Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/30/22 Eli Clifton on Twitter’s Hypocritical Acceptance of US Information Operations

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

Scott brings Eli Clifton of Responsible Statecraft on to discuss the recent revelations about Twitter’s boosting of U.S. military information operations. They go over some of the details outlined in Lee Fang’s thread, which served as part 8 of the ongoing Twitter Files. Fang reveals Twitter’s hypocrisy as the firm publicly exposed and censored disinformation campaigns by foreign governments while it worked to amplify specific fake propaganda accounts at the request of the Pentagon. Scott and Clifton go through what we learned and then zoom out. Although they see a lot of value in these Twitter Files disclosures, the two also voice concern over the lack of action Musk appears to be taking beyond just exposing past behavior. They point out how financially dependent Musk is on the government which serves as a natural ceiling to how much he can expose and upset the military and intelligence agencies. They also talk about the enormous scale and efficacy of foreign lobbying on the government, DC think tanks and America’s largest companies.  Discussed on the show: “How Twitter hid US-military info ops from the public” (Responsible Statecraft) “The Twitter Files Part 8: How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign” (Twitter) “DC think tank puts hawkish former Aussie PM on China Center board” (Responsible Statecraft) Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative-Journalist-at-Large at Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @EliClifton. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Eli Clifton from ResponsibleStatecraft.org,

the Quincy Institute website there, how Twitter hid U.S. military info ops from the public. Welcome back to the show, Eli. How you doing? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Very happy to have you back on the show here. And so this is one part of the Twitter files that have been released so far. And there's a hell of a lot. But you're focusing on some military info ops that I gather were directed mostly at foreigners, or is that even correct? Yeah. I think by all accounts, it probably was mostly focused on foreigners, on the

of speaking, Twitter users, the accounts seemed to have a focus on Yemen and on Iraq and Syria. But obviously, the accounts had a pretty broad audience, and there was no limitation on who was reading these or who was the audience for them. Right. Yeah, that's true. That's the way that thing goes around. And of course, there's a helpful little translate button on every tweet, so you never know. Exactly. It's the very nature of the platform, right? Is that while you could say that they're targeting a certain audience, there's no way that it actually can be limited to that, which is, you know, I'd say part of the feature of Twitter, not necessarily a problem. But if anybody

tells you that, oh, well, it was only targeting a foreign audience, that's just an abject lie, because the way the platform works is that you can't do that. Right. Yeah, they could be directed toward that, and that could be their excuse that they hide behind. But it's certainly no ironclad rule that somehow a tweet sent east stays that way or something. Of course. The platform is what the platform is. Now, so of all the different tranches of the Twitter files that have come out, this is from the stuff that went to Lee Fong at the intercept.

Is that correct? That's right. That's right. Okay. So give us the breakdown here about what we're talking about. So what Lee was provided by an attorney, I believe, at Twitter as part of Elon Musk's efforts to supposedly offer greater transparency into what the... the social media company had been doing before he purchased it was a set of data showing

and emails showing Twitter employees engaging in so-called whitelisting at the request of CENTCOM, of the U.S. military, effectively, who were asking Twitter employees to verify or to otherwise amplify or to ensure that their accounts were in no ways buried in the Twitter algorithm. And there were a whole list of accounts that were sent to Twitter by CENTCOM, and this was starting in 2017. And some of those accounts are actually still active. But what's kind of interesting is at the time that CENTCOM asked for it, there's nothing inherently the matter with this. So what? They're setting up accounts. And some of these accounts actually said that they were U.S. government or CENTCOM at the time that they set them up. But in the time that passed between

when the requests were made and, well, now or even a year or two after the request in 2017, 17, some of these accounts changed their profiles, some of them, and managed to keep their verified status in some cases. But the bottom line is they started to conceal their U.S. government affiliation in order to spread the message about sometimes drone strikes in Yemen or anti-Iran messages in Iraq or promoting U.S.-backed militias in Syria to seemingly becoming either from the region or from individuals who wanted to amplify this. instead of the truth, which is that it was coming out of Centcom.

And then, so now, take me through and help me understand all these Twitter policies about what they're supposed to declare and win according to their own rules anyway? Well, one quality here is that a very simple one is that you're not supposed to be, if you're a verified account, you're not supposed to be changing your identity or concealing who you are. Now, with Twitter blue, obviously, and Elon Musk's experiments with selling subscriptions, some of that's been tested in ways that it perhaps hadn't in the past. But what this very much showed was that there was a policy within Twitter of looking the other way or choosing not to pay attention to what CENTCOM was doing with their verified accounts

and with accounts that were clearly trying to conceal who they were and their government affiliation. Now, what I actually find to be more concerning is that Twitter has been very public about, especially before Elon Musk's acquisition of the company, about their efforts to root out and to disclose state-backed misinformation or information campaigns, information operations, as they call them, on the social media platform. And they've done actually a pretty good job. I've reported on it in the past, and I appreciate how transparent they've been, that they've actually disclosed not just that these campaigns existed, but they've disclosed the substance of them. So you could actually see what these state-linked information operations were trying to push and the scale of them.

And they would at least sort of samples data sets of tweets and accounts. And they disclosed state-linked information operations from Russia, Iran, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Spain, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, a whole bunch of countries. The one country that they never disclosed was no U.S. government linked information operations. And what we can say, well, maybe they didn't detect it. Maybe they didn't know. They're not claiming that they were able to find all of these state-linked information operations. But this is where it gets kind of interesting. They actually did because they know that this information operation existed because they previously, via a data set that they released to Stanford University and some other researchers, I believe it was earlier

in the year, they actually were able to show that these researchers were able to detect these sent com operations. It made the news. It was in major media. And the interesting thing is, despite Twitter having provided this data to these researchers and it being written up in a number of publications, Twitter never put it on their website that's supposed to be where they list these state-linked information operations. And that continues to this very day under Elon Musk. So I would argue that not much has changed under Elon Musk. I don't believe that the disclosures that he made under the Twitter files when it comes to the state-linked information operations are all that different than what had already been disclosed to these research groups who proceeded to publish

their findings, which very much reflected what these internal emails that Twitter showed. And they still have not, under Elon Musk, added anything U.S. government linked to the state-linked information operations disclosures on the Twitter website. Well, and I mean, Musk has said, oh, the FBI? I like them mostly, you know, except for a couple things or something, which, in other words, He's not firing them. That's right. And, you know, and whether or not these pressures are being applied or whether he's feeling them right now, the truth is that he actually has, perhaps the U.S. government has a bit more leverage over him than they did over the previous management of Twitter because of Musk's SpaceX U.S. government contracts, which are really, really big.

It's a large portion of the company's revenue streams, at least especially going forward, are going to come from both NASA as well as DOD contracts for, satellite launches as well as launching astronauts right i mean it's funny because they could just cancel his contracts i don't know how many other options they have at this point um but they certainly could make life difficult for him and then what's funny is everybody knows right that there's no law it's all politics you know the first amendment you might think would protect a guy with a Twitter from being, you know, persecuted on his government contracts from his other company or something like that. But come on, that's not the way it works at all. If he makes the national security state angry, they're going to find ways to get back at him. And so, as Dan Rather

might say, he doesn't need a memo to tell him how close to the line he can skate, you know, without, in fact, I'm surprised he's gone as far as he's gone. But of course, it's sort of like the Pentagon Papers. It's all about the last guy's administration. Well, I think you're onto something there, that there's so much of this, that he wants to frame

it as being, look at what the previous management did. And that's very much, I think, why he chose to release, particularly all of the Twitter files, but this is the one that I think kind of shows the greatest degree of, well, frankly, hypocrisy. That he wants to say, well, hey, look look at the previous people. Here they are talking

the Sentcom. Here they are, greenlighting these accounts, white listing these accounts, never banning them. But then you look at, well, you know what? Obviously, you have access to this information. Now, you can suspend these accounts. Several these accounts are still operational, as Lee Fan pointed out. You could add data about them and disclose them on the state linked information operations portion of your website, which hasn't been updated since he took over the company. He hasn't done that. And it starts to raise questions about, so what is the point of this exercise? that you release this information that only kind of confirm what we already knew that the previous management's release of this information to outside researchers.

Again, the company didn't take any measures. It seems like to curb what was going on. But it's not like Musk has taken any efforts either, other than releasing the emails showing that these indeed were whitelisted by Twitter, which I think we all kind of guessed that by now. But the question is, do you intend to do anything about it? Do you intend to take any actions that the previous management did not take? Do you intend to actually shut this down? And do you intend to disclose it on your website in the ways that you disclose other state-linked

information operations from other countries? And so far, the answer to all those questions is that he's not interested in doing that and doesn't intend to take those actions. Yeah. You know, I have a buddy who, I mean, I know this guy. He's a Salt to the Earth kind of guy. He would never say a bad word or anything like that kind of a guy. and he got thrown off of Twitter

and that also goes for like he would never threaten anyone or cross any sort of term of service that you could think of. But he's an Armenian and he's terribly upset about what Azerbaijan is doing right now and that's what he talks about

and they kicked him right the hell off of Twitter like all the way one strike no appeal, you're done and you know like it had to have been the Azerbaijan lobby ratted on him right nobody else cares right there's it is almost certain that some law firm or some professional entity when you know Googling around looking for people who are crossing the Azerbaijan party line on Twitter and then tattletailing on those people and by hook or

crook trying to get them kicked off and it works right and you know what I have this sort of issue with the way that we talk about Twitter being, you know, a bastion of free speech or somehow or in many ways protected by the First Amendment. And in many respects, it's not. This is a private platform. And, you know, that is what it is. You can like it. You can dislike it. But I don't like it when it's misrepresented as being something that is upholding these values. And so far, I think, you know, Elon Musk, if he intends to make it this bastion of free speech that he talks about, he has a long ways to go. And I don't think that the disclosures that he's made through the Twitter files have thus far shown that he's any more committed to it. Because it actually

requires not just disclosure of what the previous management did, at least the previous administration, the previous management did. It requires taking tangible steps to show that you're not going to make the same mistakes and that you're going to try to address these problems. And unsusbanding a few accounts of provocateurs is maybe that's a nice first step. But if you're concerned about free speech absolutism, but it also means, you know, living up to your own company policies about transparency around state-linked information operations, if that's something that you still claim is important. Now, that's something the previous management policy was, is that they said, and, you know, credit to them, they did at least say this was an important

issue, that, you know, state-linked information operations is something that they don't want on their platform and that they think it's important that the public knows about. And what would be nice to see now is him sort of follow up on that policy and show that he's willing to go further with it that the previous management was and that would involve actually disclosing that the U.S. government has used the platform as part of state-linked information operations.

Yeah. Well, I'm not going to be happy until they turn that hall over to Ali Abu Nima because that's what I'm most interested in. Aren't you interested in the Israelis' role in getting Palestinians and their partisans silenced on this thing? Absolutely. It seemed as if they had a rather direct line to Twitter to try to shut down accounts.

So I think a variety of folks did. I suspect the Saudis had a pretty direct line as well. When you say it appears, based off of what? Oh, just the speed with which accounts seemed to have been shut down when they had, for instance, talked about Palestinian rights, when they had been, in some cases, critical of MBS. Accounts seemed to be shut down in very selective ways. And I think that, you know, if that's because of just Biden, these within Twitter, that's one thing. It's another thing that there were actually requests coming

from foreign governments to shut down these accounts. And I strongly suspect that that probably is the case. Yeah. Well, and like I was sort of daydreaming there, you know, imagining what probably happened here, right? Is how does any foreign government operate in the United States? Well, they hire a law firm, or they hire a PR firm or a lobbying group, and then they just act as unregistered foreign agents and do the intervening, right? Yeah, or registered foreign agents, for that matter. Yeah, which is, you know, if you take the registered and the unregistered, you're talking about the entire population of Washington, D.C. at this point.

It sure seems apparent that the foreign lobbies have more sway than the American people do in any meaningful sense. You know what I mean? If you look at... Oh, absolutely. And, I mean, all you have to do is, you know, and I'm not. saying it's everything, but when you look at the sums of money being put into, you know, into the registered foreign agents, I mean, it's tens of millions of dollars coming from especially Gulf countries every single year. And, you know, you think about it, say, well, is that a lot or is a little? And you got to think, well, it's kind of relative, right? I mean, okay, so, you know, let's say the Saudis spent $20, $30 million in a year on registered lobbyists. And you think,

well, okay, that in the big scheme of things, that's not a lot of money, considering the scale of Saudi's economy, considering the scale of the weapons that they're trying to get a congressional approval for being exported to Saudi Arabia. You know, maybe it's not that much money. But then you think, like, well, you know, it isn't. And they're getting a huge return on. And who's on the other side of that? You know, most lobbies exist in competitive spaces. This might not be that competitive, the foreign lobby market, as it were. And, you know, when the Saudis dump a few million dollars in, they're probably getting a very big outsized return. on that spending in terms of their ability to shape U.S. policy, I think it's same for the United Arab Emirates as well.

Yeah, no question. I mean, you see it, I remember, well, my whole life, not just, you know, the first time, but I'm always kind of florida about how low, how small the donations are that make such a difference. We're like, man, look, this senator gets more money from Lockheed than his, you know, the five closest guys next to him. And it's $50,000 a year. Exactly. That's all it takes to buy one of these guys, a couple of nickels, that don't even belong to that, a bunch of taxpayer nickels, they're recycling back into the bribe machine for just, you know, not even pennies on the dollar. It's ridiculous.

No, I think that's such an important thing to look at and to contemplate, well, why is that? Assuming that people are putting this money to members of Congress or into lobbying operations, because they do think there's a tangible return on it. Why is it that such small sums of money seem to make such a difference? And I think that, again, I go back to there's nobody on the other side spending money. And putting aside the money issue so much, there's also just, they see very little cost in any other political sense, right? That what's the downside to doing what Lockheed Martin wants? What's the downside to doing what Saudi Arabia wants?

And it might just be that there's just not that much costs there. You know, it's all upside, as it were. Now, does it make the world a worse place, quite possibly? Does it make U.S. national security perhaps worse, quite possibly? Does it reallocate, you know, taxpayer dollars in ways that are probably a pretty poor return for taxpayers, quite possibly? But those aren't things where you really feel the cost immediately as a politician or maybe at all.

And I think that's one of the reasons that these relatively small sums of money can just seem like, well, it's all pure upside to just, you know, do what these lobbies want. and that, yeah, the amounts of money involved can be laughably low. You know, it's interesting to me. I mean, I guess once you're a millionaire, certainly a billionaire, you have too much at stake. But, well, certainly for a billionaire, but it seems like there are enough millionaires in this country. There's, what, 50,000 millionaires or something in America, something like that. Some huge number.

It seems like there would be enough who would say, well, what the hell? I'll do it. I'll put up a fund for, hey, if you're afraid that you're going to lose A-PAC money, if you vote against them on something, don't worry about it. We got your back. Just let us know, and we'll fill in that gap. They gave you $5,000 last time. We'll give you $10,000 this time if you're going to vote your conscience instead of the way a foreign lobbyist insists and just sounds affordable, frankly, yeah? Well, you know, I think it's, I mean, I think this is kind of an interesting question. We're well off topic here, but I love this conversation. But I think that there's this. quality that, you know, funders are drawn to, understandably, I think, to addressing the biggest lobbies, right? That, you know, they see the oil and gas lobby. They see the gun lobby.

And those companies and those organizations, they spend a lot, regardless of which side of the issues you're on. You can see that there's a lot of, there's a lot of resources going into that. So I think, for whatever reasons, they're drawn to trying to counter those lobbies, which cost a lot more money. for a variety of reasons. Maybe they just are higher, you know, ranked in people's minds as social issues. They're just, you know, they're just more lightning rod issues for people.

What can I say, you know? You know, abortion, same-sex marriage, guns, taxes. These are things that, you know, most people have a strong opinion about. And that obviously, I think, increases the amount of money that's on either side of these lobbies. But it also means that, you know, people when they want to counteract one side of that are more willing to put money in. Whereas, you know, Saudi Arabia or A-PAC, UAE, you know, that's just something that, you know, frankly, just fewer people, I think, you know, rank as a high, you know, salience issue for them. It's not, these are just not the lightning rod issues that the most, you know, people engaged in politics are, it's not their first and foremost issue that they care about. I think it's unfortunate because, you know, these are issues that actually do impact people a lot.

They impact people around the world, for that matter. And they impact, yeah, they impact our national security, they impact our economy. they have so many, so many impacts on, on Americans' lives. But I think that degree of detachment, you know, the fact that there's Twitter accounts that are tweeting about drone strikes in Yemen, most Americans would say, well, why do I care? You know, after publishing the article I did about it, a lot of people were saying, well, good, I see no issues, sent com can do what they want. You know, this is about a war on the other side of the world.

Why should we care what the U.S. government is doing with Twitter? Well, I love these examples, right? These examples are propaganda against Iran in Iraq where you might remember that we fought two full, full-scale wars for Iran in Iraq, 2003 through 8 or 11, however you count that. And then 2014 through 18, America fought as Iran's Air Force and Ground Force inside Iraq. And then the other cases were support for anti-Iranian, that is, bin Ladenite suicide bomber forces in Syria, and propaganda justifying killing innocent people with drones in Yemen, which is what everyone knows about the drone war in Yemen, which is the barely even a war at all compared to the real war in Yemen that America's been waging there with Saudi and UAE since. 2015, the little old barely anything drone war that was an absolute atrocity already, that was over. You know, that's 2009 through 15 there through 14. So it's, yeah, worthy of note, right, that what we're talking about here is propaganda to justify absolutely unjustifiable things

that our government is doing to innocent people, exploding them to death. That's right. And, you know, again, let's go back to sort of, you know, so Twitter's podcast. policies around this, you know, that, so I actually talked with, you know, somebody who used to work at trust and safety at Twitter, and he said, well, you know, we did disclose it because that, that CENTCOM was doing this, because we shared it with these independent researchers. And I said, well, okay, that's good, but, you know, so why didn't you put it on your list of state-backed information operations and didn't have an answer? And I think we should be asking the same question of Elon Musk now, you know, that there's a lot of,

and I understand a lot of people want to pat him on the back for the Twitter files, and I think it's mostly a healthy thing that there is, you know, daylight on some of this. But pretty quickly needs to be. So do you intend to do anything about this? Or is this really about, you know, selling some scores and, you know, about the last guy? Because, you know, what, you bought the company. This is now your problem as well. You don't get to say, oh, I push reset now and we just start over on everything. You know, so do you still have a policy against state backed information operations or not? I can tell you one thing, my ads that I see on Twitter now are hugely shifted since Elon Musk took over because as advertisers have pulled out, the ones that have remained awfully heavy on people who want to sell me real estate in Dubai and telling me about how MBS's Dream City Neum is going to be great.

I'm getting pushed these ads all day long. So, I mean, I think we should start to ask, you know, what's going on here? who's paying for the ads now? And again, are you serious about disclosing state fact information operations? And if so, the bare minimum seems like, so you wanted to disclose the ones that you wanted to score some points off of through the Twitter files. You know, you've already disclosed it. He's already retweeted about it. He's retweeted Lee talking about the sentcom operations. So, you know, do you intend to do anything about it or not? Because some of the accounts, as I was saying, they're still active. well and i mean there's a what should be a huge scandal right now is this Palestinian journalist saeed ericat he uh well tell us about him i'm sure you know more about him than i do but this is a big deal going on right this minute uh i haven't been following it too closely i've just seen some of the top lines about it so what why don't you tell me what i mean i think you've been

following it more closely so he's um i guess he's al kud's al arabi which is you know the guy that interviewed bin Laden, the absolutely fantastic journalistic enterprise out of England there, if it's the right thing I'm thinking of here. And they're Washington correspondent, I guess their State Department correspondent, you know, more than anything. His name is Saeed Arachat, and he's been banned from Twitter without explanation. They just kicked him right the hell off at Twitter. And this is a guy who, you know, I don't know, someone the audience might be picturing some angry person with a green bandana and an AK-47 or something, but this guy sits next to Matt Lee from the Associated Press at the State Department

briefings every day in a coat and a tie. I've seen him. I mean, he's very level ahead of it. There's nothing extreme going on there. Absolutely not. Yeah, he's what you would think of a guy, you know, in his late 60s or early 70s, who's a journalist for a living. is he looks like exactly what he is. You know what I mean?

And then, so in other words, he didn't call anybody a bad word or cross, make any threats, or cross any line. He's not some partisan of Hamas or something. He writes for Al-Quds Al-Arabi, for Christ's sake. Might as well be the New York Times. Well, okay, that's not fair to Al-Quds Al-Arabi. But, I mean, they're good people. Nobody suspects them of being, you know, Islamist, terrorist, simps, or anything. like that they're good journalists there yeah i mean and i think that that's you know it's been time

and time again we've seen Palestinians and Palestinian journalists who seem to you know run a foul more quickly i should say to put it nicely of you know twitter's trust and safety policies in being suspended um it i mean it's really quite noticeable and that's something that certainly predates Elon Musk but it seems to be ongoing uh again i just come back to this you know it's like okay you know Elon Musk wants to talk about things that have happened at Twitter that shouldn't have happened. But you only get to blame the last guy for so long before eventually it's like, well, you know, as I say, like these accounts that were set up by centcom, they're still operating. Right. At a certain point, you don't get to blame the last guy for that. Yeah, seriously.

Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton Show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition

needs, too. That's libertosbella.com. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian. Institute.org. I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Bovard, Connor, Connor Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick McFarlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spliet, Kim Robinson, and William Van Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abol.

nuclear weapons and Keith Knight's new Voluntarius Handbook and we've got quite a few more great ones coming soon check out libertarian institute.org slash books it's a whole new era we libertarians don't have the power but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right join us at libertarian institute.org well and as you said and I'm glad it's so important that you wrote it in your article and that you mentioned it here is that this is not a self-made man and this is a guy who's made his money even you know his car company at least at first i don't know all the details of this but was very dependent on federal government kickbacks for people who buy these cars at what would be otherwise unaffordable

prices in the market and then you know his his major thing especially now that it's you know the boom has busted and tesla stock and twitter stock prices are through the floor and everything he's more dependent on the pentagon than ever before for and i fact in fact i think i saw a tweet where he he said let me see if i can find it because it would be right here near the top here where he celebrated the um the huge number of uh rocket launches in the last year was 60 rockets went up or something he says launch 61 of 2022 congratulations to SpaceX so we're talking billions of dollars there and we're talking about without that they could somehow cut him off or at least make life much more difficult for him there that could be his entire enterprise

comes unraveled from that especially right now when they're raising interest rates and all of that funny money that they pumped into the stock market and and especially tech stocks and all that is coming crashing down right now i mean i think that's such an important point and you know linking it again to the tesla stock prices which is you know there's another Yes, you're right. You're exactly right that there were government subsidies that helped get Tesla to where it is now. And Tesla is also struggling now because you can do pretty well as a company if you're the only one really in the market and you're getting government subsidies, which is what Tesla got to enjoy for years. The portions of time in which actually their stock price went up the greatest. Well, right now, some of those government subsidies are being pulled back. Some of them are still there. But I think more importantly, Tesla is now facing the fact that there's competition. You know, the major automotive companies are now getting into that market. And they actually have experience in bringing cars to market that are safe, that are reliable, that have pretty good quality control, and that they can do it on pretty low margin.

And that puts Elon Musk in a tough spot because he hasn't had to deal with that until now. And he bought Twitter for what's probably an overinflated price. his major source of wealth is tanking with the Tesla stock prices, and the one reliable thing he has are these government contracts that they go out for several years. I've looked at them for SpaceX launches from both DOD and NASA. That's a private company SpaceX, so he's not subjected to more cases in quite the same way. He's getting government contracts that are pretty reliable. And so as a portion of his revenue streams, that's becoming more and more significant and important. I mean, you just saw that Tesla is now offering basically, you know, huge rebates if you buy a car by the end of the year

because they need to kind of juice up their sales before the end of the year, the end of 2020. You know, they are taking actions that suggest, I wouldn't say desperation, but, you know, really trying to turn things around as aggressively as they can. SpaceX is one of the things he has that's reliable and that may actually turn out to be one of his greatest, greater sources of reliable wealth, as he needs to pay some pretty big, you know, interest on the financing for Twitter, which, doesn't seem like it's going to be profitable in the very near future. So how he plugs that hole is, I think, something we should all be paying a lot of attention to, both in terms of his

U.S. government contracts, but also in terms of his, you know, foreign involvement with foreign investors and foreign governments as well. You know, the Saudis are major investors in Twitter. The Saudis and the Saudis are clearly buying a lot of ads right now on Twitter. He's got huge investments in China making Tesla's in factories over there, too. Absolutely. Absolutely. And he's awfully quiet about, you know, he's a free speech absoluteist. until you ask him about China and then he gets awfully quiet yeah um in fact um kately johnstone had a thing about how he had been um you know avowedly supporting the EU speech rules that would be you know totally anathema here right that he's been you know a huge booster

of them in fact um not just like quietly acquiescing to jeez whatever you say guys but and i'm not sure how far those go, but they certainly don't have the First Amendment. They certainly don't. I mean, it's almost, you start to wonder, does he actually believe in this stuff, or does you just talk about it when he thinks he has an audience that wants to hear it? And you know what, though, like, I mean, not to project too much onto the guy from other people's things and whatever, but, you know, you can see how people from sort of the center left, in reaction to the woke, they turn into basically like center-right Ben Shapiro type Republicans, which nowadays is counterculture because the liberals are the dominant culture. So now, as they

put it, being right-wing as punk rock or whatever. And so then this is like the intellectual dark web is people like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, who all they've done really is move one click to the right. They haven't really learned anything at all. They just got repelled by the left enough to be, you know, not even necessarily Republicans now, right? But just this

I mean, I think what you're kind of pointing to is this quality that, you know, I've seen a more extreme example, I think, is David Horowitz, right? Who was a far leftist? Well, yeah, I mean, no, he's a total neoconservative. I think this is a little bit different because I'm not really talking about leftists. I'm talking about liberal.

is this idea that in reaction to not liking what you saw in the political space you're in, that your solution is, well, why don't I just switch sides to the mere image of it on your side? As opposed to addressing, well, how did I wind up here? And what are the actual things I don't like? And how do I want to fix them? But the solution, I mean, we're getting pretty philosophical here is I think it's pretty rarely that I just need to flip, I just need to flip the script and go to the other side of it. That probably doesn't actually address the issues that you're concerned about.

Well, she has a libertarian, I'm all for everybody. abandoning whatever it was they used to believe in. But yeah, switching from one side to the other ain't much you know and going from you know. And let's be honest, you're not engaging in a lot of critical thought to just say I'm just going to switch sides. Yeah. And look

I get it too that the guy is some kind of genius who knows what his IQ count is or whatever but you'd be a hell of an engineer. You could have read every book in the library. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have wisdom or you know a sympathetic point of view or

that you know how to balance these are those values very well. You might just be really good at putting cars together and launching rockets, you know? That is always possible. It is pretty rare to find somebody who's good at all of those things. And you can see, too, how like, I mean, this guy, Jordan Peterson, I'm going to make a lot of enemies, you know, people listening now are going to be mad at me for this. But here's a guy to me who I don't understand how he's impressive to anyone except himself. He's like one of these guys who just says the same thing every.

everybody already knows only with really big words. I got to go look up in a glossary somewhere. And then I go, oh, yeah, I already knew that. Everybody knows that. But it's like this avant-garde thing to be into him instead of the conventional wisdom you'd get from CNN or your other college professors or whatever, the kind of center-left dominant narrative now. But if you look at just how like reactionary or or not even that, but, you know, how different he is, I mean, he claimed himself that like, oh, no, I'm a Canadian socialist type. I'm not a right winger, you know? I just, again, anti-woke stuff. But he was always like, what they call like a Christian Democrat or whatever. You know what I mean? Those kind. Anyway, but people go, wow. Something a little bit different. I'm blown away.

That's the thing. You can't go too different. Yeah. I guess not. And maybe we're seeing that at Twitter, you know? It's like you're willing to talk about the problems of the past, but are you really willing to go different and actually make a difference and actually change things? Right. And look, there's a point of view, too, that's fair enough, especially for a guy as influential as this guy, that if he's going to completely turn against the left and the right and be a libertarian, well does that mean he wants the libertarian party to run and win the presidency and all these things he's not going to get invested in stuff like that i'm like the libertarian party's not supported by any billionaires at all you know it's a which just goes to show how much billionaires like free markets they don't very much um but you know what i mean like there would be all kinds of things kind of if or if he was to move further left or whatever be all these other questions built in with that so yeah yeah he

the space for him to move, if he's going to move from MSNBC, it's only going to be one channel over, you know? I mean, and if you're Elon Musk, you could only move so far and expect to continue to have the U.S. government as one of your biggest clients. Yeah. So that would be an interesting challenge, right? It would be like the Elon Musk, make it in the free market challenge and see if he could be a successful businessman without having the captive U.S. government as his market, you know?

Well, we're getting to see what happens with Tesla when there's. actually competitors. Right. Yeah, that's true. And bad timing, too, for him that they're all coming to market with these cars right at the time that the stock market's crashing after its massive liquid injection bubble height air. It's definitely, definitely a pretty dangerous combination for Tesla. I mean, I'm not an expert on finance, but I think you're exactly right.

It's a perfect storm for Tesla. that they've been operating essentially without competition now that you have pretty much every major automobile manufacturer around the world coming to market just now with cars that are competitively priced they all intend to do it at scale and the stock market is inflating and it's like well who do you think who do you think in this in this scenario is going to be able to afford to to go longer Tesla the startup or the major automobile manufacturers who have been through booms and bust before Right. Yeah, exactly right. And who definitely have the political connections, you know, built in over generations that he's, you know, very jealous of and would like to have one day. But so anyway, before I let you go, I did want to ask you real quick about this one that you wrote at Responsible Statecraft. DC Think Tank puts hawkish former Aussie PM on China Center Board. And, you know, just not long ago, I was. reading this article by this china hawk and i was like man this guy's completely demented what in the hell am i reading and then at the end of it it was scott morrison the former prime minister of australia and i was like oh my god this guy's bananas and then now uh turns out he's got a jab too other than uh sitting in the parliament over there man can you fill us in real quick well yeah i mean that's exactly what it is he's a sitting member of part let's put aside

the fact that he's the former prime minister. He's a sitting member of parliament in Australia. And he just was put on the China Center board at the Hudson Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C. It's a sort of hawkish think tank. And their China center is, needless to say, hawkish. The other board members are Mike Pompeo and Paula Dobryonski. And, you know, this kind of raises some interesting questions about, you know, well, how or if

the Foreign Agent Registration Act is enforced. because by all outward appearances, the Hudson Institute's China Center is now an agent of a foreign principle. It doesn't matter if that foreign principle is the prime minister of a foreign country or an ice cream salesman in Sydney, as was put to me by one of the experts. The point is, he's a foreigner. He's not a U.S. resident or a U.S. citizen. He's advising it, according to the name of the board is, which is the advisory board. And, you know, what is that relationship then? Because if it is a principal agent relationship, you know, then by all definitions, Scott Morrison is a foreign principal. And the Hudson Institute would need to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act and disclose the nature of that relationship and the substance of what public materials come out of both of it.

Now, what's really interesting in the reporting is that I actually talked to the former head of Farah Enforcement from the Justice Department. He's now in private practice. And he said, you know what? like if I just saw this and I was still at the Justice Department, I would devote some resources to looking at it because this is like becoming, you know, as close to effectively, I'm paraphrasing him, but, you know, this really looks like, you know, a think tank that's nearly thumbing its nose of the Foreign Agent Registration Act because you can't get any more explicit about this than you're having a member of parliament from Australia advising the China Center at Hudson Institute.

What is this? Yeah, that's nuts. How odd is that compared to the status quo with, I mean, I know that, for example, the Atlantic Council is completely full of foreigners who are acting as de facto agents of a foreign power, even if they're not currently sitting members of parliament. Maybe there are some currently sitting members of parliament over there. Well, you know, it's one thing to be a member of the Atlantic Council to even write or be associated with them and be a foreign principle. The question is, are you directing actions being taken by the organization? Are you acting as, is there a principal, is there a principal agent relationship? Yeah.

And so that would be like, that would be sort of like, you know, well, what if the Hudson Institute had a sitting member of parliament for a foreign country? It doesn't matter if they're even a member of parliament, but a foreigner on their actual board. That's kind of what you'd be looking for. Yeah. So I understand what you're saying about sort of foreign influence in Washington. and, you know, Atlantic Council also gets a lot of funding from foreign governments, as does the Hudson Institute, a bunch of think tanks in Washington. It's something I've written about.

I think it's actually hugely problematic. And the Quincy Institute, I might add, does not take money from foreign governments. But I think that, you know, the question about the funding, they can always dodge the fairer aspect by saying, well, just because I'm funded by them doesn't mean that I'm their agent. You know, it doesn't mean that money comes with any strings attached. Now we can all, you know, wink and nod at something like that because we all kind of know probably how that plays out. But, you know, from a strictly legal standpoint, it's possible there is no contract that they're going to produce, you know, work on X, Y, or Z or push

certain issues. Right. Now, when you have a foreigner directing a program or advising a program, that's getting awfully close to something where it's like, how is this not a principal agent relationship? You'd have to, that's more the question now is how is it not that? You know, one time, Eli, I went to this thing. I can't remember what event it was, But then afterwards, we all went to the bar to drink. And this guy said, you know what we need to do? Oh, it was in D.C., an event in D.C. And that guy said, you know what our faction needs to do here?

We got to raise money from foreign governments. You know, the kind of people who are on the outs with the American Empire. Get them to give us some real money because they're governments. They have it. And that way we can really form our own kind of lobby and think they. And I'm like, this guy's an FBI agent. Get him away from me, right? Like, what does he say?

Well, I don't want anything to do with this. And everybody don't try. Trust this guy. I don't know who he was, but I don't like that. The idea that the anti-war movement would take money, what? We're going to, from the Ayatollah is going to support, you know, the Libertarian Institute so I can write stuff about how he's not making nukes. No, I don't want that. I can't take, what kind of conflict of interest with that race? There's no way in the world. And yet for the Hawks, of course. But that's such an outside-the-beltway perspective that you're bringing here.

within Washington, I think it's actually more normal than outside the norm. You know, I think that just kind of goes without saying, is that if you're looking for funding, you know, you try to figure out in some cases which foreign governments would be willing to support your work. That's just crazy. It's just wild. But I think it's far more common than we actually, you know, realize in many cases. I mean, was there ever time in history or would it be just totally insane if I was the president that I'd pass? the law, we have a thing where, look, if a foreign government wants to talk to our government,

they can have their ambassador talk to our state department. And that's it. And it would be illegal for them to donate money to a think tank full of Americans, register as a foreign agent and all of this stuff. No, they can send their ambassador. Well, I would be happy if these think tanks, when they take the foreign money, if they are indeed taking direction about what they intend to use it for, And if it's being used to influence the public debate, to disclose it under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

I think that there is, I think there's a vast under registration and under enforcement of the act. You know, I don't think Americans, you know, understand or would accept the idea that if you were to say to them, listen, you know how it is in Washington. It's ruled by the most powerful lobbies like banking and agribusiness, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Germany, England, and whatever. People would be like, what? The gun lobby, the AARP, and the Germans spend a ton of money influencing how Congress votes. Well, look, some of those things don't belong on that list, like all of those foreign governments, don't belong on that list. Whatever you think of the gun lobby, pro or con, or whatever you think of the old people lobby, pro or con, those are Americans. This is our country.

What the hell are we even talking about? Yeah. I mean, I think there is, you know, growing public awareness, which is the one positive thing I can say right now is, you know, there is legislation that's been introduced that would try to curb some of this by requiring think tanks to disclose their foreign government funding. And even also prohibiting former executive branch officials and members of Congress from going through the revolving door and going and working for foreign governments in their lobbying operations after they leave government. So I think that there is growing concern and, you know, say what you will about. I think a lot of bad things came out of Russiagate and out of the Trump years in terms of how we talked about foreign influence. But, you know, people's concerns about it have gone up. And, you know, I think that is one of the few constructive measures I've seen that people are trying to take hold of is, you know, hey, maybe there is a problem with the think tank sector. And that's something that the national intelligence agencies as well have apparently been talking about in classified reports that the Washington Post reported on, which were really interesting. John Hudson did some great reporting on it, which is basically saying that the intelligence agencies are seeing, among other foreign influence concerns specifically by the UAE, their funding of think tanks, and that they see this as being a potential U.S. national security threat because of the ways in which the UAE has managed to sort of ingratiate itself in Washington through a variety of methods, but the think tanks being one of them. So I think that, hey, the fact that Congress, the fact the intelligence agencies, and I don't look to them as exactly always the most ethical of the greatest, excuse me, or the best measure of our concern about foreign influence.

But the fact that they are publicly talking about it and sounding the alarm, hey, that's better than where we were a year or two ago. Right. And look, now we all have our sites. And you know what? And they happen to be right. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and now thanks to you, we all have our sites trained on the Australia Lob.

those welfare mongers they just want a bunch of free submarines and this guy wants his kickback Morrison got to stop them all right uh thank you man you're great eli for i don't know how many 10 15 years i've been dependent on you and your great journalism uh thank you again for your time on the show hey thank you so much the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a ps radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.