Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/14/24 Matt Taibbi: A Retrospective on the 2024 Election

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Scott and Matt Taibbi look back at the 2024 election. They discuss the reason Trump was able to quickly return to form, Biden getting tossed out, the many weaknesses of Kamala Harris and, of course, how awful the media was.  Discussed on the show: The Pentagon Wars (IMDb) “How America's Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up” (Racket News) Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i got matt taibi how are you doing dude i'm doing well how are you doing i'm doing great um if you guys don't know matt's a great journalist and he runs racket dot news and he's got this great show that he's does with Walter Kern

and I always forget the name of the show. What's the name? America this week. America this week. Yeah, I was going to say something like that but then I was going to flub it so I'm glad I didn't. America this week and by the way, who is Walter Kern? I like that guy. So remember the movie up in the air?

With George Clooney? Remind me. I'm not a big Clooney guy. It's it was a movie about somebody who spends too much time on airplanes and he's an efficiency consultant and it's It's sort of a comedy about how depressing corporate America is. Anyway, Walter's a screenwriter and a novelist and...

Cool. He used to be the editor of Spy Magazine, which is, you know... Okay. That was something I read religiously as a kid, so we're good pals. That's cool. Okay, well, I'll head over to the Pirate Bay and download that. That sounds interesting. He's a very interesting guy.

And I've been, you know, watching your commentary. As you know, I tell everybody, I get an email for a... Matt Taibi, I stop what I'm doing, and I read what you wrote. And sometimes it's the most crucial news in the world. And other times, it's just really interesting opinion that I almost always agree with. And you've been really great on your election coverage, you and Walter both. Walter more than me, he called a lot of this, actually. Yeah.

Well, yeah, but I mean, well, anyway, there's so much to say about it. And you guys have had so much to say about it. But I guess I just want to ask you, like, in the most general way. what do you think about what happened well this is more than an ordinary election this is a a massive cultural shift in america because in addition to changing the um you know the occupant of the white house i think voters were really um repudiating the mainstream media when when the entire media calls somebody hitler um in unison for eight consecutive years, and the population votes for that person, that tells you that

they have no faith at all in that sector of society. No, that tells you that the American people are Nazis. Yeah, or that, I guess, right? But, yeah, no, I think this is the end of a long period where we've been living almost under a kind of cult-like existence and it hasn't been we haven't been able to break it because of the informational dominance of um you know the press and academia and politics and that's now been essentially ousted i think it's all going to evaporate like all all all of these bizarre canceling behaviors the moral panics and i think it's all gone now

That's very hopeful. In fact, I think I saw, I mean, I agree that there certainly has been a thumbs down given to that in a huge way. But then I saw, I think it was a comment on your website said, yeah, but the long march through the institution continues on. These people aren't just going to give up and go away. There's a huge bureaucracy in all the universities and all of the things. and it does it is kind of apparent already though

isn't it that like the resistance and all of that stuff the way they tried to build it up back eight years ago that's just not playing out Trump's going to have his way at least on the national government level

I don't know about us out in the culture but even there too like are they going to start putting boys in Star Wars again? Yeah I mean it might be stuff like that and it won't just be based on you know the political aspect of it

right can we can we have boys in star wars it'll just be can we try to make a movie that makes money um and and not worry about anything else and because they really haven't for a long time there there have been so many other considerations that have gone into everything and this is true in journalism too like the the news business that they stopped acting like um sort of capitalist organizations about seven or eight years ago. So for instance, CNN, when they saw MSNBC make a mistake, they wouldn't jump on it if it was the, you know, a mistake that might have helped Trump, right? So you don't go beat up your competitor for political reasons. Then you no longer have a free market. And that's kind of what we drifted away from. I think we're going back to what

was more like normalcy before. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm really torn about this. too because, you know, the liberals are going to characterize it the way that they want it. If you voted against woke, if this is a cultural kind of reaction against all the wokeism and the cancel culture and all that, their phrase for that is, yes, sexism and racism and what, you know, that whole thing. And then the typical answer, which I think is actually, you know, bared out in the exit polls and all that was it this is really all just about price inflation and immigration

because that's what everybody said it was about and you don't really it's sort of like with Biden being too old to be the president like you don't really have to know anything about anything to just look at them your honor you know what I mean and the same kind of thing with the price inflation I saw this little

old lady from the Bronx saying a bell pepper is five dollars and she started crying how am I supposed to feed my grandbabies and so yeah the incumbent doesn't win in a situation like that and they printed too much money man and they were warned not to do it and then so at the same time though like man i resent all this woke stuff so much too and all the cancellation and the censorship and i've been censored but even if i haven't it all the even just shadow banning some guy i've never heard of it ain't fair to do that

and i hate the way it is but then i fear matt that actually that wasn't just rejected that people really have accepted all that now and really don't care about that it was just the bell peppers man no i don't believe that because i think in addition to the the issues that you talked about there was the well there were there were really multiple aspects to it one yeah things are really tough out there it is really really hard to to get along if you don't make a ton of money and you know the inflation was a killer it was an indirect way of of taxing essentially the poor for something that mainly helped the top straight of society. But in addition to that, there were lies about it, right?

So the economic news was massively suppressed. If you saw mention of it at all, it was in a column by somebody like Paul Krugman who told Americans that, you know, they were just mistaken. They hadn't an impression that they were, that times were tough out there actually. the economy was great. And on top of that, there was this, you know, very condescending attitude that this class of politician had when talking about the economics of the country. They came out and essentially said there is no such thing as economic anxiety. If you're voting for Trump, if you're voting for anybody except us, it's because you're a racist and you're a bigot. And all

those things combine i think to to result in a protest vote right so people have a lot of objections to trump but when you make people mad enough they will do this and i think it's all the above i think yeah well i didn't vote for him because i just couldn't my last vote was for ron paul in the primaries in 2012 and i can oh i did vote against the sheriff a few years ago because he murdered a guy so that was important but otherwise i'm not much of a voter anymore but but, and I couldn't bear to vote for Trump after what he did in Yemen and some other things back when he was in power the last time. But boy, was I rooting for him, Matt, and boy, did I almost vote for him. And you know what almost put me over the edge a few different times there toward the end was new charges in October or superseding indictments or whatever, this kind of thing.

Like, I don't even need to know the details. You're doing this on October the 15th. I'm upset. Like, no, you can't do that. It's so obviously cheating. and then I guess what you would consider white lies compared to major lies about policy but the lies about the bloodbath and the lies about the very fine people Liz Cheney thing yeah the Liz Cheney execution and Tony Hinchcliffe I actually got to meet

Tony Hinchcliffe because I was paling around with Dave Smith and I got to hang out with the guys in the back room there at the mothership and I got to meet the guy and I've seen Kill Tony on the YouTube's there. And so what I know about him is he's not just a comedian. He's an insult comic. And I also know about him that I watched the set and he made fun of lots of different people, not just Puerto Ricans. And then I had to read in the New York Times, man-made remarks against Puerto Rico. And I know it's so stupid, but that just drives me into a rage that they would treat me with such content as to talk to me that way about something that I already know better than that, you know? And I got

to admit, or I got to hypothesize, you know, expect that that's part of what drove people mad there. You know, when Donald Trump says, there's going to be layoffs in the automotive industry, and then they go, Donald Trump just threatened to murder half the population of the country if they don't vote

for him. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that incentivizes people to push back and say, look, I'm just so tired of this. I'm tired of how insulting it is. You know, this idea that they, we're supposed to vote on command because this group of people has decided that, you know, we can't handle even basic true information. So we're going

to not, we're going to shade things in a certain way. We're going to just outright hide true facts from you and all for what reason so that you can be talked out of voting for Donald Trump like that's the thing that's so confounding about this like if they just played this straight I think they would have won but they couldn't

that's just not who they are they need to condescend the people and to push them around and bully and that just doesn't fly in politics so I don't know if you saw this on the Tucker show where Paul Manafort seemed to claim to know that this was true

from inside information or whatever, but it also seemed to sort of kind of at least be confirmed by Nancy Pelosi in her interview with the New York Times that the plan was not to run Harris. The plan was, as

they had talked about, to do some kind of open process at the convention, and what happened was Biden said, well, if you're going to stab me in the back, I'm going to stab you in the front. So how do you like that? And he turned around and endorsed her and made her at that point, bulletproof in order to screw over everybody else because he knew that she was so weak,

but that also once he endorsed her, there's no way they could overthrow her for a white man now. And so now they would just be stuck with her. And that's why he's so happy now when he's giving a speech or hanging out with Donald Trump. You can see how thrilled he is. And he's not resentful. He's not like, I would have won. He's like, ha, ha, I told you I would have won and you couldn't. You know what I mean?

So he's just happy about it. But I wonder whether you think that that's really right, that he, that he announced his endorsement of her as not part of the plan that they had all come up with, but in order to sabotage the plan that they had all come up with. Hmm. Look, that's hilarious, if that's true. It's still amazing how little we know about how that whole thing came about. Yeah.

We had reporting by Cy Hirsch suggesting one thing. we had the quasi-official version, which came from people close to Nancy Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi herself, right? And that was the one in which Pelosi went to Biden and showed him polls that suggested he was going to be, you know, lose by 400 electoral votes, right? That Trump was going to get that many. And this was what encouraged him to step down. But they never really gave us anything about what the process was. Like, how did they get from Biden dropping out of the race to Harris becoming the nominee? We have almost no information about that. And I think that's amazing, don't you? I do. Seems like more than a minor issue to me. Yeah, seriously. And then,

you know, because he's such a stubborn guy. I don't want to say proud, because that can't be right, but he's such a stubborn guy like you can see how you know because they really screwed him over Obama particularly you know he he must have made some kind of weird deal with Hillary Clinton that he promised to support

her over Biden in 16 and Biden had to take the back seat and blame it on his dead son and all this stuff and then she lost and he was like see you know so now this is to him like his big vindication and it's just funny also too that

you know, not just to see like how happy he is that she lost and how vindicated that makes him, which is apparently what he's so excited about, but also he was the guy that said that Donald Trump's going to destroy democracy forever, right? Like if he ever read like the rise and oh, you guys were talking about this on your show the other day, you read the rise and fall of the third Reich, like there are all these opportunities where Hindenberg could have killed Hitler and one time he actually did bring his pistol and he was going to kill Hitler and then he chickened out and he didn't do it and then like that's what

their kind of narrative here is that this is why you have to vote Democrat even if you hate everything we've done to you that you can't let America go full fascism we might never have another election again and then Joe Biden's like hey

Don good to see you buddy and just welcome to we're going to do everything we can to make the easiest transition of power for you my friend like what is going on here, dude. They don't even care that we're watching this and remember last week, you know? I'll be shocked if photos don't surface of them, like, you know, at a topless bar or water skiing together. I mean, it's, it's, it's such a bromance at this point. And, um, it, you know, if, if that

explanation is true that, that he foisted Harris on the party, uh, in an active spite, that is hilarious. And this sort of post-script to the whole thing is even funnier. Yeah. Yeah, totally is. Isn't it great? It's so weird. And then here's the thing, too. Isn't Kamala Harris terrible and weird?

Wasn't that the weirdest thing to try to make that normal? And isn't it weird that it worked and that tens of millions of people apparently turned out to support her? Including, like, people on my street that got Madam President on their yard signs, Matt? They believed in that. I know. I know. Well, they were, even stranger was that they were convinced instantaneously that she was a good candidate. And this, I know, was bogus because I covered her presidential run in 2020 and, you know, watched as, you know, people in Iowa, you know, and Iowans are, they're great crowds, right? Like, if you've got anything to give them, they're interested, you know. If you're fun. You know, if you're fun. They want you to bring out your funniness if you've got a sort of interesting sort of non-conventional vision like Marianne Williamson. They want you to tell them about that. They just didn't have anything. They were not interested in Kamala at all. She was the biggest bomb in Iowa that I can remember. And anybody who saw that performance had to know that she was not going to do well in a national election. Now, she actually massively outperformed my expectations in terms.

She appeared on TV, but still, it was wild that they thought that that was going to work. Yeah. And then to hear them now, they go, look, we know, everybody knows, like it's Saddam Hussein's weapons and mass destruction. Listen, we know that she ran a perfect campaign. therefore it has to be that people just hate blacks and women right yes exactly that's the only possible explanation but what what's different about this race as opposed to 2016 when they instantaneously all came out with well you know we live in a white supremacist nation that's the explanation um this time the there were you know the um the coalition for trump was varied enough

that they had to blame all kinds of people. They had to blame white women. They had to blame Hispanic men. They had to blame black men. They had to blame sort of blacks and Hispanics not getting along. I mean, I've seen almost every iteration of who was to blame for this. Almost every racial category was blamed for having some kind of bigoted take that led to the selection. so it wasn't just white people this time around that was interesting yeah well you know blacks and

mexicans have always been the worst white supremacist and white women are definitely the worst sexists so this is all sounds right to me i mean the the fact that they that there were many people talking about how you know we white women didn't turn out for kamala harris i i just don't know how you can take that point of view seriously looking at the results but anyway well you know and this is it's almost not their fault because it's just damn them who they

are but they always just talk about well the non college educated white women as compared to the college educated ones because the college educated ones are the smart ones see not like the dumb ones when they don't even realize what they're talking about

is people who can afford a bell pepper versus people who no longer can. That's what we're talking about. People who it really matters when the price of groceries doubles or goes up 30, 40, 50%, and other people who go, geez, that

sucks, but then whatever, or they don't even notice because they're, you know, Butler or nanny or whatever did their shopping for them. And it's none of their concern whatsoever how much the eggs cost. And in fact, by the way, did you see Morning Joe? Oh, did I get this from you? Where Morning Joe said, what

butter cost $7? What? Is it laced in gold or something? Because he had no idea about price and plate. That's funny, yeah. That's typical of them, though, right? Yeah, oh, totally. Zabina Brizinski's daughter, for Christ's sake. Like, the guy whose fault all of this is,

and she's the one who gets to tell us what's true and false. Just like they got Alan Greenspan's wife up there telling us about the boom and the bus cycle. Are you kidding me? I'm going to hurt myself off of something. If people knew how literally intermarried Washington was, I think they would be freaked out. I mean, people,

you know, Dana Bash was a big player in this election. How many, you know, I wonder how many people know that her husband is like the chief of staff or John Brennan, or was, right? Like,

if you call John Brennan's phone, like, that's the guy who answers. Wow. I did not know that. I knew that he had been a war contractor previously. Yeah. He's the former CIA chief of staff.

God. Oh, man. I'm so far behind on everything. holy crap there's like a million things like that where you're like wow um how does that how does that work do they have do they have sort of no fly zones about what they do can and cannot talk about at night i don't know yeah they they never disclosed their conflicts of interest i mean there be you know remember it was a huge deal when what's his name oliver at the uh new york times did that final thing at the end after it was all over about how rumsfeld's generals had controlled the media you know

a bunch of retired generals, but they would get briefings from Rumsfeld every day or what they were supposed to say and how they were all on the dole, every one of them. And like the most obvious one is Barry McCaffrey, the war criminal of the highways of death of 1991. It was the same guy who he's just selling Bradley fighting vehicles. He's on the board of directors of the thing. And then he's going on TV and he's going, what the army needs right now is Bradley's. And like, is this like a Sunday morning infomercial?

Or what am I actually even watching here, you know? Well, it's more like that Kelsey Grammar quasi-comedy a movie about Pentagon contracting, right? I mean. Pentagon Wars. Yeah, Pentagon Wars. It has Robin Hood Men and Tites is in that, too. I never know that guy's name. Oh, Carrie Ellwitz, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, look, everybody's going nuts about this new defense secretary. And I don't know the guy, so I can't comment on that. but what I can say is like really how many Raytheon executives you know do we really need in the Pentagon do we is it absolutely necessary that we get another one I mean maybe it's time for some other kind of idea well they should have got damn McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute instead of this cook but still I take your point that like yeah what they consider to be the staid centrist experts we can rely on are actually a bunch of lunatics who

get everything wrong over and over again right and then that's that's that's that's the problem with this whole thing it's like the these people who complain about the you know undermining trust and the mainstream press well yeah that would be a problem if you guys didn't mess literally everything up right you make mistakes about everything i mean every conceivable major story is is bungled, and then you don't fix it by going back and talking about it. It's going to be interesting, by the way, and I know that there are people in the transition team who are thinking about this, about doing, you know, something like a Nuremberg-style, not a series of trials, but a series of investigations into, you know, what went wrong

in things like COVID, Russiagate, with the censorship business, there are going to be lots of eyes on documents that are going to be very interesting, and they're going to get out too, which is going to be great. Yeah, that's a big deal. You know, I believe through your recommendation, I started following Undead FOIA on Substack, and he put out a thing yesterday. documents I'd like to see declassified

and I just was like oh man I don't know I'm tired of getting my I'm already over getting my hopes up at all after the recent cabinet picks but wait I want to pick on Kamala Harris more still sure that perfect campaign that she ran

I know it wasn't just me because I was barely paying attention man I'm writing a book I know everyone else notice that they didn't put her out there for six weeks right they had her give a few can speeches but it was really six weeks went by before she sat down for an interview and i mean the body language there is just inescapable right of abject cowardice and and and they might as well have admitted in plain english she's not ready we have to train her like a seal and see if we can get her to repeat some things it's going to take us six weeks to see if we can get her to say too many gossens are being killed in instead of anything of substance, right?

And then, and that was it. It took six weeks, and then what did they come up with? Nothing. They came up, they all call her word salad or whatever, because she can never finish a sentence. She never, she's always trying to ad libid. She's always acting like she's going to think of something, she's going to come up with a way to finish this sentence,

but it never quite comes to her, and she just kind of gives up in defeat. Yeah, she does a lot of stringing sentences along by thinking of synonyms which are like words that mean the same thing as other words like she does that a lot because what she's she's pausing right um which is a problem but uh she also had a problem previously with reading prepared text and they did fix that pretty well i thought like you know on the campaign trail in 2020 she had this terrible issue where she would um while she was reading speeches she would sometimes kind of put a hand on a hip and tilt her head sideways and kind of look at the audience as though she were pissed off at it and there was this body language delivery that that was really bad and she eliminated a lot of that stuff and and did much more traditional um you know political oratory which was effective through the through the convention

But, yeah, man, once she started getting into those interviews, it fell apart pretty quickly. Yeah. And then, you know, I read in the Financial Times this morning that, well, you know, the reason she didn't go on the Rogan show was they had talked about it and they decided that they were worried it would turn off the progressives if they went. Well, doesn't that just tell you everything that you need to know about how useless the Democratic Party is? I mean, first of all, let's just talk about the fact that the Donald Trump interview on Joe Rogan, it got 47 million views on YouTube alone, and from what I understand, it was more like 100 million views when you figured in all the other media. So this is a show that has probably 50x the impact of the biggest cable shows on TV. So, and these are male voters. So Joe's audience is like 81% male.

They are divided into almost perfect thirds in terms of independence, Republicans, and Democrats. So the strike zone of male independent to unconvinced Republican voters, which was exactly what she needed. to reach to win the battleground states she had a chance to talk to a hundred million of them and bailed on it because a bunch of idiots in her campaign objected to the fact that joe once upon a time said that trans women or trans men shouldn't fight chicks or something like that so this again gets back to this idea of are we trying to win an election or are we trying to win some you know stupid who's the woken person in in our organization contest right it's you know you would never have seen that kind of behavior

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well even even camilla went on fox news yeah and look and you know what they say in the financial times article they go well you know because he was going to really go after her and then i guess i saw something else that like oh he was joking around on his show that they made him promise that he was going to not ask her about pot and it's like i mean that's part of the whole thing is that you're so phony you can't just grappled with the thing. Look, my job was prosecuting people and yeah, I smoked some and that is kind of fucked up, but like, I don't know, I came up with something to say

about it. Just say something, but like, no, you're not allowed to ask me about that. That was one of their strictures that they tried to do. But then Rogan had made himself so clear on different shows. And because I saw this on YouTube, people were making shorts out of it on YouTube of Rogan saying, I just want to shoot the shit with her.

I just want to talk to her. I just want to get to know her, which was also very revealing that he kept saying, who are you? Like, as though he was already talking to her, like, first person thinking like, who are you lady? Who the F. are you? I want to know. But he wasn't being mean. He was like, I don't want to badger her. I just

want to like coax her into being herself and talking to me. That was all he was asking for. And, you know, he's an honest guy. And as you know, he was like a Bernie guy. He's not a right winger. As he put it the other day, I think, that they judge him by his appearance, right?

Because he's got upper body strength. They think he's a right winger. But no, he's a Bernie guy. He's from San Francisco or something like that is so in california originally yeah he and i have um yeah he's a comedian from from boston um we actually uh cross pass although we never talked to each other back then but um yeah no he can't he came up through boston comedy clubs he he was a uh a bouncer at a casino uh in in southern mass or rhode island i'm sorry and um but he he's He's not mean, and I've been on his show much of times, and I think what they were afraid of in the Harris campaign is what everybody who goes on that show experiences, which is that, look, he's curious, he's going to ask you curveball questions that have nothing to do with anything you've ever written about or talked about on television, and you are going to find yourself in a live setting or close to live setting, just sort of talking out your ass.

about things and people are going to learn about who you are, you know, what your personality's like, how you respond to certain kinds of jokes and all these other things. It comes out over three hours. And if there's nothing there, if you have no personality, the Rogan show is the worst possible format for you. And I think that's what they were worried about. Of course. And that's the thing is, just like with Biden being too old, like, well, that's what everyone can included from her not doing it, right? I mean, if you're just the diehardest Kamala fan, maybe you say, well, he was going to be mean to her

and try to rationalize that or whatever, but for anyone else, like, that's obviously what it is. Donald Trump, the way he said, he goes out, come on, she'd be laying in there on the floor curled up in a coma or something. Because why? And he was right, because Rogan, I don't know who brought it up, but somebody's like, hey, what do you think about the windmills and the whales? Oh, I think three things about it.

Here they are in no particular order. Like, yeah, she could. not do that. She could not do that. He goes, and, you know, Trump has an advantage here that this isn't necessarily fair to her, but it goes to show like the ease that Trump was at or in or whatever. He wasn't nervous

to go up there. And when they start talking about boxing and MMA stuff, he's right at home. Because, you know, he had helped sponsor some of that back in the day and at his casinos and whatever. And so they're talking about, oh, you like that one fighter? Yeah, me too. Remember that one time

he fought that one guy? Yeah, that was great. And, boy, she couldn't talk like that about any subject. Maybe cooking or something, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, he's got a huge advantage there, right? I mean, I remember seeing Donald Trump sitting, I think, next to Muhammad Ali at a Tyson fight, the Tyson Biggs fight at the Trump casino. So he's, you know, he's right in the strike zone of the things that Joe Rogan cares most about, right? but like you said when Rogan throws him a total

curve ball and goes oh let's talk about this now he's fine and and vice versa too when Trump goes off on some tangent you know they're just but it's free form and as you say with every they had every reason to be terrified of putting her in front she would have run out

of things to say in absolutely no time flat oh that reminds me of another thing I want to ask you about and I had read this I can't remember the article anymore but it was like they had named it our or Sarah or some kind of thing. And it was the computer program that was supposed that Robbie Mook had hired to run the campaign for him

during Clinton's 16 and how these guys had the same problem with his absolute, this might have even been an article in the New York Times I read, an opinion piece in the New York Times. So this vast over-reliance on this specific kind of data analytics that just tries to profile every voter or the voters on this street or this block. and Taylor, essentially like the computer spit out on a piece of paper,

exactly what you're supposed to say to push all their exact buttons to get them to do what you want. And the guy in writing in the New York Times, he said, this would be like turning your entire hospital over to the radiology department. Like, you guys have a role to play with your x-rays and scannings and things like that, but there are other doctors who know about other stuff here too. And now, but they have just totally gotten, you know, these are the believe the science people.

Where they're like, what it really means is they seed their thinking to a computer because they think it's smarter than a human and that it will know what to do when they don't know what to do. So they ask it what to do and then it doesn't know what to do. It says you should go out there and you should say too many Gossans are dying. But that's all. You shouldn't say who's killing them. You shouldn't acknowledge that.

You're the one killing them. You shouldn't say what you're going to do about it. You sure as hell shouldn't say who is actually dropping the bombs on their head or what the fight is you should just say that and then that makes sense from the computer programs point of view and I guess the guy reading the receipt it spits out but for the audience boy it just falls so short you know what I mean why I change my mind on fracking because that's the thing I do sometimes I don't know and this is the thing that people never got about 2016 too is there were I don't know there must have been metric tons of these stories about how Donald

Trump is fake and that he lies. But on the stump, he may be lying factually about things, but he's very genuine on the stump. In other words, Trump, the human being, is very accessible to the person in the crowd. And that is very important in campaigning. Now, he may be saying something completely untrue. He may be misremembering. He may be intentionally lying. He may be making a promise that he's not going to keep i mean all these things are true but you get a sense of the person and what he's like and it's a very human thing and it's powerful and if you if you try to engineer this with canned statements you know which is what they did in the pre-trump era is they just sent people out there and had them you know the read out lists of dial survey words

that shit doesn't work it just it people do not respond to it where they were as they do respond to the other thing yeah um yeah exactly and like you know it's a george carlin thing about William uh about Bill Clinton he goes bill Clinton comes right out there and he goes hey I'm Bill Clinton and I'm completely full of shit and go hey least he's honest exactly exactly then that's there is a lot to that. I mean, nobody had any illusions about Donald Trump. I mean, maybe a few people did. I don't know. But when, you know, Harris comes out there and she tells these stories about herself that are oddly nonspecific. We hear a lot about her background as a prosecutor,

but we never hear anything about the cases. We never see video of her in court. We never see transcripts of her arguing in court we just don't know a lot about this person there's she's kind of a cipher right and it's it's one thing to get all the way to i don't know maybe a primary as a candidate like that but to be the nominee and have nothing that people can sink their teeth into in terms of i don't know who this person is it's just incredible yeah Well, and look, I mean, it's a Senate full of Kamala Harris's, too. They're all like that, basically. You know, you get occasionally a guy like, I don't know, Mike Lee or I'm sure there are some on the Democrat side.

I don't mean to be partisan about it, but just people who do read books and like are generally interested in public policy. But some of them are not. Like, you can, she's just not. If you said her, hey, man, did you see the thing about the whales and the windmills there? She would be like, no. you know she didn't see it because she because look nobody was reading

looking for that story right you just come upon that when you're reading the Wall Street Journal in the morning you go oh there's a thing about the whales in there or you know what I mean or like you're you're listening to NPR radio on the way to work and they go oh here's a story about whales but

but like you would have to be somewhat interested in news about things going on in the world to sort of accidentally have heard that that's a controversy. Did you hear that there's a thing about that? And like, I don't know all about it, but I heard that there's a thing about that. You know what I mean? She never even heard that there's a thing about that or anything else. She's just not even the kind of person who cares. She's the kind of person comes home and watches TV, like, you know,

dramas and sitcoms and things. She doesn't stay late reading. And she also just doesn't come across as somebody who enjoys just hanging out with lots of different types of people you know there are some people some crowds in which she seems a little bit comfortable but for the most part she looks just desperate to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible and you know that that's something that people pick up on is that you know maybe you don't maybe she doesn't know about the whales but a normal person who doesn't know would say oh what's that tell me about it then you know let's that tell me about it then you know

let's discuss. She can't do that. That is a frightening prospect for her, and it just doesn't work in the national level. Yeah. It's just amazing that that was who they tried to run, whether it was Biden that did it to him or whatever. Either way, the thing was hilarious.

And it was also hilarious the way that, you know, I regret this because I hate making predictions because, as Yogi Berra said, it's really dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future, because, you know, you could get it wrong, look dumb. And all the polls say it's neck and neck. And I'm

rationalized that. Like, look, I mean, I know that his negatives are high. But see, this is the way I rationalize the Romney Obama thing in 12. It was a lot of people hate Obama. But a lot of people really love Obama. But nobody loves Mitt Romney. And that's the margin right there, dude. Right?

Like, he's just safe incumbent. I barely even covered that election because I was like, Obama's going to win. Forget it. Let's get back to talking about the war. And like, you know what I mean? That was just it didn't even matter. It was so obvious. I actually got in trouble for saying on television early in that race that all the dramas in the Obama-Rominee election were being invented because everybody in all campaign journalists knew who was going to win. And I said this on CNN like six months before the election. They're like, Tybee, you're going to get us laid off, dude. Be quiet.

Yeah, exactly. We're pretending there's a thing here. and so this one was the same way except that she's sort of kind of in the chair already right and he's the challenger so that does change it a bit but you know and then you know

obviously the feeling is with obviously the inflation and immigration both of those work in his favor and the poll said you know for a year straight or more before that that those are the top two issues and and he's you know he's not very good on

printing money himself but he definitely takes the popular position on immigration right now and just not being the guy in charge right now while prices are through the roof and all that. So it was his to lose, but man, he clobbered her, right? I mean, he won all seven swing states. But it's interesting, though, because it's still by pretty thin margins in those states or not.

I really don't know the real details of that stuff. Yeah, I don't know either. but I do know that I'm working on a story right now about how one of the major polling aggregator is the real clear politics polling average average which is what all campaign reporters dating back to 2002 have always used it's just a bunch of numbers but it was suppressed on Wikipedia because it was judged to be too friendly to Trump it turned out to be the most accurate poll by far but it was it was penalized for not waiting certain things above others and you know that tells you again about the kind of landscape we live in where we think

we might be looking at raw information but we're actually seeing like an artificial version of it and so some of the polling was probably more definitive behind the scenes I guess I That's what I'm trying to say. Right. Yeah, that was, they always talk about that, right? Oh, our internal polls say this. Well, how come you don't tell us that? And honestly, I would have been looking at real clear politics if I was trying to keep up on the daily basis like that.

And certainly, you know, that night of the election, we were doing a live stream goofing around. And that was what I had pulled up on the screen was real clear politics. That is like they're the definitive source on that. But that's interesting to hear about their polling there. I guess it's really, it's not necessarily what the polls say at Real Clear Politics are here there. It's what the rest of the media choose to highlight about the polls or which polls they talk about because they would always just say, oh, it's neck and neck and it's 50-50 and it's got to be.

And I was just, man, I was not surprised to see her lose. I was going to be surprised if she was able to pull it out. But then again, I mean, I am surprised how many people did vote for her. And again, I can understand why people would be against Trump. but I don't know showing up for that though really man yeah well you know I mean there are also social factors too don't don't forget about that that's a powerful thing like you know if you if you don't vote to stop Hitler you know yeah well you know what that's the important thing too right is we always kind of maybe even just kind of pick on we think of like

the powerful liars pushing these narratives but the real point is or a real point is that There are a lot of regular people out in the country who are made to feel really afraid. And, like, I would hate to, like, have to say, like, black women. I'm sorry, but this isn't really about you at all, right? Like, I know that they keep saying it is, but this wasn't the election about whether you like black women or not. That was not the issue. And they keep telling you that and want to make you feel like, oh, now, yeah, this is because America hates you. No, it's not.

America doesn't hate you. but we weren't voting for or against someone because of that detail either or those traits that was not the issue of the election at all but I'm sure there's a lot of you know probably especially little girls and whatever who've been made to feel like oh you're supposed to put all your hopes and dreams into this

and then now it's all destroyed because it turns out America hates people like you and it's like dude that's totally not true there's a bunch of self-justifying garbage you know and um but a lot of people are the victims of that kind of thing too i saw some guy killed his family he's freaking out during the thing during the election returns really where was that i i saw one murder story in seattle that looked horrible yeah i think that was it yeah oh really okay yeah i think that might i think that was the one and there but there's you know people talking about

oh they hate their family they never see him again i saw one where this black woman was crying and saying and like I don't know she's just acting for her TikTok or whatever like who knows but like she was saying I really don't know if I'm going to wake up and be a slave again tomorrow and it's just like look man like dude you got to get out of your bubble you're in a media silo you should read my man Taiibi's book hate ink but like yeah no you're and but I can understand though

how people get inside a small enough echo chamber a bubble of you know pair of glasses of way to look at this thing that like they could really be led to believe that that was what this election was about. The white suprem—even, as you said, blacks and Mexicans are voting for Trump more than ever. But whatever. It's the white supremacist versus the people like you. And what a terrible narrative.

What a cynical way to try to run a political campaign and a political movement, the American liberal left. They're mean, man. It's a kind of racism that's really depressing. I mean, look, there's racism in both camps, undeniably, right? But the kind that's been promulgated by, not even so much the left, but as the Democratic Party, which has made everything about race, made everybody intensely conscious about race all the time, right? And so I think as a country, we had come to a place where it was starting to not mean

so much, you know. Agreed. And everywhere from the military to corporate America, it was becoming normal for people to interact and not think about it that much. And then suddenly we entered this period where it became about everything. And I think it set us back significantly. And that actually is something that is not going to go away quickly. I think the damage from that era.

from this era in terms of racial relations in this country is significant. And, you know, I don't know that how quickly it's going to be resolved. Yeah. And especially, look, I mean, they inflated so much. It's not just the price inflation on the shelves. There's major asset bubbles in different areas and things. And we could have a major crash coming. The only way to prevent that would be to slash regulation.

so much that productivity is just absolutely unleashed and counteracts the you know the come up it's the gap between the amount of money they created and the amount of real wealth that it's supposed to represent you know and so then I mean imagine we had a 2008 type thing coming soon you know at the dawn of the new Trump era something like that how how much more divide because that's what all this culture war crap is about it always has been it's so that the left and the right don't unite and crucify the bankers again to paraphrase storage carl in there of course i mean the and this is a major test for the for the trump campaign because uh you know the root causes the that that drove his popularity in the beginning i mean i i think about this

in terms of my career i started writing in after 2008 about how we created a two tiered economy with two sets of rules the the the rich idiots who caused the the the mortgage bubble to explode with you know a gazillion different cons they all got bailed out and they were made immune to market consequence and the rest of everybody else had to actually eat the losses and you know they they had the heaviest dose of capitalism they had the full free market experience right And so that's the beginning of the, you know, the system is rigged thing that Trump talked about, and Bernie talked about, by the way, in 2016, it was rigged. We go back to early Obama. It was Occupy Wall Street on one side and the Tea Party on the other.

And both of them were saying to various degrees, but they were trying to emphasize economic issues and not divisive cultural issues. Hey, guys, they're going to try to use cultural issues to divide us. So let's just leave abortion and immigration out for a minute. And let's just talk about bank bailouts. And that was the emergency. So then they started going, oh, yeah, well, you got white privilege. And you're gayer than that guy and this and that and whatever. And everybody fight.

That's when, you know, when Bernie was drawing blood against Hillary over this stuff in 2016, that's when she broke out the whole, you know, if we broke up the banks now with that end racism. It was, I absolutely believe that was. the reason that they started leaning into the identity politics it was the way out of criticism on the economic stuff oh yeah absolutely was and then people react so badly it's um you know south park had that great thing about like the science of trolling and just getting oh god yes you know one guy getting other people to fight and how it just takes off from there and it's just the perfect thing you know you mentioned before about troll trace yeah yeah yeah uh you

You know, in another context you mentioned about how Rogan got in trouble because he was talking about men fighting women or I guess a specific man who was fighting in the MMA. So it wasn't just talking about like a race and like stealing a trophy, but like actually beating the hell out of some lady. And that was what he got in trouble for. And I was crossing the line on what you're allowed to think about something that would be in any other context. the most obvious conclusion in the world. Because you're not even just talking about a man-fighting woman.

You're talking about a M.MA fighter. And she might be an MMA fighter, too, but still, you know, I don't know. I know. And the fact that people were looking over their shoulders weren't wondering if they could, you know, make an obvious observation tells you how crazy this period was. All right, hey, I got to let you go. And I know you got to go.

But real quick, you did mention there about there's a future here in document releases and especially I hope on the censorship regime because this is got to be like a real last stand major fight and right from the beginning here of if it's at all possible for free speech forces to harness the momentum behind the new trump administration and completely smash that censorship enterprise that you sir have documented to such an incredible degree there at racket dot news and so what do you know about those efforts or what could people do to help or anything like that? Help, nothing yet, but I can tell you absolutely that the transition team is marshaling a lot of resources to taking on that problem and also just the intelligence community generally. I don't know if that extends to the entire transition team, but they are looking for people to do a lot of work. Censorship is going to be a big focus for certain people. And we know that there are some people in this cabinet or around this administration for whom that's a huge issue. And yeah, I don't know how it's going to work out in the end, but I do know that it's coming,

that there's going to be some kind of effort to take this apart. That's great. I don't know if it means anything at all, but I'm going to take it as a good omen that I was Googling a thing. and Google returned Scott Horton.org as one of the results, which I haven't seen that happen organically in years, you know? And I'm like, wow, I wonder somebody took the boot off my algorithm's neck there over at Google.org, man. Wouldn't that be amazing?

That would be great. That would be amazing. And I never did ask you if you could look into it in your files. Am I in there where they decide I'm not allowed to have any more followers for a year and a half there and was it the Saudis or the Israelis who screwed me on that or what? I didn't look, but I very much doubt that you're in there because I would have had to do a search

on you. Oh, you would have had, I see. Yeah, yeah. They gave you what you guys were looking for in the first place within certain parameters and this and that. Yeah. So, but I'll look. Yeah, for sure. Anyway, hey man, it's always great talking to you. It's always great reading you. You're one of the greatest journalists and most important journalists in this country. And I like

all your opinion stuff and your great podcast. everything so thank you so much man thank you and good luck with the book thank you man appreciate that all right take care all right you guys that's great matt tieibi he is at racket dot news and uh america this week is his show with uh walter kern too you guys are really like it if you haven't seen yet the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la apse radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.