes.

01:03:14.180 Chris Hedges, you know.

01:03:15.560 Yes, I know.

01:03:16.500 And 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.

01:03:31.120 Which is weird because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right?

01:03:36.840 Yes.

01:03:36.980 If they're not, they're probably not good reporters.

01:03:39.900 Yes.

01:03:40.040 You know?

01:03:40.600 I mean, just look at who our great reporters are.

01:03:44.580 They're independent-minded people.

01:03:46.360 Independent-minded people.

01:03:47.500 And, you know, you want to experience them in little bursts.

01:03:51.280 Yeah, I agree.

01:03:51.680 That's why I agree with that.

01:03:53.580 Yeah.

01:03:55.000 But- 0.97

01:03:55.500 They're all kind of crazy, to be honest. 0.96

01:03:57.220 Yeah. 0.98

01:03:57.580 But that's okay.

01:03:58.760 Which is part of the job.

01:04:00.100 Right.

01:04:00.640 But this is different.

01:04:02.200 Like, there were a few instances like that back then of people who are critics of the war, whatever.

01:04:07.000 Now, it's just this blanket, if you step out of line on any one of two dozen different topics, you're out, you know?

01:04:17.240 And I think everybody's gotten that message.

01:04:20.960 And that's the only thing that makes sense to me is like-

01:04:24.580 But so there are no brave people in all of journalism?

01:04:27.040 There are no honest men left?

01:04:28.600 Well, how can that-

01:04:29.640 I mean, it can't be possible, but it kind of is, right?

01:04:34.340 I mean, there are a few people who I think tried to do a few things, you know?

01:04:41.440 But just to take the-

01:04:42.840 Look at the Russiagate story.

01:04:44.500 They made so many mistakes on that.

01:04:46.280 Jeff Girth-

01:04:47.240 Okay, so before you-

01:04:48.200 I want-

01:04:48.900 Let's put you at the center of this.

01:04:50.320 Because you were-

01:04:51.280 One of the reasons we're having this conversation is you were one of the only liberals in all media who-

01:04:58.340 And you speak Russian.

01:04:59.540 You live there for 10 years.

01:05:00.660 Like, you have credibility on this question, I would say.

01:05:02.820 And you were the only ones who said, you know, I don't like Trump.

01:05:07.040 I didn't vote for Trump.

01:05:07.760 But like, I don't think this is real.

01:05:09.900 I had a book out at the time called Insane Clown President about Donald Trump.

01:05:14.180 Right?

01:05:14.860 I mean, I'm not a fan of the guy, right?

01:05:17.860 But they came to me-

01:05:19.000 So where were you when the Russiagate thing started?

01:05:21.420 I was at Rolling Stone.

01:05:22.980 And-

01:05:23.480 What did you think when you first heard that he was a Russian agent?

01:05:25.700 So, it was in late 2016.

01:05:31.220 It was right after he had gotten elected.

01:05:33.480 Remember that list that came out, Prop or Not?

01:05:37.240 Well, Washington posted this story about this weird blacklist that they had discovered of people who the Russians were supposedly in league with.

01:05:45.940 And it was this shadowy organization called Prop or Not.

01:05:49.600 And they linked to this list of sites.

01:05:54.680 And, you know, without any evidence at all, they were linking all kinds of independent journalists to Russia.

01:06:02.000 And I thought, well, that's crazy.

01:06:05.060 And then there was this whole thing about-

01:06:08.740 I actually had to do a segment on MSNBC with Chris Hayes.

01:06:15.540 The other guest was Malcolm Nance, of all people.

01:06:18.660 And it was all about, you know, is Trump in league?

01:06:22.960 Before he got inaugurated, is Trump, you know, in league with the Russians?

01:06:28.640 There had just been a big leak about that.

01:06:30.920 And I thought, well, there's no evidence for this, right?

01:06:34.000 Like, we just had a catastrophic episode in journalism with the WMD thing where anonymous sources get us in a lot of trouble.

01:06:43.020 If you can't recreate the experiment in the lab, you got to be careful of that story, right?

01:06:48.960 And that's all I said.

01:06:50.420 I wasn't like, he's innocent, you know?

01:06:52.220 Like, I just thought, this is a dangerous story.

01:06:55.660 Let's all be careful with this.

01:06:57.180 And immediately, there was this reaction that was just shocking to me.

01:07:03.300 It was like this shunning thing.

01:07:04.860 It happened to me.

01:07:06.180 It happened to, you know, Greenwald, obviously.

01:07:09.280 Aaron Maté at The Nation.

01:07:10.840 There was like a group letter that was written by the rest of the staff, you know, denouncing him.

01:07:17.840 The, you know, the husband of the editor of The Nation also, Stephen Cohen.

01:07:23.240 They didn't want him around.

01:07:25.540 Wonderful man.

01:07:26.620 He was, yeah, absolutely.

01:07:27.720 He was a good friend of mine.

01:07:29.740 But it was crazy because this was so early in the process and everybody had already predetermined that this thing was true.

01:07:39.640 This extraordinary complicated thesis.

01:07:42.060 They had somehow already arrived at the conclusion that it was proven.

01:07:47.880 And at this point, you didn't know either way?

01:07:50.780 I didn't really know either way, but I had a strong suspicion that it was wrong, right?

01:07:54.360 Like, you know, journalists have a sense.

01:07:57.860 They're the sixth sense.

01:07:58.600 It doesn't smell right, right?

01:07:59.960 That's right.

01:08:00.100 Like, it's kind of like the French Connection where, you know, Gene Hackman looks over and he says, that's a wrong table, right?

01:08:06.820 Yeah.

01:08:06.920 Like, this was a wrong table.

01:08:08.660 It didn't look right.

01:08:09.920 I felt the same way.

01:08:10.780 Yeah, and it was too complicated for me to see.

01:08:14.000 I wish I had known at the time.

01:08:15.860 Even in right-wing world where I then worked and lived, I felt like everyone believed it.

01:08:22.040 Yeah, but how is that possible? 0.99

01:08:24.520 Well, I remember saying to somebody, you know, I think this is, I think this could be like complete bullshit, like actual bullshit. 0.99

01:08:30.860 And my friend goes, be careful, be careful. 0.99

01:08:33.600 Think there's something there.

01:08:34.440 I was like, okay.

01:08:35.540 By the way, I try to be very open-minded.

01:08:37.520 Like, I don't know.

01:08:38.440 Right.

01:08:38.680 If you're actually a space alien, I don't know, prove it to me.

01:08:41.200 Right.

01:08:41.300 I really try to keep every possibility open.

01:08:45.120 But I kept asking people like, what?

01:08:47.460 Okay.

01:08:48.220 How do we know this?

01:08:49.660 Right.

01:08:50.460 Everybody believed it.

01:08:52.180 Yeah.

01:08:52.820 Why?

01:08:53.180 You know, they hated Trump.

01:08:56.240 That was obvious, you know?

01:08:59.160 But that wasn't enough for me, right?

01:09:01.820 Like, just on a superficial level, it didn't fit.

01:09:04.860 Donald Trump, you wouldn't tell me he's involved in some mob deal to build a casino in Atlantic City or something like that, right?

01:09:14.540 Yeah, I believe that.

01:09:14.840 Like, I believe that.

01:09:16.720 Donald Trump being James Bond involved in a five-year conspiracy with the Russian government, you know, what did Steele call it?

01:09:26.960 A well-developed conspiracy of five years. 0.98

01:09:30.360 That's ridiculous. 0.92

01:09:31.480 This is a guy who, if you've been to any of his campaign speeches, he can't get through the first sentence of one of his scripts. 0.99

01:09:38.060 Like, his brain is already off in another direction.

01:09:40.420 How is that guy going to keep a secret?

01:09:43.140 It didn't make any sense.

01:09:45.020 And nobody had any evidence.

01:09:48.760 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 Steele dossier, I thought, well, it's over now, right?

01:10:04.840 With a Republican donor, too.

01:10:07.060 Well, yes.

01:10:08.280 Yeah.

01:10:08.560 Sort of previously, right?

01:10:10.060 Yeah.

01:10:10.240 Steele didn't come on until later.

01:10:13.720 But still, once that came out and, you know, you knew that campaign research had ended up in an intelligence assessment, that should have been it, I thought.

01:10:26.760 And everybody just plowed ahead like it was still a thing.

01:10:30.580 So what happened to you in the middle of all?

01:10:32.440 So you're at Rolling Stone.

01:10:33.640 You're this famous liberal reporter, one of the most famous liberal reporters, actually.

01:10:38.560 And you make the mistake of saying, well, we don't know for a fact this is true.

01:10:43.160 People start shunning you.

01:10:44.160 Where does it go from there?

01:10:46.380 So then I started to get angry about it.

01:10:48.880 And at one point I went.

01:10:52.160 Well, because, you know, I don't like to be told what to do.

01:10:56.000 I don't like to be told that I got to ignore something.

01:10:58.460 Right.

01:10:58.720 You know, I'm one of those difficult personalities in journalism, right?

01:11:03.900 Like, you know, it just happens that way.

01:11:05.820 But I went to Rolling Stone at one point.

01:11:08.360 I had really good editors there for the most part.

01:11:11.720 But I went to them and I said, look, this story is wrong, right?

01:11:16.860 And it's going to come out that it's wrong.

01:11:20.460 Give me eight weeks to chase this down.

01:11:23.740 And let's be the first mainstream organization to get it right and put it to bed.

01:11:29.640 And it'll be a coup for us, right?

01:11:32.080 You know, let me do my thing on this.

01:11:34.640 And they said no.

01:11:36.280 The first time they ever said no to me on, you know, like an investigative project.

01:11:40.780 And just to restate, you speak Russian.

01:11:42.940 You can read Russian.

01:11:43.900 So there's probably no one better to do the story.

01:11:46.960 Yeah, I would think, right?

01:11:48.820 You know, I even had some sources over there, right, who could have chased it down.

01:11:52.940 You know, certain aspects of it down, like, you know, the Trump Tower deal and all that stuff.

01:11:58.040 Like, that would have been relatively easy to go through.

01:12:01.820 And I had covered Congress.

01:12:03.180 So the people who were investigating this, like, I knew some of those folks, too.

01:12:09.600 And it's a great story.

01:12:11.560 I mean, when it first came out, it was obvious.

01:12:14.840 This is either the biggest intelligence coup in history, right?

01:12:19.100 The Russians getting a Manchurian candidate in the White House.

01:12:22.460 Or it's the biggest fake in history, right?

01:12:26.160 The biggest setup in history.

01:12:28.020 Somebody's either telling the biggest whopper ever or the Russians have just pulled off this, the most amazing thing. 0.99

01:12:33.700 It can't.

01:12:34.060 There's no other option.

01:12:35.660 Yes.

01:12:35.900 Right?

01:12:36.700 So if it's not this, it's that.

01:12:41.040 And we might as well be the first to report that, right?

01:12:43.580 Yes.

01:12:44.060 And—

01:12:44.500 So what did they say when you made—

01:12:45.620 They said no.

01:12:46.420 On what grounds?

01:12:48.120 I don't even—I mean, I don't even remember what the excuse was.

01:12:51.000 They just weren't enthused about the idea, you know?

01:12:53.700 And I understood that, you know?

01:12:57.180 Like, look, they're a Rolling Stone.

01:12:58.980 They have an audience that has certain expectations.

01:13:03.300 But that was a big moment for me, you know?

01:13:06.940 I mean, I was naive.

01:13:08.100 I actually thought they—you know, that the magazine would be interested in going there.

01:13:15.040 Because they had let me, you know, go against Obama before.

01:13:19.020 They had let me do other things.

01:13:20.140 But not on this, so.

01:13:23.000 So how—what did your colleagues say to you?

01:13:25.180 Because by this point, I think it was becoming public to anyone who was watching, like me, that you were dissenting from the line on this question.

01:13:34.220 Yeah, so I would say Glenn Greenwald took the brunt of it.

01:13:38.320 You know, there were stories in the New Yorker profiles, you know, the bane of their resistance, right?

01:13:46.420 Like, why is Glenn Greenwald being a stick in the mud about this Russia thing?

01:13:50.480 That was like a feature topic in magazines, like a bunch of them.

01:13:55.080 And, you know, they concluded, by the way, that he was motivated by his impatience with the rise of women and minorities in the Democratic Party.

01:14:09.260 That was unbelievable. 0.99

01:14:10.040 He was a racist! 0.97

01:14:11.500 Right! 0.99

01:14:12.980 Glenn's a racist! 0.83

01:14:14.520 I actually had the physical copy of the New Yorker when they came out. 0.96

01:14:17.420 Not really! Did they always say that?

01:14:18.320 They did, yeah.

01:14:19.040 And it was an on-the-record quote by one of his former editors, of all things. 0.94

01:14:23.300 The Glenn's a racist.

01:14:25.480 Yeah, well, they didn't...

01:14:26.880 Right, well, he's impatient with the rise of women and minorities.

01:14:30.880 So, when I saw that, I'm like, wow, this is, like, what is going on with this, right?

01:14:36.820 And meanwhile, you know, I was getting it from all angles.

01:14:40.840 There were former Russian, former American diplomats who were going after me online saying I was in league with Putin and, you know...

01:14:49.820 Seriously?

01:14:50.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:51.560 It's kind of a heavy charge.

01:14:52.600 Yeah, you would think, you know, and that was becoming increasingly common.

01:15:00.400 It was an implication of a lot of the back and forth on social media, you know, that this person is too close to Russia or, you know, he loves Putin, right?

01:15:13.320 Like, that kind of a thing.

01:15:14.880 Had you ever worked as a secret agent for Putin?

01:15:17.320 Of course not.

01:15:18.300 No.

01:15:19.500 Are you kidding?

01:15:19.980 I am kidding, actually.

01:15:21.940 It's so nuts.

01:15:22.800 You just said you left Russia because you didn't like the vibe under Putin.

01:15:25.900 I mean, we put Putin in the cover of our newspaper, like, in drag carrying a dominatrix whip, you know?

01:15:34.640 Like, we lampooned him constantly.

01:15:37.840 And I actually did some journalism in Russian for another paper that was very critical of him and talked about the apartment bombings and some other stuff.

01:15:48.340 And so, I was no friend of Vladimir Putin's, but that became a common thing in journalism.

01:15:55.560 And it was just so shocking.

01:15:58.340 And I knew at that point that my time was limited at, you know, at Rolling Stone, which I loved.

01:16:04.480 The place, I really loved that place.

01:16:06.660 And it's a great gig, too.

01:16:08.300 But there was no way I was going to be able to stay under those circumstances.

01:16:14.060 How long did you last?

01:16:15.940 Until 2020, I guess.

01:16:18.980 So, 15 years, roughly.

01:16:21.720 You know, maybe 16, I guess.

01:16:24.600 So, it was a great time.

01:16:28.420 So, when it became clear that, you know, the claim that Putin had installed Trump as the American president, when it became clear that was, like, malicious fantasy, it was a total lie.

01:16:40.480 Did any of the people who attacked you and called you a Russian agent apologize or change their mind?

01:16:46.400 Of course not.

01:16:47.060 Did any of them apologize to you?

01:16:48.400 No, but it's a little different, because by that point, I was, like, such an outlaw that, like, I had no expectation of being treated fairly by anyone ever, other than my wife.

01:16:57.060 So, I was just, no, I'm serious.

01:16:59.200 By that, you know, I was just, like, your head changes.

01:17:00.900 But you were very much at, like, everyone liked you.

01:17:05.220 And, I mean, you were not an outlaw.

01:17:07.840 Right.

01:17:08.160 But you became an outlaw kind of overnight.

01:17:10.380 Right.

01:17:10.840 Yes. 0.81

01:17:11.160 Now, my name is sort of, you know, synonymous with, you know, reactionary, troll, you know, that kind of thing.

01:17:25.180 And that happened basically overnight.

01:17:28.300 It was a little tough to take for a few years there.

01:17:30.840 But, you know, I got over it relatively quickly.

01:17:35.580 I moved to Substack, which was, it turned out to be a great thing.

01:17:42.000 And, which is an independent platform.

01:17:45.400 And, you know, I was one of the first people who kind of left big mainstream media to do the self-publishing thing.

01:17:54.600 And discovered that there was actually, you know, a functioning business model there.

01:18:03.120 I mean, I had been in journalism for 30 years and had never seen it as anything but a dying business.

01:18:09.780 Right.

01:18:09.880 There was never any money that you were actually going to make.

01:18:12.360 Right.

01:18:12.560 If you're making 100 grand, you're, like, psyched.

01:18:14.560 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:15.380 And then all of a sudden, it turns out that there's actually this huge market out there because people hate journalism.

01:18:20.420 Right.

01:18:20.840 Like, that's the problem.

01:18:22.180 And when you're in mainstream media, you don't see that there's actually this screaming need for something else that people aren't getting because they don't trust regular media.

01:18:33.480 So, I was an early beneficiary of that whole thing.

01:18:37.340 But it was a default, though.

01:18:38.540 I mean, you probably would have stayed at The New Yorker or where you were, Rolling Stone, forever, right?

01:18:45.800 Absolutely.

01:18:46.600 Yeah.

01:18:46.840 Had this not happened, I would have been there.

01:18:48.960 You know, I was very loyal to the magazine.

01:18:51.100 You know, I stuck up for them always, even when they were wrong.

01:18:53.580 Even during the UVA thing, you know, I said, look, they made a mistake, but we're doing the right thing.

01:19:00.100 We're self-auditing.

01:19:01.980 Like, you know, this is a great magazine.

01:19:04.120 We have a great tradition, et cetera, et cetera.

01:19:07.660 I was kind of a company man in an embarrassing kind of way.

01:19:12.000 But when the Russia thing happened, you know, all bets were off.

01:19:17.140 And I wasn't the only one.

01:19:18.380 There were other people in the business that this also happened to.

01:19:22.280 But none of them came back the way that you did.

01:19:27.540 Well, I mean, Glenn did.

01:19:28.840 Well, Glenn, for sure.

01:19:30.140 Yeah.

01:19:30.820 You know.

01:19:31.700 Well, very few.

01:19:33.080 Yeah, a few.

01:19:34.420 Did you think about just hanging it up and becoming a translator or doing something else?

01:19:39.300 No.

01:19:39.720 I mean, I love this job.

01:19:41.020 You know, after initially not really loving journalism, I learned to really love it while I was at Rolling

01:19:52.260 Stone, you know.

01:19:53.200 And then, you know, now, additionally, I think the country needs journalists.

01:20:02.520 I agree.

01:20:02.780 And the thing that you need most of all in journalism to be good at it is you need to have some bravery.

01:20:10.200 Now, that wasn't true in American journalism for a long time.

01:20:14.140 Probably, you know, not since the Vietnam days or the Red Scare, you know, was there a situation where there was a real social price to pay for taking, you know, a certain stance on things.

01:20:28.760 Now there is, right?

01:20:30.560 And if you're going to do certain kinds of reporting, you're going to lose all your friends, but that's the job, you know.

01:20:37.200 And not many people are willing to do that.

01:20:39.140 And I am willing to do that because I never expected to keep friends in this business.

01:20:44.880 So, I think it's unfortunately an exciting time to be a journalist, but, you know, I would feel wrong to quit now, you know.

01:20:57.000 I'm sure you'd probably feel the same way.

01:20:58.360 I do feel the same way.

01:20:59.120 That's exactly how I feel, actually.

01:21:00.100 Right.

01:21:00.380 Nicely put.

01:21:01.020 Yeah, you don't.

01:21:01.580 Yeah, that's right.

01:21:02.160 If you're in it to make friends, you're probably in the wrong business.

01:21:04.860 Go to church.

01:21:05.500 Right.

01:21:05.800 Yeah, exactly.

01:21:06.520 But 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.

01:21:19.160 Like, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

01:21:21.140 Well, first of all, being in institutional journalism, there is a little bit overrated, right?

01:21:28.660 Like, I think, because I came from alternative journalism.

01:21:33.020 Yes.

01:21:33.160 I had financed my own newspaper in Moscow.

01:21:39.300 And, you know, I did everything from printing to running the plates to the printing press and, you know, selling ads, everything.

01:21:49.800 So, you know, the business is something that I've always been familiar with and suddenly being involved with a big organization.

01:21:58.800 It's nice, but I don't see it as a prerequisite.

01:22:02.200 I thought it was really funny at the beginning of Trump's reign when a couple of the reporters were complaining about losing their White House press credentials.

01:22:10.900 It's like, who cares, right?

01:22:12.520 You're supposed to be on the outside.

01:22:14.840 Right?

01:22:15.540 Like, what are you whining about?

01:22:17.160 You know, do the job.

01:22:18.420 Have you been to a White House briefing?

01:22:20.480 I have, yes, yes.

01:22:21.680 Then you know how soul-killing it is.

01:22:23.620 Yeah.

01:22:24.020 You learn nothing.

01:22:24.760 You're captive.

01:22:26.100 You eat lunch out of a vending machine.

01:22:28.860 Everybody has got, like, the most distorted value system.

01:22:32.240 Like, they're so impressed by their hard passes. 1.00

01:22:34.680 And they're all such losers. 0.97

01:22:35.980 Like, if you would quit the business, right, if you had to do that? 0.99

01:22:39.500 Absolutely.

01:22:39.900 In fact, one of the first things that I was assigned to do when I went to Rolling Stone, they sent me on a campaign junket with John Kerry.

01:22:49.540 So, I was on the plane with Kerry during that campaign for, like, a month or something like that.

01:22:55.620 And, you know, it's a similar dynamic to the White House press corps.

01:22:59.240 It's the same people every single day.

01:23:03.300 It's very clubby.

01:23:05.420 They have...

01:23:06.140 Extremely.

01:23:06.800 Right?

01:23:07.180 So, there's even seating arrangements, right?

01:23:09.660 Well, of course.

01:23:10.260 So, the New York Times gets to sit in the front.

01:23:13.080 And then they kind of...

01:23:14.320 It's like Heathers or Mean Girls. 1.00

01:23:17.260 According to how well-known you are in the business, you have to sit further and further back in the plane, right?

01:23:23.320 Or farther back in the plane.

01:23:25.740 And at the very back are the cameramen.

01:23:27.440 Yeah, exactly.

01:23:28.680 And at the time, they were angry at Alexander Pelosi because she had filmed some of them.

01:23:33.740 So, she was in the back with a bunch of piles of equipment.

01:23:37.700 But I got frustrated very quickly by the fact that all they were doing all day long was just taking, you know, press releases from flax and then they would eat.

01:23:50.920 They would be given these big...

01:23:52.520 Macaroni and cheese, Butterfingers, beer.

01:23:55.120 So, I went on a hunger strike.

01:23:57.780 In my first trip, I had this, like, epiphany that they're just giving me too much stuff.

01:24:03.520 I'm just not going to take anything from any of these people.

01:24:05.780 And I stopped eating.

01:24:07.280 I stopped taking the press releases.

01:24:09.440 So, the only one who didn't get fat on a campaign?

01:24:11.700 Yeah, exactly, right?

01:24:13.660 And when we got to the events, I would not go to the events.

01:24:17.660 I would run a mile in any direction and just talk to anybody about anything but the campaign.

01:24:23.020 Because this isn't journalism.

01:24:27.580 You're sitting there just taking something and then converting it into a press release.

01:24:33.080 Like, what is that, you know?

01:24:34.440 But the White House is even worse because they have airs about it.

01:24:40.040 Right.

01:24:41.220 And, you know, even though I haven't done that beat, you know, for...

01:24:46.760 I think it's an important beat.

01:24:48.240 Like, you have to...

01:24:49.300 Somebody has to ask the president questions.

01:24:51.360 But they don't, for the most part.

01:24:53.000 Right, I know.

01:24:53.440 Do they?

01:24:53.920 I've never seen it.

01:24:55.120 Right?

01:24:55.700 So, you know, I don't know.

01:24:57.920 At best, you get some reporter whose goal is not to elicit information,

01:25:02.500 but just to prove that he's, like, an antagonist of the president.

01:25:07.220 Right, exactly.

01:25:08.280 You know, thanks, Dan, rather.

01:25:10.120 But it doesn't advance the story in any meaningful way.

01:25:14.120 Right, right, exactly.

01:25:15.680 What they want is...

01:25:16.520 And that's what they were upset about, the Jim Acostas of the world.

01:25:19.720 They were upset that they were being denied this, you know, saleable piece of video

01:25:26.640 where they could stand up and do this, you know, and gesticulate and...

01:25:32.500 I always wonder what Jim Acosta, who I don't know, but I always wonder...

01:25:37.340 Jim Acosta was always telling me what a journalist he was.

01:25:39.560 And a lot of guys were like this, including some I've worked with.

01:25:44.980 But I'm a journalist.

01:25:46.080 Okay, tornado comes to a trailer park.

01:25:48.880 Give me 750 words on that.

01:25:50.440 Like, I don't think they're capable of writing a story.

01:25:52.980 Do you ever think that?

01:25:53.880 Like, could Jim Acosta actually just write, like, a news story or even an expository essay?

01:25:58.120 Well, I wonder about that because are they even, you know...

01:26:02.000 Once...

01:26:02.920 Not that long, and not to be all back in the day about it, but you wouldn't have gotten

01:26:07.700 a job in the White House press corps if you hadn't come through, you know, covering town

01:26:12.340 meetings and all that stuff.

01:26:14.680 I mean, you know, I did that.

01:26:17.140 I covered aldermen.

01:26:19.100 I covered, you know, the police beat fires, stuff like that.

01:26:23.620 You have to be able to do that stuff.

01:26:24.860 And that's the basics of the job is, you know, showing up, talking to people on the street,

01:26:32.240 talking to this person, that person.

01:26:33.960 You have to be able to do crime reporting, you know?

01:26:36.820 Got it.

01:26:37.620 And you got to talk to people who are on the other side of the law, all that stuff.

01:26:41.760 I don't think they can do that.

01:26:43.200 I mean, I remember seeing somebody...

01:26:45.700 I forget what organization it was, but somebody...

01:26:47.780 One of the kind of mainstream sort of web-only sites, one of their columnists was talking

01:26:56.200 about how much he hated the telephone.

01:26:58.980 And I thought, what journalist hates the telephone?

01:27:02.100 How can you do this job if you hate the telephone, right?

01:27:04.580 And it's because the new thing is, they decide what they think, they find links that support

01:27:11.320 their ideas, and then they just type the thing.

01:27:15.820 Whereas, you know, what you're supposed to do is talk to everybody, then figure out what

01:27:20.160 the story is.

01:27:20.440 To add information to the story.

01:27:22.080 Right.

01:27:22.500 Right.

01:27:22.740 Not just, you know, the snake eating its tail.

01:27:25.820 It's just all self-reference, actually.

01:27:27.860 Right.

01:27:28.300 Exactly.

01:27:29.060 Exactly.

01:27:34.580 So, you get out of that, so the business model works in independent media?

01:27:47.060 Well, kind of, right?

01:27:49.220 So, it works if you're cranking out content.

01:27:53.380 What I don't think it's...

01:27:55.520 They figured out how to do is how to monetize, like, investigative journalism.

01:27:59.960 Right.

01:28:00.220 Which takes a long time.

01:28:01.640 It's expensive.

01:28:02.080 It's expensive, and you don't, you're not producing stuff that's, you know, every couple

01:28:07.880 of days.

01:28:08.800 And even when you do, it's not always the stuff that people like.

01:28:13.120 People like reading, you know, op-eds with strong takes.

01:28:17.760 That, you can make money doing that, right?

01:28:20.140 Well, so you whiff sometimes.

01:28:21.720 I mean, a lot of stories don't, it happens to me even now, a lot.

01:28:25.420 You waste a lot of time on stuff that's not real or not provable.

01:28:29.420 Right.

01:28:29.780 Or you think that people are going to go bananas over something, and they don't.

01:28:33.920 There's that.

01:28:34.500 Right, yeah.

01:28:35.380 What stories have you had that you thought would make a splash have an effect, but that

01:28:40.720 were sort of instantly forgotten?

01:28:43.780 Well, I don't know about forgotten, but I would say that a lot of the Twitter file stuff,

01:28:48.900 I expected that to be, I mean, I naively expected a lot of that stuff to be picked up.

01:28:55.380 Give us an example of what shocked you that you discovered during that reporting.

01:28:59.920 So, one of the things was that Twitter, heading into the 2020 election, had worked out a system

01:29:09.740 with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of

01:29:15.400 National Intelligence, whereby they had what they called an industry meeting, where once,

01:29:22.500 it started off once a month, then it was once a week, where these intelligence officials

01:29:27.300 were meeting with Twitter and about two dozen other internet platforms and briefing them on

01:29:33.500 things that they might expect in the information landscape.

01:29:36.620 And then there was a system by which basically Twitter was receiving recommendations about

01:29:48.000 content from the federal government through the FBI and then from the states through the

01:29:53.540 Department of Homeland Security.

01:29:55.000 It was that organized.

01:29:56.480 They had worked it out that if it comes from a local police department, it's going to come

01:30:01.460 from the DHS.

01:30:02.340 If it comes from the HHS, it's going to come through the FBI, right?

01:30:05.440 So, they had a very organized system of flags where you would see the FBI say, for your

01:30:16.860 consideration, here are some accounts that may violate your terms of service, and there'd

01:30:22.280 be an attached spreadsheet with 400 account names on it.

01:30:27.060 And that was just happening constantly.

01:30:29.960 It was an industrial process that they had worked out.

01:30:32.920 I thought that's a huge story, right?

01:30:36.300 Like, here's the FBI that's devoting resources to looking at social media accounts of ordinary

01:30:43.220 people and worrying about terms of service violations.

01:30:46.340 Like, what is that?

01:30:47.060 Why are they not looking for child predators and stuff like that, right?

01:30:51.840 And so, what was that?

01:30:53.700 Well, it's part of this sort of spiraling, sprawling thing where a whole series of government agencies

01:31:02.060 are very intensely interested in what's online and who's reading what and in developing new

01:31:08.020 ways of suppressing content, de-amplifying other things.

01:31:13.060 And with COVID, there was a really, really intense effort to create rules about what could and

01:31:21.140 could not be seen.

01:31:22.120 You know, they were, they would decide that things were, one of the key concepts that I

01:31:29.920 thought was really, really disturbing was this whole idea that anything that promotes vaccine

01:31:36.760 hesitancy is a kind of disinformation, even if it's not factually incorrect.

01:31:42.980 So, if somebody dies after they get the shot, right, that may be true, but internally at

01:31:53.580 the company, they...

01:31:55.100 But knowing that might convince other people not to take the shot.

01:31:58.160 Exactly.

01:31:58.940 And so, they looked at that as a kind of disinformation, even though it's true. 0.66

01:32:05.900 One of the...

01:32:06.360 Disinformation doesn't mean untrue, correct?

01:32:08.920 Exactly.

01:32:09.940 It carries the connotation, like the definition involves falsity, right?

01:32:16.660 Or misinformation, even, right?

01:32:18.620 So, disinformation is like the intentional spreading of lies, right?

01:32:22.960 But even misinformation, Homeland Security has something they called the MDM, or they had

01:32:29.960 it, the MDM committee, which is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation committee.

01:32:35.540 And malinformation is, it's just material, it's true, but kind of politically wrong, right?

01:32:44.360 Or inconvenient.

01:32:46.240 And that could be something that, you know, promotes vaccine hesitancy.

01:32:49.760 Or, you know, we have the Supreme Court case now, Murthy v. Missouri, that's partly related

01:32:56.000 to the Twitter files.

01:32:57.320 And the plaintiffs, a couple of the, three of the plaintiffs in that case are doctors who

01:33:03.920 were, who had published true research about COVID, but were suppressed, were de-amplified.

01:33:10.600 They were put on, you know, in Twitter, they were put on trends blacklists because, you know,

01:33:17.800 their research tended to go against federal policies about lockdowns and vaccination and all

01:33:25.180 kinds of things.

01:33:25.780 So, to me, that's what the First Amendment is there for, right?

01:33:31.300 Like, we do not want the government in a role of deciding what's true and untrue, because

01:33:35.980 once you do that, the government has a monopoly on misinformation.

01:33:40.160 The only protection against that happening is absolutely unfettered free speech.

01:33:46.020 And they're messing with that, you know, because I think there's just this gradual moving away

01:33:55.720 from belief that all the concepts in the Bill of Rights work.

01:34:00.020 And so this, but we, what we looked at in terms of the censorship, we, it's very much in evidence

01:34:06.620 there where they just don't believe that the First Amendment works, I don't think.

01:34:10.340 But they're the government, they exist to protect the First Amendment.

01:34:14.660 That's the whole point of having a government, right?

01:34:17.560 So, again, that seems like a prima facie crime to me.

01:34:22.480 And as you said, at very least, a huge story.

01:34:25.420 Right.

01:34:25.540 What happened to that story once you reported it?

01:34:27.460 I was denounced as a right-wing tool, right?

01:34:33.360 The Washington Post, their first story about the Twitter files, described me as conservative

01:34:38.280 journalist, Matt Taibbi.

01:34:41.700 And then they did a silent edit.

01:34:43.480 I would beg to differ.

01:34:45.140 Yeah. 0.93

01:34:46.520 It was just ridiculous. 0.94

01:34:48.560 And then, you know, that was the line all the way through. 0.82

01:34:52.620 So, even though the reports really, they weren't really about suppression of one political party

01:34:59.600 or another, they were really much more about this process, which is just so scary, right?

01:35:04.020 And nobody in the regular press really picked it up.

01:35:08.960 And that was a shocker to me because I thought, well, somebody's got to be interested in this,

01:35:13.940 you know?

01:35:15.140 And they weren't, you know?

01:35:16.700 How long were you there?

01:35:17.440 At Twitter, doing the story, you know, three and a half months, I would say.

01:35:24.700 So, we got a lot of stuff.

01:35:26.100 We got, you know, probably, I mean, not a lot, you know, 200,000 emails, something like that,

01:35:30.540 attachments.

01:35:31.660 We still haven't gone through all of it.

01:35:34.240 But the big thing was that there's just lots of evidence of this interplay between government

01:35:41.240 and these platforms.

01:35:42.440 I think Elon at one point said publicly that there were Intel operatives working at Google,

01:35:48.460 at Twitter, rather.

01:35:49.940 Lots of them.

01:35:50.760 Working there.

01:35:51.680 Lots of them.

01:35:52.720 And that was another thing we didn't understand, you know, when we first got there.

01:35:56.560 We're like, why is there a CIA person here?

01:36:00.620 Why is this person a former National Security Council operative?

01:36:05.900 Like, what value add do they bring to...

01:36:08.220 A tech company.

01:36:09.080 A tech company.

01:36:09.860 I couldn't understand that.

01:36:11.000 But they're actually working there as employees.

01:36:13.060 Yeah.

01:36:13.580 And they were making a lot of the big decisions about content, too.

01:36:18.180 In fact, one of the biggest emails that we found, there was a debate about whether or

01:36:23.800 not Twitter had the ability to say no to, in this case, it was a State Department request

01:36:30.020 about content.

01:36:30.860 And the former CIA employee says, you know, our window on that is closing as our government

01:36:39.540 partners become more aggressive in their attributions, right?

01:36:43.000 So, what they were basically saying is, our ability to push back is evaporating, you know?

01:36:50.200 And that, I think, has turned out to be true with these platforms.

01:36:54.640 I think they're increasingly just sort of intertwined with the state.

01:36:58.440 Right, yeah.

01:36:59.140 So, state media.

01:37:00.280 Yeah.

01:37:00.700 And this is another continuation of the war on terror thing because they began by demanding

01:37:07.600 that these companies fork over, you know, information about geolocation of users and

01:37:14.540 other places around the world, even in the United States.

01:37:17.160 Um, but now they're venturing into content, right?

01:37:23.120 The content domestically that people see.

01:37:25.800 So, Google's the biggest, of course, of all these companies and by far the most influential

01:37:29.500 as a monopoly on search, which is your window into all information.

01:37:34.120 Right.

01:37:34.720 If we were ever to see what goes on internally at Google, what do you think we would learn?

01:37:40.220 Well, I, I think we would find that they're, they have massively changed the formula for,

01:37:48.540 you know, the search returns.

01:37:51.060 I mean, they, they even talked about this in 2017 and 2018 when they, they had this thing

01:37:56.340 called Project OWL, um, which was designed to change the, uh, the parameters of, of the

01:38:04.960 search, uh, towards something they called authority.

01:38:08.280 And authority was basically the way it was explained to me when I talked to somebody at

01:38:12.820 Google, it was like, if you search for baseball five years ago, you might've seen your local

01:38:17.400 little league team.

01:38:18.220 Now you'll see MLB.com come up first.

01:38:20.520 Right.

01:38:21.500 And, um, you know, you've probably noticed this when you, when you do a Google search,

01:38:27.220 you know, the first 40 or 50 results will all be of a certain type and you'll have to,

01:38:33.040 it's much, much harder to find kind of this counter narrative, uh, version of reality.

01:38:40.300 Now, even if you know exactly what you're looking for or type in the, the title of the, of the

01:38:47.120 story, uh, it's made reporting harder.

01:38:49.540 Don't you think?

01:38:50.720 I mean, I, yeah, I mean, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it, it actually challenges your understanding

01:38:55.820 like what is reality.

01:38:57.460 Right.

01:38:57.900 Right.

01:38:58.300 So, um, I mean the potential for mind control or in fact, the reality of mind control by the

01:39:04.040 state and by affiliated actors dependent on the state or living in a symbiotic relationship

01:39:08.280 with the state, it's like, it's almost impossible to have independent thoughts.

01:39:12.760 Yeah.

01:39:13.260 At this point.

01:39:13.520 Yeah.

01:39:13.960 I mean, if the, if the, if most people are getting their information through these searches,

01:39:17.740 um, and through social media exchanges and those things are heavily, heavily, you know,

01:39:25.740 um, managed, um, then everybody's getting a skewed version of reality.

01:39:30.960 And that, that's going to change the way that they think about everything.

01:39:35.340 Um, I, I think that's really dangerous.

01:39:40.160 Uh, obviously it's, it's not a new concept cause we all read about it and or well, and,

01:39:47.080 you know, all of this Huxley and all these other books, but, um, you know, what happens

01:39:52.500 to people when they're, when they're getting their information in a way that's completely

01:39:56.380 inorganic and false.

01:39:57.720 And, um, you know, I, I, I think we have to get to the bottom of that.

01:40:01.620 I don't know.

01:40:02.240 I, I think it's scary.

01:40:04.980 Do you think, um, there's been any slackening of it?

01:40:09.060 I mean, we're in the middle of an election season right now.

01:40:11.360 So it's pretty clear that the people in charge in both parties, uh, will do anything to stop

01:40:16.140 Trump and for reasons, probably nothing to do with Trump actually, but bigger story, but

01:40:21.600 whatever the cause, they're totally determined to control the outcome of this election.

01:40:27.260 Yeah.

01:40:27.940 Well, can you have a democracy under those circumstances?

01:40:31.160 I don't think so.

01:40:32.300 Um, so the, there, there was a Supreme court case and there, there's one that's still going

01:40:38.720 on, um, Murthy view, Missouri, uh, and originally the lower courts ruled that the federal government

01:40:49.180 can't be, you know, doing that back and forth with, with all these platforms.

01:40:54.820 And from what I understood, there was a little bit of a, a backing off point, right?

01:41:01.180 Where they, they weren't so intimately involved, but just about a month ago, Senator Mark Warner

01:41:07.860 had a talk and he said that essentially the companies have begun, um, talking to the agencies

01:41:16.740 again.

01:41:17.320 This was after, uh, the Supreme court held a hear, you know, the hearing on that case and

01:41:23.320 it didn't look so good for the free speech advocates afterwards.

01:41:25.920 So, um, you know, that's, that tells me that they're already, you know, thinking of coming

01:41:32.820 up with another program.

01:41:33.820 I know for a fact, um, for stories that I'm, that I'm working on, that there are a couple

01:41:39.100 of different contracting ideas for new, uh, sort of content review programs that would

01:41:48.900 be partnerships with government in the same way that there, there were the last time around.

01:41:53.640 Like the last time around, we had this thing called the election integrity partnership was

01:41:57.440 run out of Stanford, but it was done in partnership with the department of Homeland security and

01:42:04.540 the global engagement center, which is at the state department, um, and the university of

01:42:10.140 Washington and some other partners.

01:42:11.880 But that was a, you know, a thing where there was a big organized content flagging operation

01:42:18.240 that involved the government.

01:42:20.660 They're going to do something like that.

01:42:22.180 Again, it's just a question of like, who's going to do it, what the method is going to be.

01:42:26.060 And my understanding is that they're, you know, it's going to be more aggressive this

01:42:30.940 time around.

01:42:32.440 So there've been a number of war games, right?

01:42:36.560 Where academics, NGO officials, government officials, it's all sort of this blob, it's

01:42:41.940 kind of hard to disaggregate it, but, um, have gamed out various election scenarios.

01:42:47.560 And it, it does, it sounds a little more to me like contingency planning than, than like

01:42:53.420 an academic exercise, but tell me what you know about that.

01:42:56.060 Well, it's interesting that you bring that up.

01:42:58.880 Um, so you may have noticed in the news lately, uh, that there have been a lot of, um, stories

01:43:06.100 warning about AI deep fakes.

01:43:08.620 Yeah.

01:43:09.160 Uh, this is the new, if Russia was the, the, the excuse for getting involved in content moderation

01:43:18.180 in 2020 or even in 2018, AI and deep fakes are the new, uh, buzzword in Washington.

01:43:28.220 And I thought it was just a way to explain away your porn tapes.

01:43:30.940 That's right. 0.81

01:43:33.080 Yeah, exactly.

01:43:33.860 I didn't make this.

01:43:35.040 It's, it's, it's a deep fake.

01:43:37.400 Um, but this is, uh, something that somebody tipped me off to now.

01:43:41.360 This is not like a, like a secret.

01:43:43.620 It, it's actually public, although nobody has brought it up.

01:43:47.940 There is a website that's out there.

01:43:49.900 Uh, but this is, um, a game.

01:43:52.020 It's basically elections and dragons.

01:43:53.540 It's made by In-Q-Tel.

01:43:55.280 You can see the IQT here, which is the venture capital arm of the CIA.

01:44:00.380 And it is a, stop.

01:44:03.280 Why does the CIA have a venture firm arm?

01:44:06.640 Because the, to develop technologies that the, that would otherwise probably be prohibited.

01:44:12.160 Um, and you know, because there's a lot of things that they get into that maybe are money,

01:44:16.820 good money-making ideas.

01:44:17.980 I mean, part of what being in the intelligence business is about is getting out and making

01:44:22.760 money.

01:44:23.100 Right.

01:44:23.660 So, so, but that's, I mean, that's kind of a problem if your Intel agencies have venture

01:44:29.560 arms.

01:44:30.960 Yes.

01:44:31.520 Right.

01:44:31.860 You would think that would be a problem.

01:44:33.940 Um, so this is a CIA funded election game.

01:44:37.540 Yep.

01:44:37.740 It's a CIA funded election game.

01:44:39.420 And, and just, just to start, just like Dungeons and Dragons, it has funny dice.

01:44:44.380 This is a 10 sided die.

01:44:46.140 For the record, are you making this up?

01:44:47.500 Is this real?

01:44:48.020 This is real.

01:44:48.780 This is real.

01:44:49.500 Haywire is the name of the game.

01:44:51.820 And, um, if you roll the In-Q-Tel symbol, right, it says.

01:44:59.900 Oh, I'm laughing.

01:45:01.020 It's so dark.

01:45:02.740 It's, it says on the back, um, if you roll, basically the whole, the premise of the game

01:45:08.940 is that you were trying to avoid a haywire situation, meaning a, an AI induced disaster.

01:45:15.300 Where the voters get what they want.

01:45:17.440 Basically.

01:45:18.020 Yeah.

01:45:18.200 So if, if you roll the In-Q-Tel logo, it says, haywire reverted.

01:45:25.180 So basically if you roll CIA, you win.

01:45:28.000 Right.

01:45:29.180 Uh, the CIA venture logo looks a little bit like the, uh, the symbol for nuclear power.

01:45:37.300 It does look a little bit like that.

01:45:39.520 Yes.

01:45:40.200 So this is, this game is used to train, uh, from what I understand, it's used to train people

01:45:48.500 in government to war game out scenarios that may happen.

01:45:52.880 Right.

01:45:53.860 Which is why, uh, this is so, some of these scenarios are so incredible.

01:46:00.860 Like if an orange populist were to somehow become president again. 0.83

01:46:04.240 Well, right.

01:46:05.080 And, uh, when I went through these, I know obviously I just opened this box, but I, but

01:46:10.140 I have another one.

01:46:11.420 Um, the one that really jumped out at me is this thing called the purple disappeared.

01:46:16.220 The purple disappeared.

01:46:17.860 You might, if you could read out what it says, swing states appear safe on the national electoral

01:46:24.280 map and early polling later, it emerges that AI driven election forecasts were wrong

01:46:29.280 because the data scientists overlook significant partisan differences that make swing states

01:46:33.900 highly competitive.

01:46:35.500 Discuss your response plan.

01:46:37.540 Then draw two injects real world harm.

01:46:41.320 It says at the bottom misinformation slash social bias, heightened stress, anxiety, and

01:46:48.280 depression.

01:46:50.260 What's social bias mean?

01:46:52.140 I, I'm actually, I have no idea, but what, but that certainly sounds to me like they're

01:46:57.760 asking the game players to come up with, um, you know, with, uh, a plan for, uh, some kind

01:47:08.260 of reaction to election results that don't necessarily square with what the polls were indicating.

01:47:16.140 Right.

01:47:16.860 I mean, that's basically what they're saying in that, in that, in that scenario.

01:47:20.840 Um, here's another one, mind games, um, an easy to use voice model helps create a viral

01:47:27.760 video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia.

01:47:33.760 Suggesting.

01:47:34.320 Discuss your response plan and draw two injects.

01:47:38.520 Uh, so it's just full of stuff like this and this, you know, we started to hear about

01:47:44.060 this idea that there were people in this information management slash censorship slash, uh, content

01:47:53.500 moderation space that were deeply involved with, you know, finding new ways to manage, uh,

01:48:03.600 information that people see, um, you know, back in 2010, the army actually, uh, got rid of

01:48:10.200 the term PSYOP because they thought it had negative common connotations.

01:48:14.340 They brought it back in 2017 because there, there was a widespread belief that, um, we have

01:48:22.020 to engage in, uh, influence operations that because Russia is already doing it because China

01:48:28.520 is already doing it.

01:48:29.440 We need to do it.

01:48:31.780 And it's, it's the same thing aimed at our own population.

01:48:34.420 Yeah.

01:48:34.840 And that's the thing we, we, we did this before previously.

01:48:39.040 We, we created phony social media accounts in Arabic and Pashto.

01:48:44.420 Right.

01:48:44.780 And that, that's something that we've understood.

01:48:47.200 What's different is that they're now doing this in English.

01:48:49.940 Right.

01:48:50.380 And they're now aiming this at domestic population.

01:48:53.200 I thought that was illegal.

01:48:54.680 It is.

01:48:55.240 I would think it's illegal.

01:48:56.560 Um, I think a lot of this, this behavior is just unregulated, not looked at.

01:49:01.200 I mean, who's, who's going to go in and tell them they can't do this?

01:49:05.040 Um, what body is going, I mean, it's going to be.

01:49:07.960 New York times, the Washington post.

01:49:10.480 Democracy dies in darkness.

01:49:11.600 I mean, that's, that's, that is the role of the press.

01:49:15.400 Yes.

01:49:15.940 But to expose excesses and roll them back by exposing them.

01:49:19.240 But the, but the problem is that they see, they see, for instance, Donald Trump and, you

01:49:27.500 know, the, the, the Trump movement as an extension of what they, what they might call the Russian

01:49:33.560 information ecosystem.

01:49:35.140 They say like the global engagement center, the state department has this concept of information

01:49:40.200 ecosystem.

01:49:40.940 So if you're too in alignment with Russian foreign policy views on say Ukraine or something

01:49:47.380 like that, you are, you can be part of the ecosystem, even if you have nothing to do with

01:49:52.860 that country.

01:49:54.320 So the idea that, you know, the, you know, the first head of the global engagement center

01:50:00.500 is a former editor of time magazine, uh, Rick Stengel.

01:50:04.060 He wrote a book called information wars that we all had to read when we were doing the Twitter

01:50:08.020 files.

01:50:08.400 Cause we didn't know about this organization, you know, talked openly about how he thought,

01:50:14.540 uh, the Trump campaign he, in it, he recognized the same techniques that he saw from ISIS and

01:50:22.660 from Russia.

01:50:23.320 So they're, they're now, they see all this as all part of a piece, you know, and that

01:50:29.260 is what I think is dangerous is that we're, we're sort of bringing the ethos of military

01:50:34.800 counter messaging from the war on terror.

01:50:37.740 We're bringing that home and the enemy is now the domestic voter. 0.54

01:50:41.920 But right.

01:50:42.820 Okay. 0.98

01:50:43.040 So military messaging, but the purpose of the military is to kill people in the end and 0.90

01:50:47.960 to deter war by the threat of killing people. 0.91

01:50:49.840 But basically it's killing, that's their business. 0.99

01:50:52.360 Killing. 0.97

01:50:52.900 Yes.

01:50:53.180 But also trying to discourage recruitment.

01:50:55.700 Right.

01:50:56.000 Of course.

01:50:56.740 Right.

01:50:56.980 Right.

01:50:57.280 So, but fundamentally, if you were to say like, what's the purpose of military?

01:51:01.900 It's to exert force, physical force.

01:51:03.480 So if the U.S. military is turning its PSYOPs on the country, like that's, it's not that

01:51:10.540 far, you know, the nature of organizations and mission creep from there to like hurting

01:51:16.400 people.

01:51:17.280 Exactly.

01:51:18.340 Exactly.

01:51:18.880 And they, and, and they, they actually, you'll, you'll find NATO, we found NATO papers that

01:51:23.880 talked about how they found the American belief in, um, inform, not influence or, you know,

01:51:32.980 truthfulness that, that was actually, that's part of an, uh, an old NATO memo about, uh,

01:51:40.280 influence operations that we have to, you can't tell untruths.

01:51:44.880 Um, the, the more modern belief is that that's outdated, that because the Russians don't do

01:51:50.940 that, that we have to, um, we shouldn't have those restraints.

01:51:55.280 So we have to worry now about sort of phony influence operations in the United States.

01:52:00.940 And if you look at it in that things through that lens, suddenly things like Russiagate

01:52:06.880 start to make a little bit more sense, right?

01:52:09.540 Because you can imagine somebody in the intelligence services saying, well, Donald Trump is part

01:52:16.140 of this, uh, nexus of, um, anti-American forces and anything's fair game against that

01:52:26.660 kind of person.

01:52:27.360 So what, what Russia is central to all of this in the minds of the people doing it?

01:52:32.040 And from my perspective, as someone who's never been that interested in Russia, the country,

01:52:36.300 you sort of wake up one day and, you know, 25 years after the end of the cold war and

01:52:40.820 realize you're required to hate Russia.

01:52:43.740 And I just refuse to go along with that on principle, not because I love Russia.

01:52:47.480 I do kind of like Russia actually having been there, but I didn't have any feelings about

01:52:51.040 it a year ago.

01:52:52.180 Right.

01:52:52.580 And, but I just, I'm an adult man and I don't want to be told what to think.

01:52:55.200 And I'm not going to be period under any circumstances because I'm not a slave.

01:52:58.900 So, but unanswered is the question like, why, why, why is that a requirement of living in

01:53:04.900 the United States where I've lived my whole life hating Russia? 0.72

01:53:07.740 Like, what does that have to do with anything?

01:53:08.860 Like, how do we get there of all countries?

01:53:11.140 What is this?

01:53:11.900 I don't understand that either.

01:53:13.100 And also.

01:53:13.620 You don't?

01:53:14.440 I mean, especially compared to when Russia actually was a major, I mean, it wasn't nearly

01:53:23.860 this intense in the seventies and eighties.

01:53:26.020 I was here.

01:53:26.500 It was not.

01:53:27.120 Right?

01:53:27.860 Of course not.

01:53:28.460 In fact, people said, I mean, Russia was actually running actual psyops against the United

01:53:33.620 States. 0.99

01:53:34.460 AIDS was created at Fort Meade to kill black people. 1.00

01:53:36.660 You know, all these things. 0.99

01:53:37.260 Like that's, that was a Russian. 0.96

01:53:38.380 The active measures campaigns.

01:53:40.040 Big time.

01:53:40.740 And, and of course there were all these proxy wars going on even then in Mozambique and

01:53:45.500 you know, there were like actual wars.

01:53:47.220 And, um, the prevailing view among people I knew was, you know, Soviets are bad.

01:53:53.040 Of course, no one's pro-Soviet in normal person world, but it would be kind of nice to be

01:53:57.980 at peace and nuclear war is really scary.

01:54:00.380 And like, let's avoid that.

01:54:02.260 I mean, that was the view that I remember as a child, right?

01:54:05.320 Sure.

01:54:05.540 Yeah.

01:54:05.740 I mean, we had, we had Sting telling us the Russians love their children too.

01:54:10.160 And which is true.

01:54:10.880 And, uh, you know, when, when Gorbachev came on the scene, I, I remember very distinctly

01:54:16.520 people saying, um, you know, that, that we have to find a way to get along with these

01:54:21.600 people, like the, the, that we're spending too much money on, um, on defense and that

01:54:27.620 this, this is, this is costing both of our societies.

01:54:30.980 Uh, but that's not where we're at now.

01:54:33.920 And oddly enough, the current American government, it feels a lot like the Soviet government of

01:54:41.120 the early eighties, right?

01:54:43.380 Where, you know, Joe Biden would, would have fit in perfectly, uh, in the politburo of

01:54:48.180 the early.

01:54:48.640 He is Brezhnev.

01:54:49.120 I've thought that many times.

01:54:50.400 Yeah.

01:54:50.680 I mean, he's, he, he's the doddering old physically dead leader, uh, who is, who still has a title

01:54:58.140 because, you know, he hasn't actually expired yet.

01:55:00.520 Residing over a decayed cynical society that no longer believes in the slogans.

01:55:17.560 Right.

01:55:18.240 I mean, the, the, the Russians have a joke where, where Gorbachev gets in the, um, uh, a, a

01:55:25.280 limousine.

01:55:25.920 He's late for work.

01:55:26.940 So he, he drives too fast.

01:55:28.300 The cops pull him over.

01:55:29.300 Um, and his, Gorbachev's driver is drunk, passed out in the back.

01:55:34.880 Um, so he had to drive himself.

01:55:36.720 He gets stopped by the police and the cop sees him, salutes, goes back to the car and

01:55:41.960 the other cop says, who is that?

01:55:43.580 And he goes, I don't know, but Gorbachev was his driver.

01:55:46.460 Uh, and that's how you feel about America now.

01:55:49.640 Who's, who's running this country?

01:55:51.420 Does anybody know?

01:55:53.000 Who is running the country?

01:55:54.580 Is it Jake Sullivan?

01:55:55.560 I mean, I mean, you'd have to make a guess.

01:55:58.380 Would you?

01:55:58.820 Wouldn't you?

01:55:59.700 I mean, somebody has to have the final say about these things and it can't be Biden.

01:56:04.720 I just think that's a very weird thing to not know.

01:56:08.180 And no one seems curious about it either.

01:56:09.820 Right.

01:56:10.380 Where are the stories about that?

01:56:11.720 Who's that?

01:56:12.100 Well, I mean, the wall street journal just did a story about that.

01:56:14.900 I read it.

01:56:15.320 They, they broke the seal on that, but. 0.94

01:56:17.580 It is kind of a silly dishonest story, but, but in it were, um, quite a silly dishonest 0.53

01:56:23.540 story, I thought, but whatever.

01:56:24.400 But there were certainly things in there that had not been in the wall street journal or

01:56:28.020 a big paper before.

01:56:29.040 Right.

01:56:29.580 Right.

01:56:29.940 They, they took a, you know, they dipped a toe in the lake of.

01:56:33.980 They dipped a toe.

01:56:34.220 Right.

01:56:34.580 Yeah.

01:56:34.820 But still, you know, you, in a real country, we would be scrambling to find out.

01:56:39.560 Well, the president is clearly not capable.

01:56:44.440 So what's going on?

01:56:45.720 You know, um, nothing, there's, there's not a hint of anything, which is just, it's, it's

01:56:51.480 so bizarre.

01:56:52.540 Well, and especially given the consequences, I mean, if this were 1995, you could sort of

01:56:56.260 say it sort of runs on autopilot and, you know, Tim Cook and the captains of industry

01:57:00.660 can pitch in and sort of keep us on the track.

01:57:03.300 I mean, that would be the view, right?

01:57:04.800 But now we are on the brink.

01:57:06.880 We're closer to nuclear war than we've ever been closer than the Cuban missile crisis

01:57:10.280 right now.

01:57:10.940 Right.

01:57:11.540 To total nuclear annihilation.

01:57:13.460 And if the commander in chief is non-compass menace and I mean, we're, the ship is listing

01:57:18.580 it's on its side.

01:57:20.340 Where are the people saying, you know, I hate Trump.

01:57:23.720 I love Biden.

01:57:24.280 Politics don't even matter at this level.

01:57:26.160 We're on the verge of nuclear war.

01:57:29.220 That's not acceptable.

01:57:30.580 Let's pull back.

01:57:31.560 I have not even heard any person say that.

01:57:34.440 What is that?

01:57:35.560 I don't know.

01:57:36.240 Where's the public concern about that either?

01:57:39.880 I mean, if this were 1986 and we were at this level of antagonism with Russia, if there

01:57:48.040 had been an exploded pipeline, if there was a shooting war in Ukraine, right, or some kind

01:57:54.740 of proxy territory where our weapons were killing Russian troops and vice versa, because, you know,

01:58:01.560 some of ours were over there too.

01:58:03.960 Quite a few.

01:58:04.720 And, you know, people would be panicking, right?

01:58:08.560 Because at any minute, you know, we're all relying on somebody like Putin being rational,

01:58:14.900 which is already, you know, I made that mistake in thinking that he would never invade Ukraine.

01:58:21.520 I thought that too.

01:58:22.060 And so, what, are we banking on the idea that if, you know, if we launch some kind of a weapon

01:58:30.320 into the Russian territory that they're not going to hit us? 0.93

01:58:34.000 What do you think?

01:58:35.800 I mean, I think the people who are prosecuting the conflict from our side, I'm very familiar

01:58:45.280 with their mindset because I knew a lot of these folks when I was in Russia.

01:58:49.140 They're not, it's kind of like all the president's men, these aren't very bright guys and things

01:58:55.620 have gotten out of hand.

01:58:56.980 And I think that they have no idea what they're doing and this could easily get out of hand

01:59:04.120 very, very quickly because they're messianic about this.

01:59:07.560 They think they must continue this conflict.

01:59:13.980 Whereas the one thing that I thought Barack Obama was sensible about was, you know, when the

01:59:18.020 Crimea thing happened, he said, look, it's not, you know, it's always going to be more important

01:59:22.860 to them than it is to us.

01:59:23.980 Yes, that's right.

01:59:24.800 Very important to them, by the way.

01:59:26.520 Right, exactly.

01:59:27.460 So, I hear these people, including the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and, but many others,

01:59:31.240 just sort of blithely announced that, well, we're going to take Crimea.

01:59:35.980 And that, again, I don't have strong feelings about Crimea.

01:59:38.920 I've never been there, but I think I know as a factual matter that that is a trigger

01:59:43.080 for nuclear war right there.

01:59:44.940 For sure, for sure.

01:59:46.020 And it, you know, it's kind of a jump ball also, like, you know, should that place be?

01:59:52.120 Well, I think it is Russian at this point, but.

01:59:54.060 Right.

01:59:54.580 And it's been Russian historically.

01:59:56.500 I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff about Ukraine's history, like the, you know, the

02:00:00.700 fact that they gave the, they created the territory as sort of on a whim, you know, in the middle

02:00:07.160 of the Soviet period.

02:00:09.060 The lines are very arbitrary.

02:00:11.160 They're not drawn along, you know, real linguistic or cultural lines.

02:00:15.260 And if you've ever, if you've been to the place, you'll find that it's, it's very Russian 0.99

02:00:20.060 in some parts and very Ukrainian in others.

02:00:22.360 I'm sure that's changing now, but, but the people who are, who are pushing this, they,

02:00:28.460 they have no knowledge of that whatsoever.

02:00:30.740 It's the same thing as when I, when I was in Russia, they, they've been told one thing.

02:00:35.520 And so, you know, Ukraine to them is like Switzerland and we're saving it from Russia. 0.94

02:00:41.740 Whereas the reality is that it's, it's nothing like that in reality.

02:00:46.900 And I, I don't know how dangerous do you think that, do you think they are? 0.99

02:00:50.180 I think they're crazy. 0.92

02:00:51.800 I think they're the most dangerous. 1.00

02:00:53.080 I think they're seized by hubris.

02:00:55.580 I think there is a messy inequality to this.

02:00:57.400 I think the entire leadership class of the country is determined to commit suicide.

02:01:03.300 I think that they've boxed themselves in their criminals.

02:01:06.240 They know that they will be exposed as such.

02:01:08.160 And they've also reached kind of the apogee of American empire anyway.

02:01:11.580 It's all downhill from here.

02:01:13.380 I do think that they feel this and, and I think they want to extinguish the society.

02:01:19.000 And I, that's such an incredibly dark thing to say.

02:01:21.440 I hesitate even to say it, but I don't see a rational explanation for any of this behavior

02:01:26.460 at all.

02:01:26.800 I don't think it advances anyone's aims, including their own.

02:01:29.240 Right.

02:01:29.700 I don't believe that Larry Fink is like orchestrating all this.

02:01:32.740 So BlackRock can get even richer.

02:01:34.260 I think they want to get richer.

02:01:35.580 I think Larry Fink's a bad guy, obviously, but I don't think it's.

02:01:38.380 Or Lockheed Martin.

02:01:39.400 That's exactly right.

02:01:40.280 The defense contractors.

02:01:41.820 That's all true on one level, but that's not the explanation.

02:01:45.840 No.

02:01:46.300 No, it's way deeper than that.

02:01:47.960 I think it's a spiritual thing.

02:01:49.600 And I do think societies kill themselves just as people do.

02:01:54.700 And I think that's what we're, clearly that's what we're seeing.

02:01:57.900 I mean, tell me how that's not what we're seeing.

02:01:59.720 And I think that's just such an ugly idea.

02:02:03.380 Again, it, it hurts me to articulate it, but you asked.

02:02:06.940 So that's what I honestly think.

02:02:08.520 Well, I mean, what other explanation is there?

02:02:11.680 Well, kind of.

02:02:12.400 Yeah.

02:02:12.480 Right.

02:02:12.720 I mean, I, I, I've kind of run out of, I made the mistake, I think, for years of trying

02:02:19.800 to think, well, what's the angle on this?

02:02:21.420 That's right.

02:02:21.660 That's how I thought.

02:02:22.300 You know, like there's got to be some end game that they're going for.

02:02:26.680 Um, and the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think, because, um,

02:02:34.160 there's something, uh, darker going on in the culture of people who run this country that

02:02:39.860 it's inaccessible if you're trying to like assign motives to it.

02:02:44.400 Right.

02:02:44.580 They could easily, like, just take the problem of Donald Trump.

02:02:47.900 They could easily defeat Donald Trump as a political entity if they just, if they were

02:02:54.500 thinking as political consultants did in the nineties or eighties, right?

02:02:59.300 Like they would just make some subtle adjustments.

02:03:01.600 They would throw a bone to, to, to working people and, and, um, you know, they would put

02:03:10.040 forward a candidate who isn't, you know, physically dead and, and they would win.

02:03:14.580 Right.

02:03:15.080 Uh, but no, for them, I think it's a principle that a certain kind of voter not have a say

02:03:22.000 in things.

02:03:22.740 And I don't, that's just totally counterintuitive to me.

02:03:26.480 I don't, I just don't understand that, you know?

02:03:29.340 Um, but.

02:03:31.220 So in other words, it's, it's not just Trump.

02:03:33.680 It's the idea that the people who like Trump, those people might have power or be rewarded.

02:03:40.720 Right.

02:03:41.240 They, we, we, we cannot legitimize the, the negative feelings of those voters, um, is,

02:03:49.640 is how they think.

02:03:51.000 Whereas it's, it's incredibly obvious if you go out in the campaign trail and talk to people

02:03:57.200 who, who vote for Trump, that they do it for a million different reasons.

02:04:01.220 Right.

02:04:01.520 You know, ranging from, you know, the, the town that I live in used to be a booming economic

02:04:08.560 center and now it's, it's dead.

02:04:10.780 Right.

02:04:11.240 You know, it looks, it looks like a, a third world country to there, there isn't a functioning

02:04:17.100 hospital within 300 miles of where I live.

02:04:19.660 The Walmart is now the only place where you can buy anything for 50 miles.

02:04:23.360 Like there, there's a million reasons.

02:04:25.520 Um, and then there's some social issues too.

02:04:30.440 Uh, but once upon a time, I mean, I, I remember not so long ago, even Bill Clinton talking about

02:04:36.660 trying to reclaim some of those working class voters.

02:04:40.280 And that was a, like a legitimate activity.

02:04:42.380 Bill Clinton won West Virginia.

02:04:44.100 He won every county in West Virginia.

02:04:45.820 Imagine.

02:04:46.440 Every county.

02:04:47.220 That's amazing.

02:04:47.620 Every county in West Virginia in 1992.

02:04:49.480 And of course, I think he lost California.

02:04:53.440 And so imagine a Democrat winning any county in West Virginia.

02:04:59.020 Well, they wouldn't want to win.

02:05:00.300 No, they don't.

02:05:01.460 Right.

02:05:02.060 It's totally true.

02:05:03.340 Right.

02:05:03.760 It's totally true.

02:05:04.580 I mean, they, they, they go in there with these scolding attitude, like learn to code,

02:05:08.580 like what's, what's wrong with you?

02:05:10.240 Um, like, like there's this punitive attitude about it, which is the, as you know, if you've

02:05:16.180 covered campaigns, you cannot win if you, if you, if you have hostility towards the voters.

02:05:21.420 Well, that's Trump's secret is he doesn't hate them.

02:05:23.520 He loves them.

02:05:24.260 I know.

02:05:24.800 I know.

02:05:25.260 Right.

02:05:25.460 And that, that was immediately apparent from his first campaign is that he got up there

02:05:29.740 and, you know, people say, well, what does a billionaire have in common with, you know,

02:05:34.280 ordinary people?

02:05:35.080 Well, he, he's liked them in a lot of ways.

02:05:37.160 He has the same.

02:05:38.180 Right.

02:05:38.780 He probably does the same thing in the spare time.

02:05:40.880 He goes to the same websites and.

02:05:43.340 We eat to the same restaurant.

02:05:44.260 We know that.

02:05:44.820 Right.

02:05:45.060 Exactly.

02:05:45.380 And, and, you know, so when he opens his mouth, people think, ah, you know, I can connect

02:05:51.300 with this guy.

02:05:51.900 Now it's a lot of it is fake.

02:05:55.680 Right.

02:05:56.120 And, and the policy prescriptions may not make any sense, but you can understand why.

02:06:01.920 But at the level, at the, at the, you know, at the level of viscera, at the, like he's,

02:06:06.160 he has affection and they have hate.

02:06:08.140 And I think that's, that's the thing that shocks me most.

02:06:10.620 Like I, I think I'm way too artistic or something to understand a lot of the things are happening

02:06:15.000 right now.

02:06:15.280 But I think in terms of like, well, out, you know, outcomes.

02:06:19.660 And that's not what any of this is about.

02:06:21.740 And the thing that shocks me most is the actual hostility that people in DC were effectively

02:06:27.620 I'm from have for the rest of the country.

02:06:29.560 Like they hate the people in the country.

02:06:31.240 They do.

02:06:32.180 They don't just look down on them.

02:06:33.200 I thought it was just like looking down on them in a snobbish way.

02:06:35.460 Right.

02:06:35.860 No, it's like a hostility.

02:06:37.240 Right.

02:06:37.560 When they die and you saw this during COVID, oh, he didn't get the vax.

02:06:40.940 Well, he died. 0.92

02:06:41.620 I'm glad he died. 0.99

02:06:42.460 Like, I'm glad he died. 1.00

02:06:43.500 Right. 0.98

02:06:43.980 American.

02:06:44.660 Right.

02:06:45.100 Right.

02:06:45.420 Right.

02:06:45.760 I'm not, I'm not happy when a gang member dies in the South side of Chicago.

02:06:49.720 No, I'm sure.

02:06:50.160 I'm serious.

02:06:50.680 I couldn't be more opposed to gang members of South side of Chicago, but like, I don't

02:06:53.580 know.

02:06:53.740 It's like a, it's a human being.

02:06:55.360 Right.

02:06:55.860 American.

02:06:56.300 Like, I think it's sad actually.

02:06:58.360 Oh, I mean the, the hostility during the COVID thing was also, it was unbelievable to watch.

02:07:03.060 Yeah, I mean, I mean, Jimmy Kimmel does this whole anti-vax Barbie thing where it's just,

02:07:09.960 you know, it's the worst kind of, you know, cosmopolitan looking down at the, at the, at

02:07:16.240 the hick kind of a thing.

02:07:17.800 And, and they, they hate these people.

02:07:20.900 Right.

02:07:21.160 But why?

02:07:21.900 I don't understand.

02:07:23.480 You know, like once upon, again, not long ago, entertainers wanted to connect with ordinary

02:07:30.560 people.

02:07:30.980 Now they, they don't like that audience.

02:07:32.840 They wouldn't want to get, uh, plaudits from that audience.

02:07:37.340 Um, and politicians don't either.

02:07:39.740 They, they, they, they want to be elected by the right people or, um, they want to, they

02:07:45.120 want to do it without the help of the wrong kind of voters, but they can't because they're

02:07:49.820 outnumbered, you know?

02:07:50.980 Um, so I, it's a crazy time, but, but, but I do think you're right that if you try to

02:07:58.800 figure this out by assigning rational motives to any of this, it doesn't make any sense.

02:08:04.140 It won't work.

02:08:04.940 Um, so we're on a slide, as you said, at the very outset into authoritarian government,

02:08:11.120 a different, certainly a different form of government, not a democratic government at

02:08:13.780 all.

02:08:14.680 Um, and some kind of oligarchy. 0.97

02:08:17.840 I'm already there.

02:08:18.740 Does that, is there any way to arrest that or slow it down?

02:08:22.580 Is it inevitable?

02:08:23.740 Like what, if you could project, what would, what do you see?

02:08:27.520 Well, I mean, I don't think so.

02:08:29.440 Um, part of the reason that I'm so spun up about a lot of, a lot of the stuff that's

02:08:35.180 happening is because I got to, I watched what happened when, you know, speech freedoms,

02:08:40.360 even limited ones, like the ones in Russia, they, they disappear.

02:08:44.420 They don't come back, you know, like that's, that's kind of what happens.

02:08:47.960 And, uh, they don't come back.

02:08:50.220 That's true.

02:08:50.760 Isn't it?

02:08:51.240 Right.

02:08:51.560 And, and, you know, in the United States, uh, there was a reverence once for, for, um,

02:08:59.880 the first amendment for the whole bill of rights that it just doesn't exist anymore.

02:09:04.460 There's this kind of like defeatist or unbelieving attitude about it.

02:09:08.880 And that's been another revelation of, you know, working on stories like the Twitter

02:09:12.940 files is finding out that people don't really, they don't have the same feeling about the

02:09:18.120 first amendment that people did in the eighties and nineties, or even the early two thousands.

02:09:23.140 I mean, even Rob Reiner does the American president, right.

02:09:26.100 And it's all about how, um, you know, the ACLU and, you know, being allowed to burn the

02:09:32.040 flag and, and he's, you know, he's on the other side of this thing now, right?

02:09:38.160 Like, and, and so what happened to all those people, what happened to that, that belief

02:09:43.440 and, and, uh, the system, I mean, for all of them, uh, you know, you mentioned that you

02:09:48.960 and I came from probably from different political, uh, places at one point in time, I, I, I think

02:09:56.180 we probably both share a belief that America on some level worked right.

02:10:00.160 Right.

02:10:00.880 It had, it had all kinds of flaws.

02:10:03.700 Um, but you know, immigrants came here from all over the world.

02:10:07.680 They built good lives and they chose to stay here.

02:10:10.780 I mean, my family, you know, came from different parts of the world and, um, this, this country

02:10:16.300 is screwed up. 0.94

02:10:17.480 I like the fact that it's screwed up, uh, but it works.

02:10:21.100 This, this, this system, um, has, has been a great thing and people don't believe that.

02:10:25.860 I think they're, they've lost that belief, I think, um, which is so sad.

02:10:31.360 Uh, I don't know.

02:10:33.000 Do you feel that?

02:10:33.720 I mean, I, I feel it really strongly.

02:10:35.380 And I, and I also feel that, um, any semblance of national unity or common belief, shared culture,

02:10:42.960 even shared language, but particularly the culture, um, is gone.

02:10:47.180 And I noticed it in talking to you because actually, you know, maybe you voted for one

02:10:51.820 guy, voted for the other, but our core beliefs about the, you just articulated them right

02:10:55.300 there.

02:10:56.200 I've never doubted that a day in my life.

02:10:58.140 Right.

02:10:58.600 I just didn't, you know, cause like, yeah, America screwed up in a lot of ways, of course.

02:11:03.680 First of all, it's huge. 0.79

02:11:04.520 So of course it's screwed up. 0.62

02:11:05.520 Everything big is screwed up.

02:11:07.320 Sure.

02:11:07.600 But the best, the system works.

02:11:11.220 And, um, I don't feel that there's a national consensus on that at all anymore.

02:11:15.760 And it seemed to have evaporated very, very fast.

02:11:18.460 And I'm not quite sure how, maybe that's the problem with being in your fifties, things

02:11:22.200 change and you didn't see the change coming.

02:11:24.940 Yeah.

02:11:25.620 That's still a mystery, right?

02:11:27.020 Like where did that happen?

02:11:28.800 There had to have been a moment in time where.

02:11:31.360 Well, I'll tell you, part of what happened is the people who were deputized to defend it

02:11:34.520 refused to.

02:11:36.200 That's true.

02:11:36.720 Mick Stengels of the world, who was supposed to be, he was literally a guardian in the

02:11:40.220 first amendment.

02:11:40.740 He's the editor of time magazine.

02:11:42.020 Right.

02:11:42.420 And all the next thing you know, he's a federal official working for Obama against the first

02:11:46.040 amendment.

02:11:46.340 And you're like, well, that's a dereliction of duty.

02:11:48.400 That's a major sin.

02:11:49.780 I think it's a crime.

02:11:50.740 I think you should be punished for that.

02:11:51.800 Actually.

02:11:52.240 You can't allow that.

02:11:53.720 I mean, if you're in a battle and the officers desert, they get shot for that.

02:11:57.880 They're not allowed to do that.

02:11:58.680 Like you need leadership in order to preserve whatever it is that you have.

02:12:02.700 Right.

02:12:03.180 Right.

02:12:03.500 And so I blame the leaders a hundred percent.

02:12:05.140 And without leadership, of course, things fall apart and no one's willing to stand and

02:12:08.420 be like, no, you know, the dignity of the average person is not just a good thing.

02:12:14.800 It's the core of the enterprise.

02:12:16.760 It's essential.

02:12:17.500 You give that up.

02:12:18.060 We're done.

02:12:18.440 And, you know, you're not allowed to do this period.

02:12:23.960 Yeah, I agree.

02:12:27.380 And, you know, not now, you know, the role, the role of the media, I think is an important

02:12:33.760 one in American society.

02:12:35.100 We were given a very important responsibility to tell the public when things aren't going

02:12:45.060 right and to do that continually, no matter what, you know, which way the political winds

02:12:53.340 are blowing to stick to that.

02:12:55.320 Um, and so now it's kind of more important than ever to, to keep, to keep doing that.

02:13:01.280 I mean, you asked me like, what, how does this get turned around?

02:13:04.020 I don't know.

02:13:04.600 But the only thing I know is I think, you know, you have to keep doing this stuff and telling

02:13:11.420 people about it and in the hopes that it will get turned around.

02:13:14.360 So last question, you, um, you spent 10 years within a society that, you know, punished journalists

02:13:21.620 physically at times for telling the truth.

02:13:24.980 Uh, you're watching political figures go to jail and whatever you think of the charges

02:13:31.140 or convictions or whatever, in every single case, you know, for a dead certain fact, if

02:13:34.940 that person hadn't been in politics on the wrong side, he would not be going to jail.

02:13:38.180 That's just a fact.

02:13:39.700 So they're using jail as a political instrument.

02:13:42.160 How long until that comes to journalists?

02:13:46.280 Like, do you worry that at this rate, like you wind up indicted?

02:13:52.380 Uh, I've, I've started for the first time to worry about that.

02:13:55.620 Um, you know, cause because I spent so much time in Russia and I knew people who, you know,

02:14:01.240 physically suffered for what they did.

02:14:03.120 Right.

02:14:03.340 I, whenever people talked about taking risks as a journalist in the United States, I always

02:14:07.560 said, look, please, you know, like in other parts of the world, they actually go

02:14:12.140 through hardship.

02:14:12.880 Yeah.

02:14:13.000 Try that in Mexico.

02:14:14.060 Yeah, exactly.

02:14:15.620 See what happens, you know?

02:14:17.380 Um, you know, but it's gotten weird here.

02:14:20.280 I mean, even looked even, even the Bannon story, there's an element of that where it may

02:14:25.840 not be as much about him as a political figure as it is about war room necessarily.

02:14:32.100 Well, it's a hundred percent that.

02:14:33.900 Right.

02:14:34.380 And no one wants to say it, but at this point in his life, as of today, Steve Bannon is

02:14:38.360 a journalist.

02:14:39.040 That's what he is.

02:14:39.660 Now you may disagree with him completely.

02:14:41.380 He hosts a talk show every day.

02:14:43.640 Right.

02:14:44.060 It's like, what is that?

02:14:45.380 Right.

02:14:45.580 And the most influential one.

02:14:46.960 Yeah, I know.

02:14:47.600 Right.

02:14:47.880 And, you know, you hear people like Rick Wilson, uh, getting up and saying, yeah, it's four

02:14:53.100 months, but it's, it's, it's four important months.

02:14:55.220 It's where it's four key months.

02:14:56.340 He said, you know, like, um, you know, the Republican strategist, he, he said that.

02:15:01.760 The Lincoln project.

02:15:02.900 Yeah.

02:15:03.000 The Lincoln project guy and the former Dick Cheney aide, you know, like I, I, I saw that

02:15:08.040 and I was like, wow, they were kind of saying that out in the open, you know?

02:15:10.920 And, um, and even, even my experience, look, look, you had the FISA thing happened.

02:15:17.600 Um, when I, when I did the Twitter files and IRS agent showed up in my house while I was

02:15:21.980 testifying, uh, to, to, to Congress.

02:15:25.660 Um, so that's absolutely crazy.

02:15:28.460 Yeah, no, I, I thought it had to be a coincidence, but I don't think I now no longer think it is.

02:15:34.740 And I do worry about it.

02:15:36.120 I mean, I haven't even shared this with my wife yet, but I thought it might be time for

02:15:40.280 us to get another house and some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty.

02:15:44.980 Yeah.

02:15:45.220 Well, there aren't many, you know?

02:15:46.940 Um, yeah.

02:15:47.620 Which is a problem.

02:15:48.600 Oh, I'm aware of that.

02:15:49.580 Yeah.

02:15:49.740 Yeah.

02:15:50.120 Yeah.

02:15:50.720 And, um, I, I never had those thoughts even, even a year ago, but, uh, you must've had them.

02:15:59.020 Um, I've had some thoughts.

02:16:00.160 Yeah.

02:16:00.340 I've had some experiences that, you know, pretty shocking, I would say, um, not interested in

02:16:05.880 talking about it, but yeah, for sure.

02:16:07.320 Really, really shocking.

02:16:08.160 But it's still kind of all hard to believe.

02:16:11.860 I guess it's always that way, right?

02:16:13.060 When your society changes, it's hard to believe it's actually happening.

02:16:16.200 Well, it's, it's, it's, it's happened slowly.

02:16:18.160 Like, um, somewhere along the line, I became conscious of the fact that obviously somebody

02:16:25.360 must be listening to, you know, the people who I have in my contacts list or a lot of

02:16:31.400 them are out of the country or running from the law or on the wrong side of the intelligence

02:16:38.320 services.

02:16:38.920 And, um, you know, there's no way that somebody is not, uh, aware of what's going on, you know,

02:16:47.480 of what I do.

02:16:48.640 And that's, that's unnerving on one level.

02:16:50.740 But yes, this, this, this recent thing about, you know, even, even the stuff involving the

02:16:58.160 epic times and, um, Alex Jones, you know, I was never a fan of his, he had some choice

02:17:06.840 things to say about me, but I think this whole thing started with, uh, the decision to take

02:17:12.340 him off, um, the internet and, uh, uh, that's troubling, you know, like they, they clearly

02:17:19.880 see in journalists and information as a threat.

02:17:25.540 And, um, I don't think it's an accident that there aren't that many places left to publish

02:17:31.800 and, uh, there aren't that many people left doing real journalism.

02:17:35.480 So, yeah.

02:17:36.680 You think Twitter will stay open for the duration of the election?

02:17:39.020 Yeah, it, it, it, it probably, it probably will.

02:17:45.440 Um, but you know, Trump's not on anymore.

02:17:48.620 I mean, to Trump's Twitter, Twitter account is what won him.

02:17:52.080 I think the, the 2016 election, uh, and that was one of the reasons I think journalists

02:17:57.540 hate him is because, um, he proved that they, in the internet age, you don't need reporters

02:18:03.840 if you're a politician and they couldn't stand that.

02:18:07.580 I mean, I, I, I listened to those conversations.

02:18:09.900 They, they, they were very resentful.

02:18:13.160 The fact that they, he didn't have to go through their approval system, you know, um, but he's

02:18:20.260 not on Twitter anymore.

02:18:21.400 And, you know, I mean, it's extraordinary that Joe Biden's the only candidate in this

02:18:26.840 election who hasn't been censored in some way.

02:18:29.280 I mean, RFK has been censored, Ramaswamy's got, had been booted off LinkedIn for periods

02:18:34.880 of time.

02:18:35.380 I mean, like Jill Stein for that matter, Jill Stein.

02:18:38.460 We found her in the Twitter file.

02:18:40.060 She was on a, on a list called is underscore Russian, uh, which was Jill Stein.

02:18:45.780 Yes.

02:18:46.820 Yes.

02:18:47.660 Her, she, and they hear themselves.

02:18:49.620 I mean, can they, by the way, I, I've liked Jill Stein and no Jill Stein, not against Jill

02:18:53.820 Stein, not voting for her, but like fine.

02:18:56.060 But if you find yourself thinking that Jill Stein, Dr. Jill Stein is the threat to America, 0.99

02:19:03.420 like you're a buffoon too. 0.98

02:19:06.180 But they, they think that, right. 0.96

02:19:08.660 I mean, they, they, they have the hostility towards Jill Stein, uh, the same way they had

02:19:13.800 a hostility toward Ralph Nader once in the, once in the day.

02:19:16.680 Uh, and to, and, and the difference is now, if you're Jill Stein, they see you as part of

02:19:22.520 the Trump, uh, apparatus, you're, you're no different from Trump to them.

02:19:28.880 Assange, uh, Jill Stein, you know, ISIS, whatever, they're all lumped together.

02:19:33.920 Yeah.

02:19:34.320 Yeah.

02:19:34.580 So Snowden, exactly.

02:19:36.020 Yeah.

02:19:36.720 So it's, it's, it's, these are crazy times.

02:19:39.120 Um, what, is there anything that could get you to stop?

02:19:42.420 Uh, no, I mean, I've got kids, so I'm obviously not completely invulnerable.

02:19:48.200 Right.

02:19:48.640 But, um, but I, I think, uh, I think the world, America needs journalists and our, and our,

02:19:55.920 and again, our first, the first thing that we have to be is, um, you know, tough about

02:20:01.240 it.

02:20:01.500 Right.

02:20:01.960 And so you got, you got to get knocked off before you, you give up.

02:20:05.800 I think you shouldn't give up.

02:20:08.480 Right.

02:20:08.900 I mean, all my heroes in journalism didn't, didn't do that.

02:20:11.780 So I'm not going to do that.

02:20:13.260 I don't think.

02:20:14.400 Um, but I mean, you wouldn't, would you?

02:20:17.360 Under any circumstances.

02:20:19.500 Right.

02:20:19.860 Yeah, exactly.

02:20:21.740 Matt Taibbi, thank you.

02:20:22.980 Thanks so much, Tucker.

02:20:23.800 I appreciate it.

02:20:26.220 Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show.

02:20:28.180 If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made.

02:20:32.840 The complete library.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - June 27, 2024

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

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