Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/6/23 Matt Taibbi on the Judge's New Injunction Against the Censorship State

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Matt Taibbi joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about the injunction compelling the Federal Government to stop contacting social media companies. Taibbi was one of the journalists instrumental in exposing a lot of the government activity cited in the lawsuit. He explains to Scott what the government was doing.  Discussed on the show: “Take That, Internet Censors!” (Racket News) “If You're Not With Us, You're MAGA” (Racket News) 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: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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

For Pacifica Radio, July 6th, 20203, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. And I'm the author of Enough Already, Time. to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them

now, going back 20 years at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show and the rest of the video sites and stuff too. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. All right. Introducing our guest, it's the great Matt Taibi from racket.com news and author of Hate, Inc. about the media as well. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Matt? Thanks for having me on, Scott. Very happy to have you here. And big congratulations to you. This is what I think journalism is for, and especially your style of journalism, too. Man, did you really get her done this time? And I know it's not the final say, but it's a big deal. So tell us about the case of Missouri versus Biden and Judge Terry Doty. Yeah, I mean, I'm very reluctant to say that this is a journalism inspired thing. But in parallel to the Twitter file, story that I worked on beginning at the end of the last year with Barry Weiss and Michael

Schellenberger and some other folks. There was a lawsuit that was developing that was instigated by a pair of attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri where they basically sued a whole range of actors in the federal government accusing them of being involved in a what they call censorship enterprise and um the judge the judge in the case yesterday terry dowdy federal judge in western district of louisiana handed down an order basically in joining nearly all of the defendants but but a huge range of actors from agencies like the global engagement center DHS, the FBI, SISA, all kinds of people from doing all the stuff basically that we describe in the Twitter files, reaching out to these companies, sending them content moderation requests

and holding over the threat of regulation and all kinds of other stuff. So it feels like basically a judge is putting a halt to all this stuff that people said wasn't even happening over the summer. So it was quite a ruling. It felt like a lot of validation for a lot of us. Yeah, good. Well, look, I know you're very modest and don't like taking credit, but you deserve to gloat because, of course, you spearheaded this effort. And as you just mentioned, and as you mentioned in your writing, of course, there's this whole list of other journalists who helped you on this. But the Twitter files, well, go ahead and tell people who didn't hear about it. Can you kind of paint a little mosaic? I like the way you write about it

in your recent piece at racket.news, Matt, you talk about how well. At first, we weren't exactly sure what we're looking at. The more and more files are giving us. It's kind of paint this picture of, wow, all these agencies, what exactly are they doing? And it begins to really come clear to you. So make it clear to us what it is we're talking about. Sure. So at the end of November and early December of last year, I got invited to go to Twitter and look through the files of the old company. And apart from the first story, which was kind of jointly agreed upon, we decided to look at the episode involving the Hunter Biden exposé and the suppression of it by Twitter, you know, the one that the New York Post wrote. After that, it was just a whole bunch of us

looking at sort of a gigantic pile of emails and Slackchats and other stuff. And we had to make sense of what we were looking at. And in the course of doing that, we ended up with this basic plot where we thought what we were seeing was Twitter did not want to be involved in a mass censorship exercise, but they were dealing with pressure from the Senate Intelligence Committee and some other folks that suggested that they would be regulated if they didn't go along. And before long, they instituted this very sophisticated system by which they were getting requests to take action on thousands of accounts by groups all across the government. I mean, it went through the FBI and the DHS for the most part, but it was like a huge range

of agencies that were sending these spreadsheets full of requests. And as you say, a lot of us we were, we were looking at this and thinking, we can't report this because nobody's going to believe it. It's too weird. But as it turned out, you know, the people who were investigating this lawsuit basically found the same thing. And they came to their conclusions through a completely different means. And so that, that felt pretty good. I mean, I think what we were looking at was a very sophisticated, kind of nascent cross-government censorship scheme that if nobody had intervened would have become kind of like a Ministry of Truth type of thing. What do you mean that they came about all their information through a completely different means?

So the investigators in Missouri v. Biden were looking at different documents. They had a series of plaintiffs. Several of them were doctors who got and who were suppressed because they had different opinions about vaccine mandates or the efficacy of the vaccines. There was one person from the Gateway Pundit. But most of what they got, they either got through subpoenas of communications, let's just say, like from White House officials to the companies or from the Census Bureau or from the Global Engagement Center, or they came from depositions. interviews of various characters who were involved in the case. So while we were mostly, we were pretty limited to getting the primary information from emails at Twitter, they were

getting it through subpoenas and interviews with principals. And, you know, they had people explaining to them what was going on in a way that we didn't have the advantage of that at first. I see. Well, they must have been guided by what they were reading in your journalism and the rest. too beyond that discovery. Yeah, maybe that's possible. But I think clearly, you know, the theory of their case, which you can see the way it evolved in the various complaints, you know, they had a number of versions of their original lawsuit.

I think the last amended complaint was from May of this year. But you can see they came around basically to this idea that the government was, had built up these companies by giving them these huge direct or indirect subsidies in the form of like Section 230 protections or failure to prosecute them for antitrust violations and basically said, you know, hey, if you don't do this stuff, we're going to take those subsidies away. And next thing you know, they're taking direction on all kinds of topics. And that's the thing that's kind of amazing about this, is that it wasn't limited to COVID or election misinformation.

It's like this whole bizarre range of stuff that they got their fingers in, which I think even now, the public hasn't grasped how vast an enterprise it was. Yeah. So, in fact, just to read from your recent piece

here at racket.news, you're essentially paraphrasing one of the plaintiffs here. And he just lists a few topics here from gender ideology to abortion to mom. monetary policy to the war in Ukraine and beyond. Absolutely.

And, you know, you talk about monetary policy, you know, the justification for some of the thinking behind content moderation on financial topics is we want to prevent panics. We want to, we want to prevent a situation where people run for the exits because they're scared about news that might be coming out of the financial. sector, well, you know, that's a recipe for disaster. If they're going to be shielded from bad news that might lead them to disinvest, what kind of a market do you have in that in that case? And in the case of the Ukraine thing, you know, one of the things that we found, the Ukrainian Secret Services sent the American government a list of figures that they felt needed to be taken

off the internet. And one of them was Aaron Mate. They just sent the FBI a list and the FBI forwarded this to Twitter. Now, Twitter didn't take action, but that tells you a lot about how the FBI perceives its role in all of this. And that is just amazing. And in fact, I'm really glad you brought that up because I wasn't able to arrange an interview with him on that crucial topic. But I wanted to make sure somebody touched that base on here at some point. The FBI, you say, Matt Taibi, they took that request from the government in Kiev, and they passed it on to Twitter. This is a list of people we want kicked off a Twitter, including this Canadian journalist. Yeah, the first time we saw those communications, I actually thought we misread them at first.

I thought at first the FBI was saying to Twitter, hey, you know, they wanted this, but feel free to not do it or something along those lines. But they weren't. They were sending it in earnest. They were like, we're forwarding these requests. And then, you know, the list that they gave them was a huge long spreadsheet of actors, which included, by the way, some pretty anonine Russian voices, just odd stuff. And I think what you see with all these censorship schemes is that once they get rolling, they just get in this groove where they want to add more and more names. And that's not a good thing. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about, first of all, the workaround, as you've already sort of described it here, and what the judge said about the work around here.

as I gather from all your great reporting that what we have as you said they had these carrots and sticks gee it'd be a shame we had to keep hauling you up before congress and just even threatening your stock price there it'd be a shame if we had to open antitrust investigations into your business or you know hey I'm sure you really enjoy this section this and that protection that you're getting now as they do and then they have all these you know all the evil mr burns is in the government rubbing their hands together and saying, oh, here's what we'll do. We'll just, you know, have cutout companies do all this work for us. We'll get Stanford University somehow to take the lead and all of these groups.

And I think you guys did this thing of like the dirty 50 of these things. There's an endless list of these NGOs and university groups and whatever. But then the idea is the government can get away with violating the Bill of Rights because it's not them doing it's these private organizations and as you even describe them they're sending requests and so even if they're threatening twitter that that's a nice headquarters you have there be ashamed of it burnt down kind of thing at the same time they're still just asking nicely and so is that the same thing as violating congress shall make no law and so then did i characterize that sort of right and then what is

the judge say about that, Matt Taibi? Well, he's pretty negative about it. I mean, he goes through a long list of citations of cases talking about the government is basically barred from what they call significant encouragement. Like, there's one case of the Lee versus the Macon County Board of Education. I'll just read one of the lines from it. It's axiomatic that a state may not induce and courage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.

So in other words, we can't get somebody else to do it just because we can't do it. It's like it's the same argument oddly enough that, you know, came up in the Alan Dershowitz reversal of fortune case. Like, you know, you can't get private investigators to break into a house to do a search just because you can't get a search warrant. Like, it doesn't work that way. And the judge looked at this. entire scheme and basically conclude clearly this is this is not innocent

communication this is an organized scheme where you know for instance you have the FBI agent talking about how we succeed with 50% of our requests and that sort of thing you the use of cutouts and the and the fact that they had disclaimers like oh at your sole discretion you made decide that this is a violation of returns of service those that's not good enough i mean i think that was one of the things that we found with the twitter files is we published this stuff we didn't even have to say it was it was a violation of the first amendment ordinary people looked at it and they said we we don't like that we think that sucks and now here's the here's the judge saying

well you think that for a reason because it's illegal and uh there's obviously going to be a fight about it, but I agree with them. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic habanero, honey habanero, pineapple habanero, Poblano Halapeno, and the Blood Orange Ghost.

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Yeah, I mean, that's the whole reason for having a bill of rights is because they're going to get carried away and they got to come up against a brick wall somewhere. And the best invention we got so far is black robe judges who can't be fired for overruling these people, that's basically it, you know, our last stand. Right. And here's another thing that drives me crazy about this,

which is you see the mainstream media reaction to this ruling, you saw the reaction to the Twitter files reporting and to this lawsuit. All throughout, they've been behaving as though this reporting or the lawsuit or whatever that we're the radicals who are creating some kind of new wild standard of, you know, permissibility and impinging upon normal government behavior. No, what they're doing is completely radical. And I would say ordinary American sort of ACLU liberals, even 10 years ago, would have thought this sort of vast system of organized, preemptive interference in the speech landscape, they would have considered that absolutely insane not that long ago and now you know it's just normal i mean

again you go back to a case like brandonburg v ohio or something like that where they set the standard for you know when do we stop incitement they set that bar incredibly high and here it's so low like they they were getting involved with everything for no reason at all so and by the way it reminded me in reading your piece where you point that out it reminded me of all the accusations against Edward Snowden, who, back 10 years ago, revealed to Greenwald at all about the NSA spying on us all. And for all their vilification of him, the federal courts ruled that all this stuff is unconstitutional. Wherever anybody could find standing to sue, they won. And then Congress changed the law.

I mean, not very well, but still is better than nothing. and it was absolutely validation of the work that he was doing that what they were doing was wrong and he was right when he said that and obviously it was clear that that was his motivation for leaking the truth about it to us all.

And again, look at the pattern, right? First they denied that it was going on at all. Then they said, okay, we are doing it but we're only passively collecting it and it's very heavily regulated and we don't make any mistakes and we don't listen to people when, you know,

when we don't have really really good reason then there are inspector general's reports talking about sort of massive violations of you know 7702 procedures and um they really are using this passive collection as an intelligence gathering tool and they're using it in the wrong way and you know once when it gets in front of judges judges strike it down the same way they struck down things like the watch list and all this other misbehavior with the the pattern is the same every time they go in and they do something without asking permission they deny it then when they get caught it goes to the courts and hopefully you know the courts strike it down but um but i think this is the same kind of thing you know i think you're it's very apt that you mentioned that because this is similar

yeah so now if you could please talk more about the true content where I'm interested, I guess, especially in the examples of vaccine injuries and these other things where they explicitly say in their messages, I guess the government messages or the NGO messages to Twitter, that look, this stuff is true, but we do not like the anticipated effect that it will have in the public conversation. that's why we want you to delete it. But factually true claims, you know, specific claims that people are making that they admit are true. How much of that is going on in there? How much? I mean, enough that they had to give a name for it in a department. I mean, they had a subcommittee at the Department of Homeland Security called the MDM subcommittee,

which is misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Now information is just true information that is narratively inconvenient or produces an outcome that they think is adverse. So, for instance, in this case, there were emails that were produced where a White House official was expressing, you know, frustration to Facebook that they weren't doing enough to remove bad information from search procedures. and Facebook responds by saying, don't worry, we're already reducing the virality of, quote, often true content that might produce vaccine hesitancy. And this shows a couple of things. Number one, it shows that Facebook views the government as something that has to report to, right? Like the whole tenor of these communications is sort of master canine, right? Like the platforms are constantly sort of reporting on what they're doing and asking if that's enough.

But the second thing is they're saying, yeah, we'll take that on even the true stuff. Even the stuff that doesn't violate our policies, we'll deamplify it if it makes you happy because they're trying to produce a certain narrative outcome. And this is constant, a thing that's like a through line in the whole narrative about digital censorship, which is that they're looking at narrative. as opposed to fact. Fact is increasingly irrelevant to these folks. What they're interested in is the political reaction of the readers, and that's what's dangerous.

You know, I just saw a tweet this morning from a guy quoting The New York Times, and they say outright here that the judge, who was appointed by Trump, expressed little skepticism about debunked claims from vaccine skeptics. In one previous case, Judge Doty accepted as fact the claim that, quote, COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease, which of course is completely true. Which is completely true. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this is not an opinion column by the editorial board. This is in their news story talking about what a bad guy this judge is and how he doesn't know what he's talking about when he's making these decisions, Matt. I know. I know. And again, there's two things about that that are crazy. Number one, they're making a mistake and not realizing that they themselves are promoting disinformation when they do it. But the second thing is the judge is making a ruling that basically says, hey, traditionally in America, we don't do this because our whole approach to controversy is,

A, that people have a right to listen to anything. It's not just about the speaker who has the right, but it's the listener who has the right to hear all sides. But B, we don't combat incorrect speech with suppression. We combat it with better speech. And why do we do that? One of the reasons we do that is because the truth is a moving target. It's difficult to find.

in COVID was the ultimate example like the truth changed every couple of weeks and you can't you know preempt speech there even though the authorities did constantly so it's it's a kind of madness you know and and I don't think they see it which is unfortunate yeah all right sansat award radio talking with Matt Taibi here and you know I don't want to waste your time on this but it is interesting and important in a way it keeps coming up and we saved it till the end anyway talk a little bit about this piece about if you're not with us you're maga because i know you're definitely a victim of this and you've stated that you're no longer a democrat you're now an independent but you've also said on this show before that you have

not moved right in your own mind in any way just that you've been made to feel unwelcome among certain parts of the left where you used to have friends i guess but can you talk a little bit about the idea that if you're not with I guess the Biden movement such as it is or this center left liberal Democrats that you automatically are a deplorable? So I was writing

that piece in in response to a profile in the Atlantic of Robert Kennedy Jr. That was called the first MAGA Democrat. And the entire thrust of the article basically

is that Kennedy is not a Democrat. He's not even really a politician. He's really an avatar for the Trump movement. They sort of hinted that he had been impelled to run for president because Steve Bannon suggested that he'd do it. But this has been a constant rhetorical technique ever since Trump got elected. And Scott, I mean, I think you've probably been victim. of this too right if you disagreed with the russia gate narrative you were a trump supporter if um course if you weren't sure that the the origin of the virus was zoonotic um you were a trump supporter if you you know if you thought people um should have the right to exchange um information about

treatments other than the vaccine, you were a Trump supporter. Even if you were pro-vaccine, I mean, it's that kind of stuff. They've just created this binary atmosphere. And I always focus on this because it's something that Orwell predicted, which is that, you know, as societies become more totalitarian, what they do is they always try to eliminate the distinctions in the shades of gray and enforce everybody to do basically, you know, rhetorical Texas hold them. We're all betting with all our chips in the middle of the table. It's either left or right that wins. It's either Trump or, you know, the forces of good that win.

And it's just not accurate, right? Like I feel like you're not a Trump, you know, you're not a Trumpist, like necessarily or. Never been. Of course not. Yeah. And I know I'm not. But, you know, like when the Twitter files. started, even the Washington Post, they did a story calling me like conservative journalist Matt Taiv, you know, where does that come from? It's just a labeling exercise. And I think that

this is going to result in people just getting, they've now done this to enough categories of people that it's going to become true. You know what I'm saying? Like they've labeled the Greens MAGA. They've labeled Bernie supporters MAGA. I mean, people aren't going to necessarily move right, but they're certainly going to absolutely hate the liberal damn Democrats. Right. Right. And what kind of a political strategy is that? I mean, even just from a practical standpoint, remember when Hillary Clinton first came out with that deplorable statement? The immediate first blush response of all the pundits was to go back to the old school way of thinking about this, which was, wow, that's kind of an unforced error. like you don't you know a politician who goes out and and throws away you know a sixth of the electorate for no good reason um is making a mistake but they do that over and over again they

they don't just disagree with voters they insult them they berate them they call them traitors they call them idiots uh insurrectionists like they use the harshest conceivable language and it's just, it's so infuriating. Well, and in the most unbelievable ways, I mean, one of the clues to Rushingate being a big fake hoax was that you had a bunch of great journalists on the left, like yourself and Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracy and Robert Perry and Ray McGovern and of course, Aaron Mate and, you know, all these left-wing journalists who are just saying, look, by definition we're not Trump guys. I know you had written a book insane clown president about this guy.

And, I mean, Ray McGovern says he's been the worst president of America's ever had. Worse than Nixon, worse than anyone. And he still debunked Russia Gate all day, every day for three and a half years. He couldn't help it. It wasn't true. And so the idea that he had moved to the right or somehow was a Donald Trump guy just because he was debunking the CIA and FBI's lies about him, that's completely ridiculous.

Doesn't follow at all. No, and the only reason they do it is because it's a, you know it's a social pressure technique you do not want to be cast out of the you know the garden of the accepted or whatever it is right and and i think a lot of younger younger journalists i know i know this happened they looked at what um you know the kind of treatment that especially glen got going got this worse than me like you know they had feature stories in the new york remember the one yeah the bane of their resistance that kind of portrayed them as none because he wouldn't go along with this and suggested that it was because he was racist and hated women and you know who wants to go through that like not everybody especially if you're starting your career you don't want to deal with that stuff yeah and it works but it comes at a huge cost which is you know I think you lose the public if they see that you're tailoring the way you report things because you're you want to

to keep your job you want to keep your friends like that's that's not a place you want to be yeah all right well i'm so sorry that we're out of time but i really appreciate your time again on the show matt been great thanks so much god appreciate it have a good one aren't you guys that's the great matt tie eby he's at racket dot news and that's it for antiwar radio for today i'm scott horton find the full archive at scott horton dot org and i'm here every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a See you next week.