Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/7/22 Matt Taibbi on the State of Journalism Today

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Scott talks with journalist Matt Taibbi about a number of articles and videos posted recently at his substack publication TK News. First, they talk about the misleading journalism behind stories of Russia granting whistleblower Edward Snowden citizenship. They also talk about the abundance of former intelligence officials and agents who have taken jobs at major media outlets and the quiet tyranny of a de-ranking approach to censorship.  Discussed on the show: “The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell” (TK News) “Snowden Didn't Flee to Russia: Obama Trapped Him There” (Stark Realities) “The News is Just Guesswork Now” (TK News) Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi “The Election Was Hacked” Video TK News “The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It's Out of Control Now” (TK News) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: TK News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scott Horton.org, but I got to generate revenue, you know. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism.

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All right, so you guys, on the line, I've got Matt Taiibi, of course, from Substack, Taiibi.substack.com where he's got a lot of great things. We're starting here with Edward Snowden and the Washington Post today. Welcome back to the show, Matt.

How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great, Scott. How are you doing? I'm doing really good. You write good stuff. I especially appreciate you sticking up for Ed Snowden here. But I got to tell you, if I didn't know who Ed Snowden was, and I read the Washington Post about him, I might think all kinds of stuff that ain't right. Yeah, I think that's by design, right? Yeah, but I mean, this one is special. You know, people bring up Orwell all the time. Of course, Winston Smith's job was rewriting the news, but you really mean it when you bring up George Orwell and the 1984 reference to,

to this Washington Post story in the way that they treated the granting of citizenship by Vladimir Putin to Edward Snowden last week. So I guess, first of all, give us a little bit of background on what Putin's doing there and what choice Snowden had in the matter. And then maybe we'll do this Winston Smith stuff. You know, I, so Edward Snowden accepted Russian citizenship. It's obviously no secret that he lives there. If I remember correctly, the reason that he did this has to do with the fact that he has a Russian wife, and there would be complications for his children if he didn't accept the citizenship. Look, it's no secret that he lives in Russia, I think, at this point.

How he got there is a story that people are beginning to forget, which is one of the things that I was trying to. to write about in the piece. But there's a legend that is beginning to seep into coverage of the Snowden story that if he didn't, you know, sort of release the information about America's surveillance programs at Russia's behest, it certainly has, you know, a malodorous feel to it that he ended up in Russia after doing so. And so that story, when that's a story, when that story came out it was it was present essentially presented as edward snowden leaker accepts russian citizenship yeah well i mean and the whole thing really was and this is amazing that they got away with this to the degree that they did he was trying to get i guess to ecuador but certainly you know

maybe to cuba to latin america somewhere that's what everybody thought i think he had indicated that and then he just had a layover in Russia. Too bad he didn't take a different flight, but somebody had the bright idea in the Obama government that, hey, let's strip him of his passport right now. Then he'll be stranded in Russia. And I guess they must have calculated like the damage from his leak was done,

although we know that it's not like everything that he gave to Greenwald and the Washington Post made it online, you know, and still he had enough in his head that you would think it would be a real risk, a security risk to leave him in Russia where he could be debriefed by their intelligence services, but they decided

that it would be preferable to take that risk as long as they could make him take the public relations hit of having the word Russia next to his name for the rest of his life and have him not able to defend himself except from

Moscow and in a way that makes him a traitor, even though what he did wasn't treason. He didn't just give this stuff to Greenwald, who ain't you know who's an american citizen and a lawyer and all these things and a journalist anyway but he gave him to the washington post to barton gelman and so um for them to get away with smearing him as a russian traitor in that way when they're the ones who left him stranded there and our literal president now was vice president then when they did it is pretty amazing that that's

never part of the narrative you know it just makes him look so bad that that's where he lives now He's got nowhere else to go, I guess. Well, and this is one of the things that's so amazing, I think, about both the story of Snowden and Julian Assange. And if you go back and look, you won't have a tough time finding pictures of celebrities from the news business with their arms around each other, accepting awards for their roles in either disclosing the Snowden material or... some of the Assange stories, you know, if you remember, most of the major news organizations in the West were in one way or another partners with one or both of those guys. And you can go back and find these, you know, self-congratulatory tales with headlines like, you know, Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for NSA spying

revelations. But that's all been kind of wiped clean. And what's amazing about this Snowden story is they not only touched up history in the article itself, but they did it on second thought in the day of publication. Like they changed the headline, they changed some other facts in ways that in the past would have been considered probably improper unless you left a notation, which they no longer do. Yeah. And by the way, I want to recommend people this Brian McGlinchie article at his substack, stark, stark realities.substack.com. It's called Snowden didn't flee to Russia. Obama trapped him there. And it is absolutely factual and great journalist Brian McGlensy there. I want to make sure to mention that. Yeah, absolutely. And now, so you talk about these NSA revelations. I mean, who knows what I think about what people think. But I've, Had sort of thought that Edward J. Epstein, this lunatic at the Wall Street Journal, said that Edward Snowden is a traitor for Russia and China, and he is your enemy and he hates you, and that's why he gave all this stuff to Bart & Gellman, and that everybody thought that that was stupid, and that only he believed that, and it's like 35, you know, people who took those columns seriously, because

everybody knew on the face of it was obviously the truth that this guy just thought the American people needed to know this stuff. And so he gave it to the Post and the Greenwald so that one, he thought this guy will really be thorough, but he thought, this guy's really legitimate and we'll put a real stamp of legitimate journalism on this by making it a Washington Post project, which it was. And then, you know, I know you're not the world's greatest expert on this, but if you could just tell us off top of your head what you remember, remember about some of those revelations what we found out i mean it's true isn't it that the courts ruled that the programs that he exposed were illegal yeah there were a couple of different

court cases there were there were federal court cases um that both ruled that the uh that the nsa's programs um exceeded the reach of what uh they had been allowed to do under even and the Patriot Act. And so the argument that the intelligence services have always made has been that, well, we're only doing incidental data collection. We're only collecting telephone numbers. We're not actively listening to anything.

This is just metadata. But we've subsequently found out that they have misused this data, that they occasionally reach of the cookie jar and maybe even more than occasionally they do that um so the the notion that they were sort of mass collecting um the the phone records of everybody in the country uh but not looking and you know at any individual information not not trying to detect any patterns in anyone any individual's behavior we were supposed to be reassured by that but they they you know they

never asked for permission from Congress to do any of this. And they rebuffed overtures from oversight committees when they started asking questions about it. And so by the way, now, some of the biggest stories, I mean, Greenwald and his team did a great job. But Barton Gilman and his guys at the Washington Post also did a great job, including publishing the black budget for the first time in history. And they didn't say, oh, gee, we shouldn't publish that. They published it. like exactly what they should have done. And now, so that's the transition to this insane article, very well-written piece by you, but it's just the reality you're describing about the way that the Post covers Snowden and his revelations now. You'd think that Barton Gilman had worked for the

New York Times or for the Dallas Morning News or was the San Jose Mercury News. That's where Gary Webb was from. Yeah, you'd have thought that he was from there for the way that the Post treats the article now. It was amazing to watch this in real time. It's really funny for me because when I first saw the story, I saw the original headline to the story. And the story was written by a relatively new reporter named Mary Aleutjana. And this is one of the things that happens in journalism. People don't realize this, but it makes sense when you think about it. Well, journalists get older and they get replaced by younger people who don't necessarily

remember the history of even their own organizations, the ones they worked for. And so the original piece was written by a newer reporter, and it depicted Snowden in a certain light. It had a headline that was extremely suggestive. It said, Putin grants citizenship to Edward Snowden, who disclosed U.S. surveillance. Now, if you're just reading that for the first time, that just sounds like somebody who's leaking something important. And the lead to the story read, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship on Monday to Edward Snowden, a former security consultant who leaked information about top secret U.S. surveillance programs

and is still wanted on espionage charges. So there's nothing in there that gives you any kind of indication that this was like a whistleblowing activity. They later altered the story because, as it happens, there are still some people at the post who were involved with the original collaboration with Snowden, and they ended up co-bylined on the piece, and they changed some key words, but because the wayback machine doesn't work the way it used to, it was very hard to find the original version of, of this article and you know i said that's kind of where we're at right now we we don't always know when they're making changes and sometimes the changes are significant yeah well and in this case too they i think you say made some changes that kind of soften their take then they kind of took them back added some more you know harder quotes and let's make sure and let clapper or whoever revise our previous take when we were trying to take it back a minute ago this kind of

craziness all afternoon this went on kind of thing is that right yeah absolutely and again not to be too um i don't know moralistic about it but once upon a time if you were to make a substantive change to a news article um online you would never think to do that and and not put a little asterisk at the bottom of the story saying something like a previous version of the story said X. Right. Because it was considered not just ethically questionable to make changes and not acknowledge them, but it's also disorienting for the reader because, you know, they may see something and then go back and read it a second time and think, wow, was that crazy? Did it read some other way at first? Which is what happened to me. I mean, I read that

first headline that used the word disclosed, and when I went back to look at it the second time, it was now replaced by exposed. So Snowden exposed U.S. surveillance, and I thought, wow, maybe I imagined that. They didn't say that. But they did that. They eliminated a quote from somebody saying that Snowden had done an immense public service by exposing mass surveillance. So they put that in and took that out. And all of this happens, you know, without kind of letting you know what the, what, what, what how the history of all those tracks, which again, it's just very disorienting for readers. Yeah. And then so did, uh, I hate to even ask, but did Bart and Galman have anything to say about this on Twitter or whatever out there and.

I didn't see anything. Like, hey, that was my work that I did, guys. Yeah, I didn't see anything that Barton said. Obviously, Glenn said something, you know, because Glenn doesn't let stuff like this go without comment. But this is another weird element to the kind of modern press environment, which is that a lot of the reporters who were gung-ho and taking on the intelligence services, you know, even six or seven years ago, they've done a complete 180. And they're either being quiet or they're, or they've adopted a new direction in their careers. I don't necessarily want to name names, but there's, there's a lot of that going on in the business. And so, yeah, they're just, there weren't a lot of people, there was not a large quantity of people who pointing this out.

Let's just put it that way. Yeah. Well, and speaking of which, you're really way out ahead of the pack in identifying and really listing by name and memorizing them all. of all of these different people from the FBI and the CIA who rule especially TV media right now. Can you talk a little bit about that? And this is all mostly with the advent of the Russiagate hoax in 2016, right? Or nah, not really, but that's when it really like shifted into fifth gear kind of deal. Yeah, I mean, it's been going on for a while.

I think you could say that this phenomenon, I think there was even a story about it in the New York Times, I think in 2010, about the proliferation of former intelligence officers in media. Now, the interesting thing about this is that the way the military and intelligence people used to influence the news was that they would dominate the guest list. So they would always be in the green room. If you remember back in 2002, 2003, 2004, there were these amazing years where almost everybody you saw on television was a current or former military official. uh you might remember a couple of press watchdogs doing ridiculous counts something you know to the effect of you know for every 250 ex-military or current or ex-military voices uh who were interviewed on tv there might be one piece activists somewhere in there right um and that used to be how then it was larry sanders secretary or b j honeycutt or right where it was like look you guys are great and

everything but we really need somebody with a little more weight to stand in that place you know introducing alan combs for the other side of the story yeah yeah exactly it wasn't it wasn't like uh it wasn't john lennon on there let's put it that way right it was it was it was somebody who is uh appropriately slavish to the to the to the to the pentagon and deferential um to most of their assumptions but you know they might disagree for instance that uh you know we need to invade now as opposed to six months later after inspections took place. That was the idea of that was what you would get for dissent. What's happened, however, in the meantime is that we've had this bizarre process where actual

reporters are being replaced by former intelligence officials. So no longer are sort of on-air talents or on-air personalities and media interviewing these people, they actually are these people now. And whether it's somebody like John Brennan or James Clapper or Michael Hayden or Frank Figgily U.C., you know, from the FBI, who has some kind of arrangement as a paid contributor arrangement. where they show up, you know, 20 times a year or whatever it is. It could also be somebody who's actually like a newsreader who comes from that world or who's actually like on staff and now operates in that capacity,

which is just a new phenomenon in our business. We used to try to keep a pretty safe distance from the intelligence world. and now, you know, they're making, there's more of them on staff than there are actual reporters in some places, which is just freaky. Hey, man, you guys should all sign up for the Libertarian Institute's email list. Will Porter's been putting together this great newsletter every week. And all you got to do is go to the bottom of the page at libertarian institute.org and sign up there. It's real dang good.

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but the team at expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent. and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone

from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. Yeah, now, so this gets right into a theme of your new piece from today. The news is just guesswork now, which is an important story that you're talking about. in the background that I'd be happy for you to get into if you feel like it, but essentially talking about just the absolute blurring of the line and the point of view between the New York Times writers and the intelligence community on the case of the assassination of Darya,

Dugina. And so, and it's just the language that they use the whole time. You give examples of maybe the way this would have been written in a previous era and how, instead it's published just straight from the point of view of the CIA kind of thing yeah so once upon that like just to take an example here's a passage from from this piece that came out today which which was called let me see if I can find it the well we'll pun the title later anyway the story in the New York Times was about essentially It's quoting American officials saying that Ukraine was responsible for the assassination,

the car bomb assassination of the nationalist Darya Dugina. And so here's a passage from that piece. It reads, The United States has tried carefully to avoid unnecessary escalation with Moscow throughout the conflict, in part by telling Kiev not to use American equipment or intelligence to conduct attacks inside of Russia. Now, that's reporting, right? Like, you're giving the reader new information.

Somebody is telling the New York Times that the United States has told Kiev not to use American equipment or intelligence to conduct attacks inside of Russia. So normally, as a reporter, you'd want some kind of attribution there. It would say something like, according to U.S. officials, or according to SARS is familiar with the matter, even if you want to be really vague about. it, you know, the U.S. has told Kiev not to use American equipment. Instead, they just use the kind of general, sort of neutral narrative voice of the New York Times, which is the wet dream of every anonymous source in the world. They don't want to be quoted as saying anything. They want the reader to think this information is coming from an independent news source. And so this is something that has just happened more and more in the news business.

It's probably not noticeable to people who don't work in journalism, but it's almost like a, you know, the formalization of that meme where you used to see ads that were depicted as, that made to look like news articles, except now it's happening within news articles, right? you're having passages that are actually, you know, attributed to somebody, but the Times is using its own voice, almost like a favor, which is really creepy. Now, so I'm behind on this story and how it was covered when it first happened. Did the Post and the Times seem to think the Ukrainians were behind it at first, or they blamed it on, you know, competitive forces inside Russia, this kind of narrative, or what,

do you know? So they never came out and really said it. there were there was some speculation that it was a false flag attack you know um and you know there there was never any definitive um tale about who had done it there's this character on the internet named uh ilia paniamarov who's a um who's a ukrainian he has a twitter account that kind of went from zero to a gazillion after the invasion and he's he's close to this resistance group, this Ukrainian resistance group that, I'm trying to remember what the name of it is, it's the National Republican Army. And Ponamara have claimed responsibility for them at the time.

But, you know, they never really got into it and the story just sort of went away, which is what makes this new story unusual. It's like, why would the U.S. want to bring this up? Why would they want to remind everybody that this, A, that this happened, and that B, that Ukraine did it, it's just very confusing. Yeah, especially in the New York Times, as you put it in here somewhere to, this mess of reporters that they handed it to. They wanted to make a major story out of this. And then it's not really clear that it's directed toward truly admonishing the Ukrainian leadership. They could have just done that with a phone call. so you highlight where there's one paragraph where maybe this is the real hidden meaning of the article is yeah by the way we can reach out and touch you inside moscow and you know it and that that was really the point of the whole article that they buried in there you know yeah there's just some there's this uh amazing language right because they uh throughout the piece that they reiterate over and over again that the united states uh took no

part in this, that they would have been opposed to it had they known about it ahead of time, that they had admonished Ukrainian leadership for doing it, that they didn't know which parts of the Ukrainian government were responsible. And then there's this paragraph for it says, the killing of Ms. Dugina, however, would be one of the boldest operations to date, showing Ukraine can get very close to prominent Russians. So this is like straight out of Godfather Part 2, you know that scene where, you know, Michael Corleone says, if there's one thing that history teaches us is that anybody can be assassinated, I mean, that might be the real message of the piece.

It's just not clear. And what's odd about it is that journalists used to try to help us a little bit understand what the messages of a leak is supposed to be. Instead, they just kind of put this out there and we're not really meant to know what to make of it. Yeah. Hey, I wish I had said at your intro here that you wrote this brilliant book. hate ink which has what i don't know eight or ten great chapters on all these great angles on media understanding and dissection and criticism here about all these great topics and now so one of things that's going on a couple things going on at the same time here is uh in the last

week here is you guys beef with youtube over a video that you made about election controversies And this is huge by itself, but it's also indicative of a huge problem about discourse on something as important as YouTube, which, you know, it has the traffic because it sort of promises to be open access to everyone. And then, boy, it sure ain't. And then we also have another form of censorship in the form of Katie Halper's suppression and firing from the hill. and I'm going to interview her next week so we don't have to spend too much time on that but at least I'd like you to give us a brief real quick so people understand what happened with that

and what they can expect to hear from her there. Sure, yeah, Katie's situation is she had an arrangement to do fill in hosting of the Hills Rising show and she did what they call a radar It's a direct-to-camera monologue essay. It was pretty involved. It's like a 12-minute thing.

And she had done it on Israel and Palestine. She was critical of Israeli policy. She described it as apartheid. And she went through a number of things that people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu said. And she got fired basically for doing that editorial. And not only did you get fired, they basically told her that it was because of the topic, which is unusual. Like, there are people who get fired for going into the wrong, reaching into the wrong areas, but usually they don't just come out and tell you that that's the reason. Yeah.

I mean, she didn't say the wrong word or any kind of thing. She says right up front, of course, that she is a progressive American Jew and has a critical take on. this for obvious factual and moral reasons and the whole thing is straight from the heart and perfect and I guess was that you or somebody's organization went ahead and reposted the video so people can find that right yeah it wasn't me some somebody I think it's breakthrough I can't remember who did it but yeah I think that sounds right is that what it's called breakthrough media yeah I think that that's what it is but they they put it up there and um yeah we blogged it at the institute too if people want to look at the blog there you'll find it yeah and you can find

that she you know she's she's got her own show too and she's been talking about it and the the intercept covered it and as did a couple of other outlets but you know it wasn't like it was everywhere you know that's another thing about about this environment is that when people get censored now or if you know there's some kind of a free speech issue once upon a time you could expect it to kick up some dust in the business and that's not always the case anymore yeah like well for example did she get a story in the new york times or washington post about her no of course not no no and

yeah um and look i mean you're right because you know she's high profile enough i mean you guys are not you know you guys are definitely like upper middle rank you know famous journalist not in you know in like social class i mean like obviously you're super famous and accomplished but um you know i mean you you would think it would get you would think it would get at least a notice from somebody right yeah yeah i would think that i absolutely do think that she deserves that that would have been written up you know whatever not just business insider or whatever but like that no that should have got a column in the or uh you know a little news brief or something in the wall street journal too you know what i mean that's a big deal

Yeah, and the issue is certainly controversial. You know, there was, there's been kind of an unofficial omerta about that subject and the business going back, you know, probably my whole lifetime. I actually told you this story. I don't think I've ever said it publicly, but when I was maybe 17, a pretty experienced TV journalist. My father, I knew some people in the business because my father was a TV reporter.

Anyway, when I was starting to go into journalism myself, you kind of put an arm around my shoulder, this guy, and said, well, if you're going to be a journalist, he needs you to know two things. And he said, one is when you're really, really drunk before you go to bed at night, drink a liter of water. And I said, okay, I'll remember that. And he goes, the other thing is never talk about Israel or Palestine, is that you do those two things and you'll have a successful career. So it's kind of one of those things. Everybody's always sort of known that it's a little bit dicey to go there. But you certainly shouldn't get fired for, you know, for doing an editorial. I mean, that's what the media is for.

She didn't, she wasn't out of bounds. She didn't do anything obscene. She argued her point. Yeah. And in fact, the subject, I'm sorry if I spaced out and you said this, the subject that touched it off was a sitting congresswoman had said something controversial. And then so Katie was saying, actually, you know what? There's something to that that you ought to have to hear. I mean, this is why they wrote the First Amendment in the first place, you know, right there. Yeah. And to be honest, I haven't talked to Katie about this. I didn't ask her, but I imagine that she might. not have done her monologue had not CNN gone out of its way to run a story quoting the end defamation league calling Rashida Talib who is the congressman and he's semi for saying that so you do get press attention if you go there but it's usually in

the form of condemnation if that hadn't happened I'm sure that Katie does that editorial And then we don't have this mess, but we do. Yeah, no, so that is important, yes, because I sort of oversimplified there. It wasn't just that, you know, the congresswoman had said something and there was some criticism. It was this pretty serious hit job by Jake Tapper there that Katie was directly responding to. Right. And then, of course, he would never, he would never be man enough to just have her on the show then and be like, all right, then let's hear it from you. Right.

Right. And this is the thing that really drives me nuts about, you know, quote unquote, liberal or blue state media, you know, because I used to appear on those channels all the time. And I think they used to be at least decent about trying to put the other point of view on if they disagreed with it. I mean, they weren't great, but they at least did it. Now it's like a non-starter. You just, you will never see the other point of view, right? So if it's, you know, throughout the Russia business or somebody saying that, you know, Bernie Sanders, that Putin's trying to help Bernie Sanders win the election or you're just not going to see that other person on the other side. And that that's just, I think, cowardly. And that's a feature of modern media that is, that is, I think, really unattractive. And now, so look, this might sound trivial, but I don't think so. Tell us the story about this YouTube suppression of your partner. I'm sorry, what's his name, Matt? Matt Orphalia, yeah.

Uh-huh. He does these nice montages, and this one is about the double standard of who's a lot to complain about the legitimacy of which elections, and it's just standard, great, you know, sort of tongue-in-cheek, but just reporting there's nothing kooky about, there's nothing partisan about it he's not really taking one side or the other he's just showing a double standard coming from one group of people and he got jerned for it and the thing is about it right is uh i mean you and matt you're gonna be okay but people get jerned off of youtube all day long over nothing and it ain't fair man the way people are treated no and

you so what so what happened is you know he made he made a video And as you point out, Matt's, he's very clever. What he does is he makes these montages of things that people said. So in this case, he made a montage of people saying that the election of Donald Trump was illegitimate or that the election was stolen or that the election had been hacked. The point being that this is the kind of thing that you can get, you know, have your. content moderated for now if you say it in the other direction, if you say the 2020 election was illegitimate, if you say Joe Biden is not our real president, if you say the 2020 vote was sabotaged or whatever it is, you'll be taken off social media pretty quickly. And all

Matt was trying to say is, look, we've been over this ground before and they're pretty selective about when they decide to enforce those rules. They have very clear rules that you cannot impugn the integrity of what they say. The terminology they use is any past U.S. election, but they allow it. So he puts this montage together of people saying this, and they demonetize that video. There are actually two of them. They demonetize them both. One of them they restored after I bitched about it, but the other one they have not yet.

So, and as you say, he wasn't inventing any of this stuff. He was just taking clips of people saying things on the news and stringing them together. But the context was apparently offensive. So they digged them for it. Well, and look a few more like that and you're done, right? You kicked off of YouTube forever or something. Yeah, there's that. You can get strikes.

Also, being demonetized, having anything demonetized drives your traffic down generally. And so even if you survive financially when they do it, what ends up happening is you start thinking about where's the line and you stay way, way, way short of it because you don't want to take the risk of getting a strike, getting kicked off the channel, you know, having your traffic go down even more because this is your livelihood right and so that's how you get this this monolithic content on youtube now they mean they know what they're doing they're very good at it unfortunately yeah hey you guys i quit twitter again had to to get the new book written but i'm still lurking around a bit at my reddit group page r slash scott horton show so you can still find me there but there's a catch

the reddick group is members only just donate five dollars per month with paypal patreon or subscribe star and we'll see you there. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydrocanabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the hempspot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally. Because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order.

And free shipping on any order over $100. legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest, in your state. The Hempspot.com. Spell V. THC. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years. It's called the war state.

I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided. to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. The War State by Mike Swanson. Now, I troll through Reddit sometimes and the level of unanimity that whatever the government is saying

at any given time is totally right and everybody else is stupid. It's just amazing to see, like, the way that kind of consensus is enforced just through the algorithms and through the up votes and down votes about what we all agree. I remember seeing a thread on there

about how you would have to be just an absolute stupid idiot and lunatic to believe that Hunter Biden would have left his laptop at some repair shop and that somehow there it got into the hands of the republic let me get this straight and then that's got a million upboats and anyone's saying are you kidding me you think what the Russians planted it instead makes more sense what that doesn't even exist in the in the conversation right it's downvoted to oblivion and the consensus reigns completely false completely wrong yeah and i wonder how many of those million people who are upvoting are you know either current or like me former drug abusers and know absolutely for sure

that it's totally possible to leave a laptop anywhere you know let alone at a repair shop uh if you're if you're doing a lot of drugs like hunter of hunter biden was but yeah no it's it's that stuff is crazy. I know the writer Walter Kern, who I do a podcast with, he describes social media now as a lathe. It's just where you go on there and it's like a machine for shaving your opinion in a desired shape. It's so far from being anything like a, you know, a freewheeling discussion. It's really unfortunate. Yeah, you know, I was having to talk with Eric Garris from antireware.com yesterday or the day before about how things used to be compared to the big change and it was the Trotskyites, the world socialist website who did the best journalism on this. I believe you've

written about what they wrote about this before in the past met about how it was, you know, with the advent of the Russiagate hoax that they just absolutely screwed anti-war.com and then also a bunch of left-wing sites, truth dig and truth out and I guess common dreams. And I'm not sure, a lot of very legit, progressive, but very good on war-type sites. And essentially, they were making an example out of us because they were also, if I essentially remember the way it went, which I think I do, they had really gone after the right first and the Trump supporters and the popular, you know, kind of alt-right and alt-light leaders and all this during that time.

and then they wanted to prove to the Republicans that they were being fair. So then they went after all of us, too, even though, you know, we're not leftists. We're libertarians, but whatever. And then we went on the chopping block, and they just absolutely, I mean, when Google turns the screw on your algorithm,

I mean, there goes everything. I mean, you think about the tens of thousands of articles we have in anti-war.com with the SEO keyword, whatever, for whatever you're looking for on any foreign policy topic, over the last 25, 30 years. It's just absolutely incomparable. And we should be on the front page of everything

all the time when people are searching for that stuff. And they've just pushed us way, way, way down. And only for telling the truth and doing the right thing. They don't have us on anything where we crossed a line or whatever line of any legitimacy. Yeah. And it's very frustrating because I think the public doesn't notice that kind of content moderation.

They know, sometimes notice when somebody is removed from the internet, they sometimes notice when, you know, an individual site has been blocked or when certain kinds of words are prohibited. But the deranking process where, you know, now if you go searching for something, it might be 60 or 70 entries before you get to the anti-war.com site that, you know, you know uses that exact your exact search terms in the headline um you know that that's a new phenomenon i mean i when the world socialist website did their research about all the people who's um whose traffic had gone down after google made this change through a thing they called project owl uh where they decided to um enhance something they called authority and i called them up I called Google up and said, well, what does that mean? How exactly did you tweak the algorithm?

And the comparison they gave to me was, well, in the old days, if you search for baseball, you might have gotten your local little league, and now you're going to get MLB.com. And so what happens is if you search for Trotsky, for instance, you will not get the world's leading Trotskyite organization, right? the world socialist website, you'll get like a New York Times article about Trotsky. Or if you search anti-war, as you, I'm sure I've noticed, it's not your site that comes up, right? It's going to be somebody else writing about the anti-war movement in a way that's probably not all that positive. Yeah, the anti-war movement in Russia is making great strides. Let's all get behind them. Exactly, exactly.

Which, too-shay, that's fine, but still, not at our expense. Yeah, and I think that's just messing with reality when you do that. You know, you're playing with people's perceptions of what's out there because you're driving the real results of things artificially down. It's like having a media regulator, you know, who decides what gets seen and what doesn't. And we've never had a media regulator in this country of that sort, precisely. for that reason. Like, we didn't want to give the government the power to pick which content succeeds and which doesn't, and that's what we do now.

I mean, it's not the government necessarily doing it, at least not directly, but it amounts the same thing. Yeah. All right. Look, as long as I'm whining, I got one more, but it's not just personal. I mean, because I hate the IRS for personal reasons, but also for what they do to other people. So it's still indicative of other things.

I know Garland Nixon, who's an anti-war leftist activist, has been treated the same way. And it's just so obvious. I mean, what can you say about it? Since the end of May, my follower count on Twitter has been hard-limited at 63,000. And I was doing good. I was getting between 4,000 and 8,000 new followers every month for a year before that, something like that, whatever, going back. And then the anime, that was it. and then I complained about it and did like a big follow train on one day and that got me up to 63.3.

And then now here we are in October and I'm at 63.3. And even when I had like some right wing friend Tom Elliott had said had retweeted me complaining about it. And that had got me up by a few hundred. And then essentially what happens, Matt? And I quit Twitter anyway. But still it's important though, sort of in its way, it's important. that essentially what happens is every day my far account goes up

far account goes down far account goes up far account goes down like Homer Simpson in his hospital bed and so I'll get almost to 63.4 and then I go no to go all the way back down to 63.33 or whatever and every single day count goes up

count goes down and now look it's five months later four months later I can't count well but like what happened and then so I email there And I go, what's going on? They're like, well, you're just not using hashtags effectively enough or whatever. Well, no, man, come on. I'm obviously being somehow limited, like hard limited.

And there is one correlation, which was I had said something pretty bad. I don't remember exactly, but it was pretty bad about the cops at the Evaldee massacre, where they refused to save the children for over an hour there, the, what, 300-something cops, whatever it was, who stood there and did nothing. And I had said something horrible about them, and I got turned off for 12 hours. but then they turn me back on and then but that was it but my follower account has not gone up ever since then and people get you know kicked off at twitter and suppressed on twitter and shadow band and all these things like it really is such an important town square for people to use and yet it's so obviously

rigged in such insane ways like this like why don't they just kick me off then if that's what they're going to do i'm not a lot to have more than 63,000 who came up with that crap you know yeah they didn't You know, you're right. If they're going to interfere, you know, why go to the lengths of making it look like they're not or making it look like it's an organic phenomenon? You're far from the only person in this camp. I mean, I'm actually in the same place. I mean, they've essentially frozen my count for a while.

And, you know, I know that that's not what's going on. I mean, I'll do tweets sometimes that get retweeted by this person or that person, and it'll get, you know, 10,000 likes, and I'll get one follower out of it. I mean, come on. Yeah. Like, that, it's, it's absurd. I don't get angry about it. I mean, I haven't, but at the same time, like, the hubris of it is really irritating.

Yeah, and look, you can't say this, so I'll say it, because it is true, and it's an important part of this story. you're a pretty big big shot man you know this is not the same as picking on anti-war dot com when you pick on the guy who was the star of rolling stone magazine for 20 years or whatever it was you know you've written these huge books you know all these people on a first name basis in new york city and all this crap

if they can do this to you and they can really screw everybody like this it's absolutely outrageous yeah i mean i think that's the uh that's the the issue with these high profile decisions that they make that is more it's more consequential that you can step in look i i got a lot of negative feelings about somebody like alex jones i don't i don't have terribly positive feelings about don't trump but the fact that

they can go in and just kind of remove these folks um without discussion uh means that they can do it to anybody and what they figured out is that they they you know they will do it to everybody i mean that that's what's happening they you know the camel's nose got into the tent and then they just started you know sort of playing with reality everywhere and that um it's really irritating and i think people get really angry i mean there there's more and more i think uh sort of organic anger about this now because no one's fooled by it are they i don't think so yeah well you know i need to study really hard on libertarian solutions this problem i know that obviously there's alternative media sites uh there's bit shoot and there's odyssey and there's rumble and there's all these

things i don't know how easy it is for any of those to become the new standard in the way that you know facebook became the standard and twitter became the standard in google and youtube i've become the standard. There's got to be a way to mix it up. I think really it's got to be an encrypted app that you have. There is no Zuckerberg or anybody else like at the top to make these calls because it's just an app that you have. You set your own algorithm and join up a social network computer to computer without having to go through them at all, some kind of thing. But it's got to happen because this is just intolerable at this point. Seriously. Yeah. And just to finish on this note, You know, that's why I thought it was so notable when it came out that Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk were talking and Dorsey was saying, look, this can't be a company.

It's got to be an open source mechanism that can't be messed with because, you know, what happens is what we have now is you have this just sewer of content moderation decisions that is really it's off-putting and it suppresses discussion. and um and they got they got to find another way the problem is that that the landscape is so monopolized that whenever a new platform grows it can be bought out like instagram or it can be um it can be influenced like um what's the one i'm thinking of where amazon and apple teamed up to um parlor parlor yeah exactly right so whatever you think of parlor like that's not a good thing when those companies have the ability to just, like, dictate to them how they operate. I think it was that horrible Tyler lady, something from the New York Times. Hillary Rends.

Yeah, who was saying that, yeah, you know, and I got to say it's quiet because I don't want to give any bad guys any further ideas. But, you know, the real problem is that podcasts are still unfettered. We got to get some fetters on those pot. And look, Apple could just turn off our whole world, couldn't they? They could. Yeah. they think they could they could put us in fetters uh and you know that the the idea that we can't have any non-searchable content out there that they can use to algorithmically suppress like

that's the kind of person who would think that way is is pretty messed up in the head but unfortunately that's like 98% of all reporters now so um it's really depressing all right listen i got to let you go but first i got to tell all the people to go and look at your archive at Taibi.substack.com and listen up everybody. There's the articles that we talked about today, but keep paging down because there's about a three-part series there on the Department of Justice and the absolute corruption in the system of America's national police forces and prosecutions now and the corruption and the disgrace of our former civil libertarian defenders and protectors who've all gone a wall on us and all this stuff.

It's great journalism as everything from Matt Taiibi is, as you expect it to be. So please go and look at all that too. And then also this stuff about Snowden and the killing of Oladaria, Dugina, however you say it there, and the rest. Dugina there. Okay, thank you, Matt. Really appreciate you, bud. No, thanks a lot, Scott.

I appreciate it. And thanks for having me on the show. Absolutely. The Scott Horton Show. and anti-war radio can be heard on K-P-F-K 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com

anti-war.com Scott Horton.org and libertarian institute. dot org.