Chapo Trap House - 302 - The Russia House feat. Matt Taibbi (4/1/19)

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

We're joined by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi to discuss his new serial book "Hate Inc.", and the political media's many failings in covering Russiagate. Check out Hate Inc. here: https://taibbi.substack.com/

I Go lucky has admitted that he made contact in Prague with with with yeah, that's right. Yeah, you fucking guessed it Susie and Neva Vosky and Neva Vosky's denial that she knew Steve Bobutnik Well, that's out the window. That's part of more trap. All right. Yeah, okay folks buckle up We have confirmed in tell from the FBI that Michael Cohen was in contact with dr. Robotnik It's only 10 15 a.m. The what happens to the oh, it's only three o'clock guy that guy

That's my favorite part. That's my favorite Trump Russia guy Yeah, he could just be making a path of those and I wouldn't know because I haven't been following this for two years and he's just like Robert Mueller just said that Donald Trump has a small dick and I'm like, it's only you know, it's only 1 p.m. I don't even know I haven't even checked the time. You could be telling me anything. I don't know I mean, it's certainly I was thinking about it's like it's sort of why I don't feel like Too smug having gotten this one right because it didn't involve like a great amount of research Yeah, right sight on my part. No, I was just like, oh, oh, there's Eric Garland and Louise mentioned people are taking them seriously

They've obviously gone insane You know what this is like for me. This is like, I mean, what do you even get right? Just that like Donald Trump isn't literally a Manchurian candidate. Yeah, like everything else What you get right is that Donald Trump is too stupid and too Prone to talking about anything that happens to him to ever sit down and have a meeting where they say we're going to Collude to swing this election because he would have immediately tweaked right You'll never guess what I just talked to So this is what this reminds me of this thing

I was just too lazy and bored to follow for two years and I was like kind of right about it where I was like Yeah, he probably like isn't an agent of the FSB. I'm gonna assume that It reminds me of like, you know, my mom being like you have to do good in the ACTS to you know Be a successful adult. No, I don't I just kept doing what I was doing. I was right. It's one of the best deals I've ever made the other thing is I always I always personally kind of buy the theory that Trump wasn't trying to win. So why would he even make a quid pro quo? Yeah, that was Manifestly obvious to everybody who was covering it at the start. I mean

It was pretty clear that he was wing it. He had absolutely no strategy whatsoever I mean, it's probably officially start. We're sitting here with Matt Taibbi to talk. We're talking we're talking Russia gate, baby And no, Matt you you lay out in your latest piece in a enrolling stone You know, I don't want to repeat ourselves too much on this show because you know We've said for a while now that this Russia thing is just like a convenient excuse for a political and media class to kind of wash their hands of this You know traumatic event of Trump being elected president and being wrong about it That's an excuse of words to an actual cudgel they use against the left

Yeah But you talk about what covering him on the 2016 campaign was like and you make the point that like he did he wasn't trying to win Right. He just like it got too far before he could ever go back. Yeah. Yeah, and I was funny I was talking to Matt about this the other day Do you remember when Howard Stern ran for governor of New York on the Libertarian party? Oh my god. That's right I forgot I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, he he he put it out there I remember this distinctly because that was when he was king of all media and there was He packed the Libertarian party convention with his supporters

That's how he got the nomination and I remember watching as a teenager on C-Span And it was just a static shot of the dais and it was a complete zoo Like there was like an old guy with the elbow patches sort of, you know, like a real Nasik, you know Firebrand just yelling about how this was a disgrace and this was awful and it was it was, you know Ayn Rand was spinning in her grave and then I swear to God This is in it'll be in my head till I die a baba booey looking motherfucker in I think like a tan Windbreaker just walks up to the empty dais pulls a dildo out of his pocket and just goes I got a dildo I

Got a dildo and then he got the nomination I remember but then and his only two planks where he wanted to fill all the potholes in New York City And he wanted to bring back the death penalty Tumor is Libertarian position and but then once this was like, okay, you're gonna have to disclose your Your income and you know, you're gonna have to do x y and z. He just said I'm out. Yeah, it was it was that But it was also the polling showed that he had an actual shot at getting elected governor Yeah, and Stern. I think his credit was just like what now like this is too ridiculous I can't be governor of New York, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm like there's a harbinger of things to come Trump obviously lacked that

You know that break the regulator. Yeah, exactly including remembering all the shit He said on Howard Stern about drilling a hole in the wall at Miss Universe to pick on teens like he said fucking porkies. Did he do that? I don't know. He just went on Howard Stern. He's getting sued for it. He went on Howard Stern like he was meeting with his own oppo people to get ahead of stuff Like it didn't matter. It's amazing. Everybody just broke. Yeah, everything broke and there had to be someone responsible and it's like Putin Yeah, no psychologically just people weren't ready for the whole thing And I was thinking about it like the only thing that's like really comparable like in my lifetime or modern American history It's like the effect that the election of Donald Trump had and breaking people's brains was 9-11. Yeah, because it was like it's exact same things It's like a movie. Yeah, you know like all the red signs are blinking red but nobody you know knew nobody knew any better

Except for a few people who were you know screaming like an invasion of the body snatchers right Right exactly and except in this time It's sort of like the shoe is on the other foot because it's primarily you know It's the Democrats and liberals who the ones that feel you know degree you know they're on the shoes on the other foot Exactly, it's sort of the opposite political context and you know it is true that you know something like 90% of the press votes Democratic Right, so that's a thing and that that was a factor with with the WMD case because there was a little there was some room politically to talk about That fact that it was fucked up But in this case it just got momentum and it just you couldn't stop you know and we've talked about like you know why this is the perfect excuse a lot

But one of the things you go into in your rolling stone piece is how in addition to creating this whole you know narrative about Trump and Russia and treason and collusion They were also like going along with it this idea that if you didn't buy it or just like yeah I think this is bullshit or like something about this doesn't seem right It was sort of like this idea that you were signifying some kind of covert alliance with Trump and fascism and that you're helping him in a way When in fact as you lay out this piece like the exact opposite is true Exactly the old this this literally was the only thing that the press could do to completely you know fuck things up I mean all they had to do if you tell the truth about Donald Trump It's gonna hurt him every single time you know but the the one thing that they couldn't do was be over their skis with facts and validate all those things that he was saying in his tweets about how you know we are You know we're so against him that we're making things up and now he doesn't have to do anything to run for reelection in 2020 now he can run on this forever right Yeah I mean I don't know I mean like his approval rating I think the day to day approval ratings are kind of fucking meaningless

Right but it's not like we've seen a huge up shoot so far I feel like he will essentially have the same problems he would face whether you know whether Mueller was like yeah he yeah guess who met with Michael Ian Gavin about the Kravnevich affair like if Mueller had said that whatever the people were talking about for two years yeah I think you generally have the same problems running for reelection but it does yeah he could definitely use this as a cudgel in a way And it really fires up the base they're they're super excited about it It's it's a it's a huge class issue to me because it's just about you know it started even before Russia get started I think I mean he with the press he definitely went after us because we are dorky looking at the upper class people who live in Washington and New York and in those crowds and it's the setup and the speeches makes it look particularly bad because we're literally above everybody else on risers with ropes around us to keep all the heard out We experienced that when we were at CPAC and we were in the media zone and people were getting mad at us because we were blocking their view Exactly

I mean imagine if you go to a you know a baseball game or whatever it is and there just happened to be you know 50 Jim Acosta standing on you know a riser in front of you so that you can't see the game That's why they keep at baseball games they keep the luxury seats way back you can't see them you can't get mad at them and like be thinking about how much money they spent Exactly That represents the deep state To be fair about CPAC I was wearing a novelty sombrero with a pressed hiccup in it I was so big I'm still having neck problems but I wanted people to respect me I'm sorry I just wanted people to know I was a member of the press I apologize to everybody But like you know if the Democrats like after the election of Trump had intended to actively help him and make this obviously craven fraud seem less so It's hard to imagine how they could have done anything better than go all in on the collusion trees and shit because if they had just like left that aside

The Mueller report would have him absolutely dead to rights paying off a porn star like a week before an election and like obvious campaign fraud Right and that's pretty good right That is very good it's also impeachable I think Yeah absolutely It's questionable whether you know politically that would work but you know it's that you could throw a dart at basically any business venture that he's ever been involved with And it would be it would resonate powerfully if they had done that instead right if you would look at Trump University with 19 investigators that can imagine the shit that would have come out of that right I mean everybody That people got a sort of shoddy substandard education there was some great inflation going on there

Yeah exactly and then they got they got in debt I mean that would Now I'm imagining some rich parent like bribing Trump to get their kid into Trump University I swear he's a water polo water polo prodigy get him in But yeah you're no you're right I mean that if they had if they had tried they couldn't have done worse and obviously we still have to see what's in the report But the thing that they sold more than anything else was that one piece of it you know the Manchurian candidate story and it was just it's just such a bad error and he's gonna he's gonna harp on it And and he's never gonna let us forget Man he was he was just feeling himself at that Michigan rally holy fuck I mean we thought I thought he was he was moist at CPAC He was positively dewy

He was drip or die there He was just like little little out of shift tiny thin little neck tiny little neck out of shift not like the great lakes those are deep I support the great lakes always They're beautiful they're big very deep record deepness right I love the one most incorrect thing he could say about the great lakes that they're really deep Superiors are deep I do like that he said I've always been a supporter of the great lakes not to be just the lakes themselves just like it's 1985 He's at Studio 54 like trying to talk you know Cheryl Teague's in the bed and he's just also thinking about like Lake Erie and how to support Larry Silverstein came up to me and said one time two billion dollars we destroy Lake Erie I said no no good Lake

There are a lot of fish there they have their little neighborhoods they got their their fish schools People have fish schools they swim around Is that a thing that people thought like I think Hillary Clinton did pledge to drain one of them I think I don't think that went over We said before we recorded Virgil you said that like the way we've talked about it over the last few years is just like it's a running joke on the show It's just something we refer to If you had listened to this show for the past two and a half years you probably would not and this was the only thing you listen to you probably would not even know who Robert Mueller is If you're if your captor has been doing that you're

No there's one thing you would know about Robert Mueller you would know that his bussy wide AF and wild it out because the one thing I do remember is Felix talking about fantasizing about getting railed by Robert Mueller Yeah the woman who posted the Robert Mueller sex that was the most we've ever covered Mueller was the woman who was like I would love to get dicked down by Robert Mueller on Twitter This would probably like your knowledge of the Mueller investigation Russia gate would just seem like an inside joke that we invented on this program And the way we've talked about it is really only as a launching point to analyze one the sort of structures in the media and politics that led us to our you know current hell state and to as a shared pathology of a certain you know subset of liberals which probably numbers in the millions whose brains have been irrevocably broken by the election of Donald Trump but compare our show with basically every other political podcast that did emergency pods about you know about James Bork getting fucking getting indicted for stealing a submarine Yeah that was that was the thing it would always be like the only angle of the Mueller investigation I deeply know is that Roger Stone has like a gang of sickly old men who he abuses

really critical and Jerome Corsi Corsi claiming Jerome Corsi claiming that Roger Stone was trying to kill him by tweeting at him meanly so that he would have a heart attack That was hilarious Just like going up to the judge naked and lying down on the floor and moaning You know Trump's sovereignty was to surround himself with old men that he makes humiliate themselves for his amusement Yeah and all of them all of them would be like 345 am Roger Stone called me and said I'm going to slit your dog's throat you fat fuck It was like I don't know what this has to do with it It's pretty cool The Trump organization is organized as well as the bum fight videos

And that was like so Roger Stone is interesting to me because he has the same like he's as impressive a political operative as Jacob Wohl but he was just lucky to be in a time before the internet Yeah When people couldn't easily like look something up and be like yeah you're lying But because Trump is like yeah Trump's like this guy's the best he's so smart he just says whatever Have you met my friend Roger Stone Yeah he was like crucial to whatever operation But that was the only angle I was following just Roger Stone's gig of ailing old men turning on him If Roger Stone goes to jail it's pretty funny I don't know

I thought that should have been a suspension of disbelief moment for the entire crew of prosecutors The moment that Jerome Corsi started to become a character in this whole thing You know they should have backed off and been like you know Maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere You're just imagining like just imagining like an FSB agent meeting Jerome Corsi in an underground garage and he's like scrolling through pepe memes He's like look here I am as a griper Da, da, da, yes, that is impressive Yeah you're like we buy the pic a little closer

You survived like the greatest collapse in life expectancy and life quality in your like you rose back through the ranks You've just you've cut so many throats you've been through so many literally cut throats like you've killed oligarchs all this shit And then you just meet this guy in like a pinstripe suit but the pants are cut fucked up All that work to get here right Yeah he's wearing like suspenders and a belt with a skull on it and a top hat So you'll be like so as you see I have three dying men who I have used They're like yeah okay So that I mean obviously for us sort of an inside joke but like for everything I was like Russiagate

It's just like everything else it just sort of evolved into a kind of a signifier or a shorthand that everyone kind of forget what it was about But people were obsessed with it and I think now it's just become sort of like a marker for whether in the online economy Whether you've been owned or not Yes, yes I'd like to be clear, we have not been owned We have not been owned We have not been owned But it's easy to forget there was a real story here

I mean like whether it's a con, a delusion, a conspiracy theory For any of those to work it has to be based on something like they're not Well okay so this is actually an important point because this was one of the first problems that I had with this With any news story you want to know what the beginning is I hate to draw this comparison but like this happened to me with the Flategate I was actually interested I was interested because I'm a football fan I was interested in investigating the Flategate And I kind of like on my spare time started to ask questions from all the teams

I even asked, they sent me to interview Andrew Luck and I even asked him about it But I got like four different answers about how it started Like one person said it was the Ravens who started it Another person said it somebody intercepted a ball in one of the previous games And then another person said it was somebody had seen something at the RCA Dome In the previous game that led them to think the Patriots were messing with the balls But I could never get a straight answer and to me that was important because If they had a legitimate reason to test the balls then the story is totally different

But I could never find out what it was so I didn't feel comfortable writing about it Here we don't know what started the RCA, we still don't know There's no definitive account of what started the investigation Well I mean you just released a chapter from an upcoming book I hate ink, it's all about this You do like a really detailed timeline of as best you can following the entire story Like every step along the way And in this chapter at least even though it's sort of hard to say where it begins

You sort of begin with the steel dossier I mean it goes back a little before that but that's like the sort of You think that that was kind of the hook? Well that was where it started to become public but this is the problem The investigation, right We know that there was an FBI investigation that started at the end of July in 2016 And they've had like three different explanations for how this started One was that the FBI was interested in this guy George Papadopoulos

There was another one where the FBI was following Carter Page And there's a third one where the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ Their guy, their head Robert Hannigan intercepted something that worried them Flew to Washington, told the head of the CIA who in turn told the FBI But they never told us what it was They kind of hinted at this story over and over again So that was a huge red flag to me right away Like if you can't, like with Watergate, you know what the story is

Like it starts with a break in You tape along the fucking door, you don't tape Exactly, exactly Vertical, that horizontal, idiots Here's another sort of like a red flag for me Like as far as the steel dossier goes I think it should have been a tip off that the guy who created this dossier Was a former British spy named Christopher Steele

It's like get the fuck out of here Christopher Steele My favorite 90s porn star But you compare him in this chapter to like he's sort of the Amid Chalabi of this whole fiasco He's the screwball source for the public claims So what was the steel dossier and what was in it? So the steel dossier, the Democrats The Democratic National Committee hired a law firm called Perkins Coey

To do basically APO research on Trump They hired this firm Fusion GPS which does this kind of stuff They dig up dirt on political candidates And at some point they hired this guy Christopher Steele And it's worth noting that before this happened They hired this guy in like June of 2016 There were already rumors like kicking around Washington About something to do with Trump and Russia

Like reporters were talking about this So they hired this guy who's got Bonafides He used to work for the MI6 and was the station chief in Moscow in the early 90s But he hadn't been there in a long time And he put together a series of memos But the thing that's amazing to me is The first memo has the p-tape It has the five-year plan to

Apparently Putin's been cultivating this Manchurian candidate for five years It has that he's being blackmailed In other words, this guy within days Having not looked at this story Comes up with the intelligence coup of the century Like literally overnight We started shopping this around to reporters We all heard the rumors in the early fall of 2016

But nobody would report it because we couldn't confirm it And then they cooked up this weird scam Where basically all the intelligence she's handed it to Trump after he got elected And leaked the news of the meeting Which allowed all the reporters to talk about this report finally You talk about how this is a trick that's used Often in Washington and Wall Street You said to publicize unconfirmed private research

Can you explain a little bit more about how that scam works? I've done a couple of stories about this You have a short seller who wants to knock down a stock There was a company called Fairfax Insurance A bunch of guys bet against So they hired some slimy investment bank To do a negative report Then they basically went to the FBI

And said, hey, can you take a look at this? It's really important Their books are wrong And they're cheating their investors, blah, blah, blah The instant the FBI takes possession of the report They call up a friendly reporter And they say, this company's under investigation Everybody times their bets perfectly

They know the story's coming up the next day The reporter does the story The stock goes down for about 10 minutes And everybody wins It's like an old trick It doesn't mean the stuff in the report is real It just means that you're reporting on the journey of the report Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah So if you're a reporter Then it becomes like a story not about that it's unconverifiable It becomes a story about like, well, the FBI is looking into The FBI is looking into it Somebody handed it to somebody else We know that the CIA gave it to Trump And informed him that there was blackmail material out there

And the huge red flag there was that Comey hands this thing to Trump And says, I promise, sir, this is going to be close held And within fucking five seconds Every news organization in Washington knows all about this meeting And they have the reason that they need to publish it Which, again, should have been another red flag But you mentioned other examples of this kind of private oppo thing Which is like, in and of itself not inherently good or bad

No It has like led to some useful Enron Yeah, the Enron story Enron was a big one Yeah, Bethany McClain was the reporter they gave it to And it was a similar thing They had people who were betting against that company

Because people were looking at it, they could see it was a scam So they did a report and they got a reporter who was good And that turned into a big story But there's some negative examples too Like the Arkansas project was involved whitewater in the Clintons They just generated tons and tons of stuff And it was hard for reporters to sort out what was real and what wasn't And after a while it just turned into just a lot of noise that appeared in the press

And this led to, you know, a special prosecutor investigation And all kinds of other stuff I mean, correct me if I'm wrong Wasn't there something to do with the Steele dossier where it was like They were also going to look into Hillary Clinton and vet her And then they were like, oh, we couldn't find anything Yeah, there's a line It's on Bill or Hillary, they're clean as a whistle

That to me was a huge tell It's actually mentioned twice in the report That the Russians are keeping a file of compromise on Hillary Clinton But there's nothing in it Because it's just a bunch of meaningless conversations Rather than any embarrassing or improper conduct And they mention this twice and I'm like Why would they mention that?

You know, first of all, I doubt it, you know what I mean? Like if the Russians have been monitoring the Clintons And they have, certainly for two years, for two decades I'm pretty sure there's something in that file But they made a point in the report to mention that twice Which to me suggested that it was written for public consumption They meant for somebody to read it Which they say isn't true

They say it was just for their private clients But, you know, you can't prove that one way or the other That way, you know, it was a reason to look at the document And be a little bit skeptical, that's all It's so baffling to me that you're gonna do Trump OPPO And you're gonna just hire some syphilitic James Bond To make shit up when he just has done every crime you could think of You know one thing that I didn't hear from the Clinton campaign?

The fact that when he was building Trump Tower He hired a bunch of Polish immigrants, illegal immigrants To build a fucking thing, and then fucking had them deported before paying Exactly How bad was that? I didn't see that in any ads They investigated the one crime that Donald Trump did not... The single crime? He's done every single crime

He's done, like, even the weird crimes that are still on the books Like, he watched an Irishman on Sunday I tied up my horse after sundown They couldn't stop me I let my falcon for the purpose of falconry To a friend, it wasn't for a photo shoot He used it for hunting Yes, he did even that

There was, like, in... When he was talking, they interviewed him, like, after the apprentice started And he's like, I didn't want to do it Because, you know, I meet with a lot of people every day I meet with members of the mafia who don't want to be recorded He bragged about his mafia connections all the time Like, he thought it was cool that he was on first date basis with all the games That's the coolest thing

But the thing is, the real joke of all of this is they even... They could have fucking talked about that stuff And guess what? It wouldn't have mattered anyway Because the vacuum of Hillary Clinton's awful candidacy Was always going to win out Right, exactly And no amount of... Because he was such a comically corrupt figure

But everyone kind of absorbed that And then there was still, like, yeah, but... Hillary, and there was no counter to that Because corruption clung to the Clintons the same way And people were like, if all things are equal I want somebody who at least acknowledges there's a problem And, you know, says the word jobs once in a while And that's all it took

I mean, that to me was a huge sort of unremarked fact about the election That the basically one in five voters disapproved of both candidates Right? And we're talking about people who voted Yeah, exactly So that doesn't even include the people who didn't vote And of those voters, Trump had something like a two to one advantage So that was his main constituency His winning constituency was the people who didn't like him

Yeah, it's all bad, let me shake it up Right, yeah, exactly Something different than business as usual Because I know business as usual doesn't work Right, exactly Going back to the Rolling Stone piece you did One thing you mentioned that I hadn't considered before Is that Jeb Bush's and Hillary Clinton's strategy to attack Donald Trump

Were identical to one another Which means that Hillary Clinton saw it fall flat on its face in the Republican primary And decided to do it again in the general It was unbelievable I mean, Jeb, covering Jeb's campaign was one of the weirdest things I've ever been through He did an event in a pharmacy I can't remember the name of the town in New Hampshire But it was a small ass pharmacy

It was like a little pharmacy He comes and he's like alone in the pharmacy They've announced it but there aren't enough people there There's like a few people in the aisle So they rope off half the pharmacy so that it starts to look more full Right, and it's still It's an old trick Put them in the adult diapers and feminine hygiene section

Tarp off the top of the Oakland Coliseum But he couldn't even Eventually he filled like about an aisle of a pharmacy And they spent $150 million on that campaign They got three delegates It's got to be the most $50 million a delegate It's number one effort in terms of wasted money

Oh, totally Hillary watched that and she's like, hell yes, I'm doing it This is my guy I may not be Taker Pal, but I'm asking you to please clap Virgil, when we were in New Hampshire we saw the billboard The billboard when you drive into Manchester The thing that every reporter vote, they're all going to see it It's just in quotations

Donald Trump is unhinged, Jim Bush The big red billboard that he spent $35 million on That was Jim Bush's campaign It was like the greatest transfer of wealth from like Just sort of old money billionaires to sort of new money shitty consultants Ever It was like a petite bourgeois revolution It was actually kind of beautiful

Looking at the home stretch of the Hillary campaign I assume that their general strategy was And this is a rule of thumb in political campaigns If your opponent is imploding, stay out of the way Let it happen And I think they assume that after the Access Hollywood tape came out And after all these news articles, these long reads coming out Just about the general criminality of Trump's business dealings

They thought the media will just do our dirty work for us And that's, as I understand it, one of the central topics of hating And I want to go back to the start of that And you are serially publishing this, right? Yeah, yeah, on a site It's taiibi.substack.com I got approached a while ago by this new company called Substack And contractually I couldn't just blog or write

So I thought about doing books And I had some, you know, some of my favorite writers had serialized books So I started to serialize a couple of books Well, I did one that was a... I co-offered with a drug dealer Which was called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing And then I did this one Could you just like text me his contact?

And then this one is about the media Which it started out as kind of like a rethink of manufacturing consent But then it just turned into, like, boy It turned out I had a whole lot of, like, bottled up shit About things I didn't like about this business And just started pouring out I've been reading it It is a brutal and specific takedown of the media

Especially viewed through the prism of the way they utterly fucked up the 2016 election And I highly recommend anyone listening to this Go on taiibi.substack.com and subscribe to it And you said, so this is... You got the perimeter of Chomsky Right, yeah Yeah, I went to go visit him And just sort of asked him if it would be alright

For me to kind of rethink the whole Because his whole thing was about basically... Is this like the tequila mockingbird sequel Where you just sit and just see that If you don't want me to write it Not twice Oh, come on, Chomsky's not like Harper Lee He's still fucking pretty, he's still sharp

No, he was cool with it But it turned out to not really be like that It turned into much more about Some very specific things about the business And particularly about political journalism And how we screw it up all the time And the group think especially Which this turned out to be like a classic example of

You compare the Russiagate story To the weapons of mass destruction story And obviously you're careful to say In terms of the actual effect it's had on the world WMD, at the end of the day That probably killed a million or so people And it's killing people to this day To this day

However, Blake, you do make a comparison In terms of like how intel from Intelligent sources were stove piped To credulous or willing members of the media Could you compare to like how that stove piping Worked during the war up to the Iraq war And to the Russiagate story Yeah, so stove piping originally was this thing that

Seymour Hirsch wrote about it I think it was actually called the stove pipe Was the name of the article And the whole idea was Dick Cheney was tired of Hearing from other points of view In the intelligence community And he wanted to basically stick a pipe Down through into the agency

So he could get the analysis A dumb waiter Yeah, exactly He wanted the raw data that fit what he wanted to hear And he wanted to be able to pull it up Without having dissenting people clean it out And so he takes this stove piped information And then he used this laundering technique

To get it to get it before the public And this is you know This isn't the kind of thing if you're a reporter And this happens to you It's a big red flag Like basically what they would do Is they would give somebody a scoop They would say we found out that

They're like importing yellow cake uranium from Africa You know, off the record Or anonymously So the New York Times or somebody would do that story And Cheney would go on TV that day And say well according to the New York Times You know, Saddam Hussein is importing uranium From Africa

So it's a trick, they're laundering Can we just edit in the sound drop Of Brad Pitt from Burn After Reading Good I think that's the shit man The raw intelligence This is the real raw shit Exactly But you know

I remember he went on Like meet the press that Sunday Meet the press that same day New York Times Known that he saw the significant quantity of uranium From Niger Right, and if you're the editor of the New York Times How do you not not at that moment

No, you've been fucked right Like at that exact moment They should have just backed out I mean there were like 90 moments like that Before the war that should have just told reporters Something is really off here The British published an intelligence dossier In February about a month before the invasion

That within days was revealed to have been plagiarized From a student thesis Written from a Cal State University 13 years before And this came out in the news This was their argument for invading Iraq They took from a student thesis from Cal State University My favorite example of that that we talked about

In one of the very, very early episodes of this show Was I think it was in the curveball shit He talked about like Saddam's chemical nerve agents Had the elegant pearl-like construction That was directly taken from Michael Bay's The Rock Really elegant string of pearls configuration Unfortunately incredibly unstable Which has literally never existed

A pure invention in that movie Those like anal beads, like neon balls of VX nerve gas That was entirely taken from the movie Just so he could put that one of the guy's mouth Pop it open Something like that should be a little bit of a tell So what were some examples of the Russia story of this happening? Well the steel thing was, you know

That was the major example Because it's private, unconfirmed research And first of all, why is the FBI, the CIA and the NSA Why are they giving us something That some guy who was hired by a law firm Who's some out of work spy Why are they foisting that on us? Don't they have something better than that?

If they were this concerned, they should have their own research That should have been thing number one But there were lots and lots of other stories where The main problem was that the big papers Especially the New York Times, Washington Post Actually they doled out these scoops all over the place But they had lots and lots of unnamed government sources Who would whisper something to these reporters

And the story would fall apart like Gradually over a period of days and weeks later Like there was a big story about how Trump had Repeated contacts with Russian intelligence That was in the New York Times in February of 2017 And they didn't say whether it was witting or unwitting contact They didn't characterize it at all And it was sourced to four current former officials

And this is another trick that people don't know about Like typically that's actually one source What you're dealing with is a high-ranking person At one of the agencies who then says Oh, you should talk to these three other people And then you call those people and they're like Oh yeah, I heard that Some version of that tends to be the way

A lot of these stories get into print And there were so many of them There's a few lists online, you can find them The one I kept, there's about 45 to 55 stories Significant stories that screwed up And had to be walked back during this period Going back to 2016, I believe it was you Who brought up the example of the Podesta leaks

And the Hillary Clinton campaign's response Which was, you know, some of these are forged We can't trust these And the media, you blame the media for not following up And saying, well, okay, which ones are forged? I'm calling your bluff right now You have to do that immediately But they didn't do their job, they didn't do their due diligence

Which meant that the only way you're getting A real discussion of what's contained in those emails Is through the right media and these Facebook groups And podcasts and shit like that Right, and this is this thing that developed in 2016 The normal reason that you don't make mistakes in print I mean, there's a lot of reasons not to do it Among other things just because you just don't want to

But in the old days, if you really screwed up badly Your competitor would point it out And, you know, have a laugh at your expense But in the new kind of, you know, left and right media landscape Nowadays, if you screw up, it's kind of like this unspoken thing That, you know, CNN is not going to call it MSNBC And The Times is not going to call it The Washington Post The correction is going to appear in The Daily Caller

Or, you know, on Fox and vice versa Right, so now, your own audiences never hear about things that go wrong And that's a major structural flaw in the press So, in the prism of manufacturing and consens So, why is that? What is the sort of central thesis For why the media dropped the ball in 2016? Well, there are so many reasons why they dropped the ball in 2016 One of them is just they had been celebrating for so long

This idea that people in Washington, the press The donors and the parties together What they call the invisible primary, right? They used to have this term, they would openly talk about it The people who really decide the elections Remember Mark Halperin before his career blew up? Yeah, we remember Mark Halperin Yeah, so he used to talk about the gang of 500

And he would openly brag about this He's like, oh, there's 500 people in Washington Who actually decide who gets to be president every year And I've got my finger on the pulse of the gang of 500 And they tell me what's going to be important this year This year it's going to be NASCAR dads and whatever And it's just bullshit, right? They have no idea

But they got into this habit of believing that they could tell people What was important every year and who was going to win And who could be a candidate and who couldn't be a candidate And then Trump came along and he was the first person Who didn't just disappear when he was ordered to by the press It was a Herman Kane Not to mention, you also pointed out how larryce it is That they seem to have no compunction about just openly saying

Yeah, in a democracy of 300 million people It's actually these 500 guys Exactly They don't think it's weird They don't think it sounds weird to I mean, I wish that were true If it's only 500 people we got to take care of You know

Parity In the game That's just 500 people for me to befriend And win over to my point of view Exactly, that's what I meant So among the media class there's just a consensus Right, basically We agree on the same basic precepts of society

And everything outside of that Everything outside the bounds of acceptable discourse Well, that's loony tune stuff They also have the same belief about what people want And that is what governs They would say they have normative views But more importantly to them, to normative views Is their understanding of the electorate

Right, absolutely This isn't going to play in Peoria or whatever That's the Sovereign always says DC is Hollywood for ugly people But I'd say Hollywood has won up on DC And most of the time they can kind of figure out what people want Yeah, right Like whether it's like an inspiring fucking superhero bullshit

Or like a Judd Apatow movie that's like I used to drink beer and now I'm a father You know, type of thing But in DC it's just like These people who went from like St. Chatham's great school for good boys To Harvard, to doing their senior project in Afghanistan Like Mayor Pete did

To fucking McKinsey Then to where they are now You know, they're the guy who scrubs the boils Of James Inhofe's feet or something And their thought process every day is just like I might slum it today by going to LaPan Quotidion Very exciting And they're just all their days like

Yes, so what a theoretical normal person would like And they're never right, they're never fucking right I don't believe that, but since they're all saying the same thing That's the same as being right Right, they only talk, they talk to the same 500 people It's basically just like an insular discord server Like the same 500 assholes Like one will go up to the other and be like

Hey, I think that Stepdads who take AYSO too seriously are going to be pivotal this year And then like asshole two goes to like a party of assholes And it's like, did you guys know that Stepdads who take AYSO too seriously are going to be The deciding factor in the Democratic primary What is AYSO? The youth soccer, national youth soccer

I played in it, I was not very good They really are guys like guys in a discord server Bitching about how the mate is fucked up right now They really have to nerf Marco Rubio Yeah, yeah And it's just like, it's the same I think there is something that goes on in sort of insular communities Where it just sort of encourages lying

Because if it's a very small and pretty much the same people The entire time you're there It's you want to get one up And it's not prison where like you just become the best at like Stabbing people or selling drugs It's just in this one you have to become the best at like Knowing voter insights And if you didn't actually know any

And just any like really good policies Just out of the question You would just like kind of just sort of like Make things up that are half intuition And half like you saw like 30 seconds of this is us And you're like, oh, okay, I got it And so it just it's is a very weird Community it is

I've said this quote on the show before But to me it is the quote that will Define political journalism for all of time It's from Michael Barborough And it's from an article about how he was on paleo When he was running in Iowa and he was about How the ankle was that that was going to hurt him Because Iowans are a bunch of fat assholes

Who love to stuff their fucking faces And his not eating as much Like not deep-throating the corn dogs And the quote is and it's still in my head Three years later, this rigid abstiniousness Will put him risks putting him at a dietary distance From an electorate that still binges on carbs And after eight years of a T seeking

A T sipping president seeks a relatable eater in chief Oh my god, that's beautiful It's to me it's the cellar door of political journalism I have a tattoo down my rib That is You couldn't do better than that It's amazing That's exactly the way it is

A relatable eater in chief Like how do you wrote it was printed in the New York Times See Matt, since we first made that thing I think the funny fuck don't think about that It's true It's kind of right Trump had all those pictures of him Doing thumbs up like an idiot in front of a KFC bucket

There are so many pictures where he's thumbs uping food Those are like the two things These two favorite things are to be next to a bunch of Just like $50 of fast food and thumbs up it And meet the hot generals Those are just two favorite activities Just to stop at one thing though When you talk about insular communities

I think people forget it's literally an insular community It's literally on an island Yeah, because you can't At a certain point in the campaign You're walled off with the same people Week after week after week after week Because of the Secret Service and the way things are organized You go to the events

You maybe get to talk to some people in the crowd Who have of course been selected for you to talk to By the campaigns But for the most part you're talking to other reporters People who are on the plane working for the campaign Maybe some pollsters, maybe some donors That's it Of course it's groupthink

You're literally flying in a plane full of people Who are only getting information from each other For weeks and months at a time Most people don't see that That starts to become an intellectual problem after a while And then when they venture outside of it It's why we got approximately 15 million articles in 2017 That it's like, uh, yeah, I talked to the first dirty guy I found

That's how Salinasito got to become For a minute like a genius Because she was like, hey, I'll talk to regular people If they're all, you know, Republican like, you know Comptrollers or whatever the fuck Right, so the media, they got it wrong And then Trump gets elected And then there is just a multi-day hangover

Where a lot of these people just as individuals Just had total anxiety breakdowns And people were, you know, this was, of course, an opportunity for self-reflection That great American pastime And of course, you know, various hucksters came out of the woodwork Like Salinasito, you know, offering false answers for why You know, oh, you didn't talk to enough people laid off from the racism factory And, but generally, as I recall you write about this

Generally, the media decided on one tack Which is, okay, let's deal with reality Trump is president, so we have to change gears and decide What being objective journalist means In this, you know, bizarre quasi-fascist, you know, post-truth reality Which was doubling down on, it's the news, god damn you, it's the truth Democracy dies in dark We're going to be, and the media is saying we're going to be

We're going to be in opposition to Trump More or less explicitly, and we're going to hold him to account from day one Yeah, they said it, or they said it explicitly, it was there was an editorial That was passed around from journalists, every journalist read it It was by Jim Rutenberg in August of 2016, New York Times And it was all about how Trump is making us rethink the norms of objectivity And his main thesis was exactly what you said It was basically that instead of thinking about just truth

We had to think about being true to history's judgment History's judgment, yeah History's judgment, that was the phrase And so, you know, everybody knew what that meant That meant that we had to double down on, you know, being part of the story, basically And you bring up in Hate, Inc. You have another example about how, there's like numerous examples of journalists To like, their inner bullshit meter was sort of telling them something

But they felt sheepish about coming out with it Because of fear of helping Trump Oh, totally And you talk about David Korn, who was one of the big Russiagate guys Like, you went on a TV show with him, then you pressed him on, you know, Points of Fact Or like, about the narrative he was saying And he basically responded to you with like Well, if you want to fact check the opposition, like, you do that

But I have more important things to focus on Yeah, that was really weird I mean, you know, I didn't know David Korn very well I knew him a little bit We had been friendly, I guess But then, you know, he did the first story about the Steel Report So he was, you know, he was a significant player in this whole Russia thing And then we were both invited on a radio show

And during it, I brought up the issue that, you know, some of these stories were going off the rails factually And he said, he said something about the exact phrases that That's looking at the wrong end of the telescope Everything looks small Yeah, yeah He told the jury to look at the facts Then he said that the facts have no meaning So I wrote to him afterwards and I'm like

What telescopes should we be looking at? I mean, we're not about anything except getting things right and wrong If we're not doing that, then what's the point? And he, you know, his basic response was If you want to police the anti-Trump opposition, go for it You know, on the list of things should I have to cover I don't think that's very important And I kind of understand where he's coming from

But the problem is, you know, that's just, I don't think it's a good place to be for the business I mean, that's an argument that I remember Glenn Greenwald making In the middle of the election in 2016 Where he's kind of calling bullshit about a lot of this coverage And is well pointing out that, you know, the entire media class is in the tank for Hillary Which we all knew and only the right, you know, pointed out But it's an election year and we hate them So, you know, we don't want to give any credence to these, you know, chuds and morons and sadists

But it is absolutely correct And there's this sort of unspoken idea that, you know, okay Well, when it comes to something like the pedestal leaks You know, we're, you know, we're going to walk her basically on it And that that is what's Glenn's argument I believe it's your argument as well That actually hurts your side in the long run By stifling any kind of, you know, what the media or the discourse is supposed to be

This open exchange of ideas and analysis and questioning Right, yeah, exactly And it also, it also very pointedly allowed Trump to run against us Like, you know, like he had an accessibility problem with his audience He's a billionaire, he doesn't really interact with normal people But compared to us, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah Like he has the same habit

At least he's on TV and he smiles at you He smiles, you know, he probably watches the same porn Like, you know, like I don't know about that Most of the, most of the, most of the, the lame stream media did After the election was doubled down on exactly what got them into the same mess Exactly, exactly And it's in that, you know, in that atmosphere

If you're not going out and actually, you know Questioning the structures of the society, this economy, this politics And all of these assumptions that we've made about the neoliberal consensus And about foreign policy Then, uh, that is the, you know, the perfect petri dish for Hysterious, like, Russiagate Exactly To metastasize

Yeah, no, that's exactly, and that's exactly what happened I think, you know, we, we got into this place where we just We weren't examining what we were, what, what the point was Exactly And, um, we allowed Trump to caricaturize us And, and, and rather than draw the conclusion That he had successfully portrayed the press as being in the tank for Hillary and, and all that We, we became that even more

And we, we chased the wrong story Uh, another thing I, I really liked in Hate, Inc. Uh, speaking to Virgil's point about the ongoing anxiety breakdown And hysteria of the media post And some of these people like 2016 elections Some of these people were decent writers and we just lost them forever Right

Uh, the thing that you zero in on that's honestly been one of my favorite things to follow Even from afar Is this bizarre, uh, conversion of journalists into like spy talk Oh my god Everyone says things like sig int and compliment without batting an eye And it's just like, wait, where did, where did all this come from? Like, what the fuck, like I know, I know, it's, it was so embarrassing

And, you know, the, the, where, where you saw it the most was in the profiles of, of steel Because most people had, if they had any exposure to him at all They met him a couple of times, but he basically wasn't, he wasn't available to most reporters Like, literally every physical description that you ever saw in a John Le Carré novel Was applied to steel, you know He was, uh, he was a gray man He was unassuming, you know, if you walked into him you wouldn't have seen him, you know Like, it was all this stuff

His wife is having an affair that he just found out about The guy who's also a traitor They even called him, there was some, like a more self, more self-effacing smiley or something like that Like, they, they, they openly compared him to that And it's because, you know, look, a lot of journalists are failed lit majors like me, you know Like, they, they, they wanted to go into the movies or something So they, they have a tendency to try to force character types onto real people And, you know, and Robert Mueller became Elliot Ness

And steel became George Smiley And then the, the spy talk, look It would have been easier to take if, if they had been able to get simple shit, right? Like, the, the New York Time Magazine did a thing that was half the White House And I think they meant it to be half the Kremlin But they put St. Basil's Cathedral instead, right? So it's literally like if you, if you put, if you put the Kremlin and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Like, that's what it looks like to Russians

The St. Basil's Cathedral, the one with the onion domes, is a church You know what I mean? They got that wrong, that's like upside down The, the, the, the Washington, sorry, the New York Times did the same, same graphic basically You know, they kept continually mixing up the Soviet Union and Russia Like, there's hammers and sickles everywhere What was the Donor-Brazil quote where she said like, the communists are in charge of that The communists, they're, you know, they're dominating the debate The communists, the communists haven't been around since 1990

Like, what, you know, what's wrong with you? It's, it's drivel, it's absolute drivel Yeah, I mean, it was nuts, and, and there, you know, they were drawing on the sort of archaic feelings people had about the Soviet Union And, okay, I get that, but like, you know, it makes us look stupid when we do this stuff And this is, and these are political and media elites, people with minimum large audiences And perhaps just the ear of, I'm not sure, the ear of famous people In fact, some of them have actually legislators themselves with an actual fucking job that impacts, you know, hundreds of millions of people Just buying into this, pandering to it, or just otherwise just exposing themselves as just gormless idiots

This is classic difference in Skye That was like, how much of it, like You're all doing disinformat Skye Honest question, this is an honest question How much of that do you think was just like midlife crisis? Like, because I kind of like, when I looked at it, initially you're like, I shut the fuck up But it is like, it is like just a gasp for excitement Or like any type of, it's a fun, it's a totally, it's a good job to be like a political reporter

Like, I will make fun of you, my friends will make fun of you, but that honestly doesn't matter You can see what you're going to tell me live Yeah, it's not going to harm you, you can fucking go on a fly fishing trip that you paid $13,000 for Because you don't know anyone who fly fishes Your son is going to the new school to write a new type of play that's even worse than the original kind Richelman was trout fishing last week, by the way That was great, she cut the trout fishing vacation short to come back because the news was happening Sorry, the news never comes off the line

That was when it was released, right? So like nothing was out yet Like there was nothing for her to say other than, oh, it's here Well, except that we knew there were no indictments, so that was that was But it is like, she stopped her vacation to be like, ah, yeah But it is like, it is like, you're bored because the only thing that like, as I've said The only thing that keeps you going in life is novelty or a sense of meaning And I guess they had no, neither, and this gave them both Look, a lot of people who went into the journalism business, especially, you know, people who are like my age, right?

Who, you know, went to college in the 80s, early 90s You know, it was all the president's men, it was a big thing Everybody wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, you know, like that's, that's why a lot of people went into this business So they're always looking for Watergate, that's why there's so many stories with Gates on the end of them I hate that The second I found out what Watergate was as a kid, I was like, wait, that's just the name of the hotel I was like, even as a kid, I was like, this is so fucking stupid Another example, in terms of, like the spy speak, another idiotic thing that we now have to think about

That's driven journalists crazy is this idea about the Russian bots, that the bots are like manipulating discourse Through Facebook and Twitter, and you can never know if the person responding to you is real Or if it's just, you know, someone wearing a tracksuit, like I am, you know, in a basement, you know, like, typing out Yeah, exactly, just, you know, typing out Yeah, we're really not, we're really not undermining the whole narrative since both I and Will are wearing tracksuits right now But, um Russians are really into bad tracksuits by the way, I can confirm that But you know, their image of the bot farms and the Russian hackers, like, is just, they're just painting with words

A stock photo, and you can see the Shutterstock fucking watermark on, you know, a guy dressed in all black with the shades At a keyboard, and you see the monitor and it says, access granted No, but one of the things you talk about in Hate Ink, because you, that I didn't know about, but could you talk about Was it the, uh, this firm new knowledge? New knowledge, yeah This is a really good, uh, like, little gem This is just unbelievable, like, so the government, there were all these sort of quasi-governmental sort of agencies and think tanks that popped up around Because what happens when you have something like this, is that all these, everybody wants to cash in, so all of a sudden, you know, somebody will put together a think tank Whose job it is to, you know, investigate Russian cyber warfare or whatever the hell it is

So they'll grab somebody from the Pentagon and then they'll ask for a grant and they'll get it But there's this company called New Knowledge, which suddenly became like, you know, they were writing reports for the Senate They were a main source for a lot of news stories for the Washington Post, the New York Times Basically talking about how Russian bots were trying to sow division, which is this phrase that popped up Talk about, like, washing our hands of anything wrong with this country, is this like, this other idea that, like, anything that's bad about America is just being stoked by Russia All our racial divisions are like, they're exploiting that Totally, no, that was in the, well, I can go on forever about that, but anyway, New Knowledge So they did a story, the New York Times did a story, like, at the beginning of last year about how Russian bots were trying to stoke division over the Parkland shooting

And the first person they quoted was this guy, Jonathan Morgan, from New Knowledge, who was, you know, an information warfare specialist who was, you know, held in very high regard by the United States government And then it comes out, like, nine months later, I think it was this, you know, Scott Shane, one of the Times' own reporters finds out that New Knowledge was faking Russian bot activity in the Alabama Senate election Like, they were trying, the whole idea was they were trying to make it look like Russian bots preferred Roy Moore, right? And so they were trying to discredit Roy Moore in the Senate race by releasing news stories that Russian bots were doing something to help Roy Moore Most of these stories of information cyber warfare are just stories about somebody just made a Twitter account and just, like, picked a photo of a guy holding a fish and put in the avatar Exactly And just retweeted fucking Glenn Greenwald I've seen government-created account, like, you can tell when there's, so, you know, the Saudis opened that posting center

Oh, yeah With the orb I've seen what those accounts are like, it's just, like, it'll be like a guy named, like, Great Khalid3844220 And he'll just, like, if anyone says anything about Saudi Arabia, he'll be like, you're a liar, what about Rosa Parks? And no one cares, no one cares That's the thing, these are stories that just prey on the technological ineptitude of old people Right And over again, most of the stories, you just look at them and if you have any kind of familiarity with social media or HTML or anything like that, you see that, it's bullshit

I remember, like, a few years ago, like, every time a reporter would, like, they'd be like, they would post, like, Trump lied and think it was just, they were amazed, they would take a lap around their computer Oh my God, they just, um, yeah And then, like, of course, like, they'd be like, oh, I guess the MAGA people, or should I say, bots, and it would be like, yeah, it would be a guy named, like, Rifle Jim3844220, like, a bunch of numbers And they'd be like, oh, interesting that you have no profile picture, it's like, yeah, that's how a boomer would use the computer Yeah, it would just be like, yeah, it would be like Rifle Jim being like, you're the lying fake news And you'd be like, oh, I'm being targeted by the Russian government That's why the bot thing is a perfect example of how the person is political, because the bot thing not only excuses all of our social ills, racism, gun violence, psychosis, and, you know, our general clannishness and violent distrust of one another That's all just bot-stoking things

Yeah, Russian bots, yeah And personally, when someone tweets that me, that I'm a hack and a shithead, and my hat makes me look like I'm going to have a penis face, I could say that is also a bot So not only is my country good, I am also good, and anyone who says otherwise is a robot from Moscow What I also want to know is, and like, every time I see one of these stories, I always, you know, this is what my head goes to is, you know, let's say, oh yeah, the Russian government is paying track suit guys To make fake American profiles and, you know, at, you know, Resistance Kelly 53 and say, well, what about wanting to broader it? So what, is that illegal? Is that, what's your strategy here? We, like, Russians can't use the internet and say stupid things like Americans can I love the idea of nuking Russia, because somebody replied to like, was rude, because they paid a guy to be rude to fucking Jim Acosta on Twitter Oh my god, if that's how human civilization ended, that would have rolled, I would have been happy with it

Go back and look at when the GRU, when Mueller did his indictment of the GRU guys, that's the Russian Intelligence Agency And these are the people who supposedly, you know, were involved with the, with, you know, this whole operation, that and the Internet Research Agency People went on TV and said, we are at war with Russia This was an act of war, like, no, they fucking tweeted at us, you know What's wrong with you? I know that, that's never, I love how people, whenever they talk about the indictments that Mueller, or the Mueller investigation led to A big chunk of them are these GRU guys, that's never gonna fucking be a trial, ever Because they're not gonna fucking get extradited

I just wish they would, because I would love to see that trial, where they've got a big blown up thing, and they're like, now Mr. Grigorovich here It says, this right here, where it says that you're replying, you're replying to Jim Acosta with, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is dummy thick That's fair, sir, were you responsible for this tweet, Sarah? I love the idea, I love, yeah If you're like the GRU guy who has to, they're like, alright, your job, your job is that you, uh, you fucking, you reply to the Scott Dworkin guy So he's fake news, funders You have to be like, god damn it, like, I, oh my friends are doing so much cool shit They're out there killing oligarchs in the UK, I'm the fucking posting guy

I'm the guy who replies to Chris Hayes, this fucking sucks, I'm gonna go back to school Yeah, it's the end of Marigold on 34th Street, and this guy's bringing sack after sack of printouts of Jake Tapper's mentions You're rotting a police chief in Donbass right now You have to, you have to want to kill yourself if you're like a Russian paid reply guy You asked for the transfer to Kyrgyzstan, like that moment, like, you know, send me back to the worst fucking hole in, yeah RZM-17 or whatever it is I should have taken that job drinking until I passed out every day in my dad's backyard In the family business, we're unsure how it makes money, where we drive an ATV into a brick wall every day

So that's hysteria, it's, you know, something that we've said on the show is that Russian Gate is the Liberals' QAnon And it's, here's the, and we just watched the prophecy fail, and everyone doubling down on it They're going to, they demand the report, of course they should publish the report and they will publish the report And look, let's be clear, there'll be shit in it Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, that'll be more grist for us to, you know, talk about and pick over But the, you know, I assume the base conclusions that Andy Barley down in the memo are true, and that's the thing we have to reckon with The report will have redactions, and they're going to demand the unredacted report just like the QAnon people demanded the unredacted report And what makes this actually a perfect one to one is that for months now, Q has said, actually the Mueller investigation is investigating the

Pedo crimes of fucking John Podesta and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and that's going to lead to them all being sent to Guantanamo So we will be in a situation where both the Q people and the resistance people will be demanding the unredacted, the same unredacted report Look, look, alright, I'm a centrist, I'm a big fan of grant bargaining, we execute Hillary and Trump at Guantanamo Bay and replace them with holograms That would be great if it just turned out, yeah, these are all, these have all been actors since like early 2017 Everyone is a hologram created by their execution I'd take that, I definitely would, yeah So, just wrapping up, at the end of the day, this is an honest question, at this point, what can one honestly say about Donald Trump's ties to Russia if anything at all? That can be fairly said about his relationship with either Russians or the Russian government, which are two very different things

I think he's Russia curious, right? I think that's pretty clear There is a land of contrast Yeah, I mean, you know, there were some meetings there, look, I had the misfortune incidentally to actually run into some of the same people The woman he had the meeting with at the Trump Tower, I actually know who those people are, it's a company called Previzan, they're involved in this Anyway, the point is, they did have an interest, and there is some political synergy between Donald Trump and some of the things that the Russians are into Like, Trump has talked from the beginning of his campaign, and I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with Russia But he talked about how NATO was kind of a crappy deal for America, like, you know, it was invented to oppose the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore The member countries don't pay their bills, all that stuff is true, you know, he started talking about that

There are some other things where he, you know, his policies were sort of in line with Obama's on Syria Like, you know, his calculation was the lesser evil is let's join up with Putin and fight ISIS So I think, you know, Trump is the kind of person who probably admires Putin because Putin is the kind of person that Trump wishes he was, like a self-made criminal tough guy, you know what I mean? As opposed to having it handed to him by his daddy, like, Putin is the real thing, Putin is a bad motherfucker, you know what I mean? And I think he does have a natural affinity for him But, you know, that's not against the law and he openly ran against it, he openly ran on this, that's the thing that I think people are point out He probably has a bunch of laundered money that they put through all of his real estate holdings because that's all he's useful for is like a pass-through for other, you know, money that can't be opened And of course that describes the entire New York real estate business industry

That's one of the big reasons for us to get this because you have to particularize it because if you generalize it, then the entire ruling class is just as crooked as him and that can't be the case That's a huge thing, they actually started opening the door on like Saudi money, UAE money, like Chinese money, like, you know, all of their interference, like everybody And you want to talk about fucking bots and shit, Israel? Right, yes, of course They had a lot, they had a huge investment in getting Democrats out of there and reversing the Iran deal and they have a fucking Hasbar network They have those, they have those posting centers just like the Saudis do and like Russia does They have some, they have some really advanced models in their posting center The guy who said that St. Palestine is like dead naming a transfer

That's so good That guy is like the highest, that's T-1000, that fucking guy No, he's that tier one posting operator for sure Yeah, the Russian, the Russian guys are just like, you're gay, Mitch McConnell rocks And it's like, okay, buddy However, as you pointed out Felix though, the Russian, the Russian posters do have the ability to warg into animals So that's, that's, that's pretty Or the Russians do have warging powers

They hire two guys from Ghana to do a YouTube channel saying that Hillary's a witch doctor It gets like a thousand fucking views But that thing about like Trump admiring Putin, that was a thing on Teacot Like who are all dead now, rest in peace They all died of natural causes in 2014 But they, like the people who were like the Benghazi people who unified on Twitter Their thing would be like post a side-by-side of, yeah, like look at Barack Obama's gay bicycle Next to Putin's awesome horse

Where he's shirtless Like you remember those would be like, this is what a real leader looks like And that wasn't, they didn't have any opinion on like Nate or anything either They're just like, this guy is strong I bet he could, it's the same mindset as being like, oh, what if Ozzy Osbourne beat up Justin Bieber Being a gay girl Like it's the same thing There's a geopolitical thing going on there

And look, there's also a simpatic with just their, look, I was there when Putin came to power One of the reasons he was popular is because he opposed like neoliberal politics Like, you know, that we were trying to impose on Russia through Yeltsin And, you know And also being very intensely nationalistic as well Exactly, he was a complete, the whole idea was Instead of stealing all the money and sending it to France, right We're gonna steal all the money and keep it here, right

And that was basically his platform and he became hugely popular for that And it was very much directed at the kind of western neoliberal consensus Like, and his argument was basically these people came into our country for 10 years They told us what to do Everything got screwed up because of it We had, you know, our economy's a mess And now we're gonna run our own thing And look, it was a very similar argument to what Trump made when he ran

So there's that whole thing too, which is definitely a factor What has been the most galling about, you know, all the Russia case stuff And all the pandering, especially from members of Congress From guys like, what's an Eric Swalwell? He's one of those big guys, right Has been these crass appeals to patriotism And I saw one of them, the pontificate the other day that, you know If the Russians approached me, the foreign government approached me and said

I have information about your opponent I do the right thing and call the FBI And it's like, if the Russians approached me with information about another podcast I wouldn't call the FBI I don't care And that's what I think about all of this Because even if their greatest fantasy is true And Trump is the Manchurian candidate and Lyndon LaRouche was right

And that the Russians have taken over the government Any day now the American flag is going to go down And a hammer and sickle is going to go up They're going to blow up Mount Rushmore and put up, you know Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev and all these guys And then, you know, there's going to be tanks and missiles, you know Going down your city street Right, instead of underdog at Thanksgiving Day Parade

And then, you know, suddenly your boss is speaking Russian I don't care That's owned is my answer That's just chickens coming home to roost If the Russians contacted me with information I would just treat it like any other telemarketing call Honestly, I would just be like Who cares, man?

I thought this was my food Yeah, I was going to say You got the three minutes until my ramen's ready But I can't The people who have, you know, they've drunk the Kool-Aid They've got nuts I can't blame them, you know Just on a human level if we're talking about it as a pathology

Because the past few years have been genuinely terrifying And have proven to all of us our powerless Our utter powerlessness as individuals And you're watching the mainstream of racism And the increasing brutality of our society The way we're treating refugees, so on and so forth It is enough to break the brain of any sensible empathetic human being And again, another parallel with QAnon

Is that, you know, the Russiagate stuff Gave you a media consumer with someone watching MSNBC Somebody who's posting on the resistance hashtags It gave you the illusion of control The illusion of interactivity Because you get to play a part in this spy novel now You get to say things like Sigan And you get to put together the clues

And if you put together all the clues You would have Carmen Sandiego Exactly, which is the exact same appeal as QAnon It's this gigantic ARG For people who have yet to recognize their utter powerlessness The 9-11 truth was similar in that way too I mean, I think a lot of people after 9-11 You wrote a great article on 9-11 conspiracy theories as well

Yeah, I think people were genuinely freaked out And the notion that a couple, like a relatively disorganized group of people Could, you know, actually pull this off Was too horrifying to people It was actually more of a relief To imagine that George Bush had done it You know what I mean? I want to apologize to our listeners

I didn't know we would have a left gatekeeper on the show Google Building 7 Google Tower 7 everybody Alright, I think we should leave it there But I just want to say, Matt Taibbi, once again, thank you so much for joining us Thank you, Virgil, Felix Hate Ink, we'll have a link to it Taibbi.substack.com

And again, I highly recommend you subscribe Thanks Till next time everybody Cheers Cheers S Amber S Amber You