The Tucker Carlson Show - Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Donald Trump is releasing more secrets than any president in history. Matt Taibbi on the top ten mysteries we’re likely to solve. (00:00) Fauci’s Pardon (07:32) The J6 Committee’s Pardon (11:02) The Golden Age of Journalism Has Begun (17:44) The Major Questions We Should Be Asking Now That Trump Is President (31:00) The Destruction of Nord Stream Will Kill the EU (37:57) The Key Players of COVID That Have Yet to Be Investigated Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 3 months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker PureTalk: Get your free iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy at https://PureTalk.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fauci's 81. Yeah, who cares? I think he'll be punished. Yeah. You know, in some larger sense. But I want to know what they did. That's the— Okay, so can we just go through a couple of these?

And, like, why would you pardon Fauci? What are the potential crimes, the crimes you think he committed and could be punished for that you're trying to prevent him from being punished for by pardoning him? Well, with Fauci specifically, the one thing that comes to mind immediately is perjury. Yes. Because he's been accused of that essentially already by, you know, the House committee. Lying under oath to the Congress. Lying under oath to the Congress, in particular saying, you know, that we have never funded gain of research, that we weren't doing it during this time period. Even as there are other people in the government, like, you know, the deputy director of the NIH saying, yes, we were, or Ralph Baric, who was one of the scientists at UNC, saying, yes, absolutely, that was gain-of-function. So, there's a little bit of a problem there.

Now, he later amended the statement and said that he was speaking in a specific way, under a specific definition, but there's exposure there. But that's not really the issue with Fauci. The issue— I believe that. Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else, and they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of

our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. The issue is really it's about the whole rat's nest of gain of function. How much did the authorities know about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute? Did they have human sources at the Wuhan Institute? Was there advance warning that this was coming? Were they suppressing investigations into the possibility of a lab leak because of the connections to U.S. research? All that stuff is in play. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's going on that you want to know. So Fauci was part of the U.S. bioweapons program, obviously, right? I mean, if you're funding gain-of-function, it's, you know, vaccines are one part of that, but probably not the only part of it, right? So the idea is you make the virus more dangerous in order to create a vaccine to fight the virus. But in the process, you wind up with much more dangerous viruses. Right. And that's one of the things that raised a red flag for some of the people who were looking at the COVID phenomenon is just look at the surface characteristics of the disease. It's

highly transmissible. It's not terribly symptomatic. Everybody's going to get it. Not everybody's going to be harmed by it. It's what they designed, what you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance. Yes. Yeah. So, my interest is not in Fauci. I think any normal person can make up his mind about Fauci.

It's pretty obvious who Fauci is, the super bureaucrat. It's in the bioweapon programs and the Frankenstein science that's being funded by our tax dollars around the world, to be specific, in Ukraine, in China, in Djibouti. We have biolabs in a lot of places around the world. And like, what are they doing? What are they doing? What was their relation to the Wuhan Institute also? I mean, I think those are all important questions, like both the bioweapons and, you know, their relation to the pandemic.

But the thing is about these pardons they're a mistake if you want to know what's happening they just made it a lot easier for us to find out how because now uh once the pardon's uh delivered the person can't plead the fifth if they're brought before a grand jury they can't take the fifth anymore if they're brought before a congressional committee uh they they can't evoke their right against self-incrimination. So, they have to say something. And this is what's so interesting because I've been talking to criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and they all kind of said the same thing. It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon

if you're trying to cover up things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved, right? So, that's a red flag for us. When we see somebody getting a pardon, we think, well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there, right? So, either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate, or there's something we don't know about that is interesting. Well, it's such a profound thing to do. I mean, if somebody said to you, Matt, would you accept a pardon? You would say, well, why would I need a pardon? No. I mean, it's like, it's incriminating. It's morally incriminating or it has the appearance of moral incrimination

just by its fact, right? It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating. As the Department of Justice itself said in a memo, I think on one of the J6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a pardon going forward. So, you're making an admission if you accept a pardon. So, yeah, I wouldn't accept one if I were totally innocent. Of course. Yeah. And also, I wouldn't accept one if I had something to hide. Because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap hide because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to take the fifth on that.

That's fascinating. Right? So, the whole thing is really illogical. I think it was more meant to be a symbolic gesture. And this is really, I think, to the the thinking of the biden administration about so many things right they were so driven by optics with trump that they did so much they did a lot of things that were incredibly stupid so they want to portray him as vengeful and out to get people and the the pardons are a good way to do that. I mean, if you're aiming for that audience,

but it had the negative effect of opening all these investigations up, it seems to me. So you really think this was aimed at MSNBC viewers just to paint Trump as a vindictive person? So I asked a lot of people, why did they do this? Like, what's the point? And one of the theories was that, that this is messaging,

that they were trying to create a headline. And there were lots of headlines instantaneously. If you saw them, they all basically said the same thing, like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration, you know, Biden issues pardons. It's always after the

comma, right? That's one theory. The other theory is that in the last days of a presidential administration, it gets pretty chaotic in the White House and people who want things and, you know, they will come in and there'll be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper. And that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons. For instance, the J6 pardons, this has never happened before where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people, right? It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol Police officers who testified, to the staff. But it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned. So now, if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to go over a test to prove that you're actually part of that category,

that I testified before the committee. Does that mean that the committee called you, that you talked to a staffer once, or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified? It's very weird. And the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry. They didn't have all the names. It's amazing. Right? So, but why would you preemptively pardon the J6 committee? I mean, that's like the single most legitimate, morally empowered, great group of people ever empaneled in this country. Like, truly.

Well, I mean, there are obviously some theories about why they would do that, right? What? Mother Teresa, she was such a great person, we're going to preemptively pardon her. Like, what? This is crazy. No, it is absolutely crazy. And if I were some of those people,

I'd be offended. Yes. Especially the people who testified and who didn't lie under oath, for instance, right? Because they're all named. Yeah. All the police officers who testified to the committee.

Now, what if they're only really trying to protect a couple of them? And there are some very conspicuous names. I think we know who they are. Right. Yeah, exactly. The ones they're trying to protect. Right. But what if you're one of the other ones who just gave some testimony some testimony they i mean they interviewed hundreds and probably thousands of people right yeah it's

some number like that massive number and i assume most of them told the truth i mean right all right most people do tell the truth actually i think i think that's probably the case yeah i mean if especially if you're under oath and you're a law enforcement officer i mean it's a very serious thing to to lie in those situations. And, you know, there are a couple of places in the testimony where it doesn't look good for some of the people who testified. But for the vast majority of them, I would take it as a grievous insult to be given that pardon and especially to not be named. That's what's so weird about it. But it suggests what I have thought from the first week, which is there are like serious

crimes here. I mean, you talk to Steve Sund, you know, who ran Capitol Police, who's like a non-political person, just career law enforcement, former MP, you know, former Washington DC cop. I don't think he has any weird agenda. I mean, his story is so unbelievable. They just didn't give him any intel at all and didn't give him any resources. And everybody else knew this was happening except him. I mean, the whole thing is so nuts that you're like, wait, there's something going on here.

I don't really know. The pipe bombs at the headquarters? The pipe bombs, the gallows that was erected by some weird unknown group the night before. Will we ever get disclosure? I guess that's what I want. I just want to know. Again, I am not vengeful. I don't really want to punish people so much as I just want to know. That feels like punishment enough. Will we? I think we will. I think we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism. I think this is after eight years of crazy misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, you know, ranging from Russiagate to Nord Stream to, you know, the COVID origins where we were actively kept away from one side of that story for years.

I think we're going to find out a lot of this stuff. There are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place. There are reports that have been commissioned to look into a lot of these questions, and they're going to be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. And it's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not going to have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff. They're just going to sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we want to find.

And I think that they're going to have that collaborative arrangement. It's incredible. There's panic. I sense panic. And I sense it in some of these confirmation battles, particularly the sort of offline stuff that you don't see in the media,

but just when you find out the lengths to which permanent Washington is going to, say, sabotage Tulsi Gabbard, who's an army officer who's had a clearance for more than a decade, carries an automatic weapon. I mean, clearly we trust her with America's defense. Why can't we trust her with America's secrets? Well, of course we can. So what is this? And it really is people

are panicked that what they've been doing is going to come to light, I think. Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence to conduct a wide-ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders her to come up with, you know, anything negative that they can find. Holy shit. So, can you imagine? No.

Right? I mean, that's like trying to make a list of everything. She'll be doing it from now to the end of time. No, I mean, in perfect seriousness, it's setting the stage, kind of a second church committee hearings era. And that was a great moment in American history. Once every 50 years. Right. We find out what they're doing with their black budgets.

Yeah. And really, in the mid-70s, who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide-ranging, you know, list of horrible, stupid things horrible, stupid things from trying to murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Jr. to trying to leak news about mistresses of civil rights leaders. I mean, the list went on and on and on. And we only found out about it because they went too far, right? And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer to start looking into this direction. And it all came out. Well, not all of it, but a lot of it came out. A lot of it.

Frank Church, sadly, got incredibly fast-developing cancer, I noticed. Did he? Yes, he did. He did kind of like Jack Ruby- cancer, Hugo Chavez style cancer. It's interesting. Huh. I did not know that. Yeah, couldn't treat it.

He died. Sad. Sorry. No, it's all right. I mean, look, it's hard not to think. I never thought this way until like a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago. I'm like, oh, not I did not think this way. I attacked anyone who did.

Right. Yeah. But can I say one thing that I've noticed now that I'm in middle age? Is that all my life, the older guys I've known, like you go on duck hunting trips or whatever in Washington where I lived, like with my dad and his friends or whatever. And the guys who were in their 50s and 60s all thought this way. They all thought this way. They all thought this way. You know, after like a lifetime of government service as an operations officer, whatever you're doing, right? They all had this mindset. And I remember sitting like in a duck blind thinking, these guys are fucking crazy. They're all nuts. What I didn't realize was there's a reason that people become more open to these sorts of explanations the more they see.

Of course, and maybe- Right? Right? Yeah. I don't know why I didn't get that. It's probably just our generation that thought the schoolhouse rock thing was true. I mean, right? It's so true.

Because, you know, we grew up with all the president's men and after the church committee. So we thought it all had come out. The good guys won. There's transparency. We have the Freedom of Information Act. We can find everything out. No, right? It turns out no, right?

No, I never thought of Schoolhouse Rock and all the president's men as sophisticated propaganda put there by the intel agencies, but I think you're right. Whether they were, whoever did it, it was effective. Want to hear something creepy? You are being bought and sold every day without your knowledge. Data brokers are watching everything you do online. They track every website that you visit, every link that you click, every video that you play. They collect that information about you and your behavior and your thoughts, and they sell it to anybody who wants to buy it, including governments. No privacy whatsoever. Obviously, it should be illegal. It's not illegal.

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apply. Learn more at TurboTax.ca slash business tax. So can we just go through, since I think you're as i've said many times and i mean i think you're one of the great reporters still working not that there are many not there's a ton of competition yeah there there aren't many but um and and you are by your nature a curious person which is like requirement one for journalism and like the one thing no one else seems curious about, I think, but you are. So can you just go through in no particular order the stories whose endings you'd like to know? Like, what are you curious about

as we enter an age of disclosure, God willing we do, what do you want to know? So first of all, just to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago. Oh, did you really? Yeah, of all the things to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago. Oh, did you really? Yeah, of all the things that I would want to investigate if I were, you know, in that kind of a position to order these kinds of things. I'm actually going to take notes as you talk because I want to follow along at home as this happens. Okay.

But I couldn't finish. There were so many different things that I never got to the end, but I would say that the big ones, you know, there are huge glaring questions, which is unusual. For instance, who was president the last four years, especially the last year? I mean, I think that's an enormous question. Tony Blinken. Do you think it was Blinken? You know, I think Blinken's so evil, so demonstrably evil and also stupid that I just see his fingerprints everywhere. Right, right. But that's just a pure guess. That's the problem.

We don't really know. I know that in the last two months, Blinken did everything he could to accelerate the war between the United States and Russia, which is like, should be illegal. I don't know how he got away with that. Nobody said anything about it, but that's a fact. So anyway, sorry. His State Department was also involved in the censorship stuff too. Who was president?

Who was president? Let's start with the big question. Yeah, no, I mean, I think of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people signing documents or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in American history, right? So, you have to look at what was the process of the White House operation, right? Who was actually running things? We know from a surface point who held the posts, right? So, Ron Klain was the chief of staff. We know roughly who else was in Joe Biden's orbit.

What was the schedule? You know, did he sign things by auto pen? Because they have this machine that does. And who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on, right? Like, these are all questions that we have to get answers to. What was the day-to-day operation of the Biden White House?

And again, especially in the last year, because I think, you know, that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like, you know, cutting off the Democratic primaries to challengers, you know, these are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions. Who decided to kick Biden off the ticket? Biden on July 13th was giving a speech in Detroit and he's like, I'm running. I mean, he couldn't have been more affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race. Within seven days, he was out of the race. Within three days after that Detroit thing, there were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to, or going to try to pressure him to drop out. But I don't believe that. I think we need to find out

exactly what those communications were. I mean, who had the authority to push the president of the United States off his own ticket? Unless he had a sudden change of heart. Do you believe that? I think it's really obvious that his statement dropping out on Twitter was issued before he knew. I mean, I've heard that again. I don't know is the truth, but I've heard that. It's very conspicuous that when he wanted to say things, he said it on camera, but there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful and that was done on Twitter or in a letter or in a press release. I mean, even the note explaining the pardons, who wrote that, right?

It was on Biden's Twitter account. I doubt he's sitting there tweeting. So it's just a coup. I mean, that's a coup. If you take a sitting president of the United States and force him to drop out, I mean, right? It's on the table. It has to be. Because, you know, Jill Biden has been very circumspect in talking about it. She's said these really curious things about how she wants to reevaluate her relationships.

I think she was referring to Nancy Pelosi. But what exactly happened in that one week period between, you know, the middle of July and the 21st or so? And then what happened in between the 21st and the 22nd or whenever it was when Biden suddenly came out and made Kamala the nominee. Like, how did that happen? Who made that decision? So that was after the Republican convention? Yes. Yes. So you had this incredible week or two where Trump gets shot, survives, you have the convention, and Biden drops out. I mean, that's – and as far as I know, I don't think anyone's ever done like a real TikTok on that.

No, there were stories, but they were incredibly incomplete. And this is one of the things where, you know, I was looking at it, even from just the professionalism point of view, in terms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these papers. How does nobody ask who made the decision to nominate Kamala Harris? How did that happen? How was he kicked off? Or how did he come to that decision? Normally, there would be a big show of that, right? There would be, somebody would come out and give an interview to, I don't know, 60 minutes and say, well, here's how that happened, right? And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation whenever there's something big that happens with the president. Here, they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release,

and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers. None of it made any sense. So, you know, they have to get all those communications. And I think that's what was important. You know, there were preservation letters that were sent out by some Senate committees. I hope it captured a lot of this stuff, but we'll see. Do you have any sense of what the answer is to either one of these questions? Who was functionally operating the Biden administration and who kicked Biden out? Who made these decisions? I've only heard theories about this, right?

And that's the problem. It's kind of irresponsible for reporters to speculate. I agree. We don't know. All we know, we saw little bits and pieces of things. Like there was a really weird moment. You might remember when Biden said something to the effect of we can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was. Right. And people immediately interpreted that as a regime change. Of course.

Comment. Right. comment, right? 47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walkback clarifying statement saying, you know, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something ambiguous like that. But there were leaks in the press about what happened there. And there was a remarkable line in one of the stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement. How is he not in charge of it, first of all, right? Like, you know, they're talking about Jake Sullivan is involved in the process. But that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where, at best best Biden was a participant. So I think we need to know a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions. It might be different in terms

of, you know, for each realm of the government, right? Maybe the national security questions were dealt with by one person, then, you know, the foreign policy things by another? I don't know. I mean, we'll see. And then domestic policy, which doesn't even really exist in this country. It's all national security, like, runs everything. Right, right. Who's doing that?

Yeah. Oh, that was only the first thing in the list, right? No, you just got, you know, it's so funny as you say this, and I won't interrupt you anymore, but I just can't. I mean, it's like crazy. You're going through this stuff. This just happened this summer. Yeah.

And I was there. I mean, I know a lot of the people. I feel like I'm not that informed, but maybe more informed than average because it's my job. I kind of forgot about all this stuff. Like so much stuff has happened. It's like, it's amazing. Yeah. all this stuff. Like, so much stuff has happened. It's like, it's amazing what we have allowed to sort of pass by us without demanding answers. I mean, I remember being in Russia in the late 90s.

There were multiple episodes that you might classify as quasi-coups, right? There was an episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karzhakov, and it kind of Yes. And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in? You know, what did he do when he was immediately kind of used to clamp down on an investigation of Yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at that was going on than we got last year in the United States of America where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in Washington supposedly covering all this stuff. It blows my mind. I mean, you've done this your whole life, so you know and you grew up in it. So you must still know people in that gigantic press corps a few but you know the ones that i that i i'm still in touch with mostly have been kind of squeezed out uh you know there are people who who did try to get to the bottom of what

happened i mean cy hirsch did a a story about the mechanics of how it got to be, went from Biden to Kamala. And, you know, that story came out on Substack, but it wasn't picked up anywhere. And that's kind of the way the media works now. Cy Hirsch also broke the story that the United States, NATO, the Biden administration was behind the sabotage of Nord Stream, the natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, to Germany. And that, I mean, that's on the list too, obviously. But that's, I mean, I think we can say that's true. And I mean, why isn't Cy Hersh getting the Pulitzer for that?

Why, you know, he was immediately, this guy's been a hero on the left for my entire life. Before I was born, he was a hero on the left. And all of a sudden, everyone's like, shut up, Putin apologist. Oh, I know. I know. I mean, I'm sorry. You know, this is just, oh, it drives me insane. It drives me insane.

Not only are there almost no good reporters left, the few good reporters left are like attacked all the time. Yeah, they've all been kicked to the curb. You know, I think it's very notable that a lot of the high profile investigative reporters just can't even publish in the United States, you know? And, you know, look at somebody like Jeff Gerth, who writes, who made a point of kind of keeping ties to traditional media and not burning bridges and doing all that stuff and worked his butt off to get this 24,000-word piece about Russiagate into the Columbia Journalism Review.

And it should have landed hard. It should have landed like a Mike Tyson uppercut, you know, and people just ignored it. So even when they don't kick you out of the club, they just, they ignore the hardcore reporting. I mean, and Jeff Gerth, for people who were, you know, under 40, was definitely one of the most famous investigative reporters in the world and feared. Yeah, New York Times front page. Of course, Jeff Gerth, big deal guy for many, many years. He was the bulldog going after the Clinton administration on everything, right?

So, I mean, when he did a story, it mattered. It was on the desk of every senator in the country. Of course. And that's what's so interesting about this period is that there is none of that. The stuff that lands on the desks of people in the relevant committees in Washington is PR. There's no reporting there for the most part. Maybe that will change now. I don't know.

But I doubt it. People read your stuff. I happen to know. So that's good. That would be great to know. They do. Yeah. So, okay.

But Nord Stream, don't forget. Okay, so Nord Stream. Let's go to Nord Stream. And I'm going to stop interrupting. Nord Stream. What do we know? I mean. I mean, we know that there's five or six shifting official explanations of what happened. settled on this kind of labyrinthine story about a rogue ukrainian operation that apparently without

our input when went and did this um yeah i don't believe it uh i mean it's it's it's laughable to think that that's true and so you know but that's the kind of Nord Stream is just one. It's like looking up at the stars in the sky. That's just one of them. And that's a huge story. I mean, think about it. It destroyed the German economy. It will destroy the EU. Ultimately, when people wake up from their dream state, it will destroy NATO because it was an attack by one NATO power on a NATO ally.

Another NATO member was attacked by the United States on Germany. And it wrecked the German economy. Absolutely. It strained the incoming relations. And it could have resulted in an immediate nuclear escalation. I mean, there are so many different things. And it was a massive ecological disaster. It was a deepwater horizon level environmental event.

It's the greatest man-made emission of carbon dioxide in history. period. I'm sorry, but it is. Nord Stream is, if you're making a list of the 10 weirdest things that happened in the last eight years, it's probably at the bottom, I would think. I mean, don't you think? I mean, Russia- I think that's right. I just, you know, I like Western Europe. I think it's important to have a thriving Western Europe. I don't think they're a rival. I think they're a complementary region to the United States. And to see it destroyed intentionally by the Biden administration, well, it's just wreck Western Europe. Like, why would you do that? And so I'm fixated on it, but you're right. So what are the others? So COVID? I mean, there are so many different areas where they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate that. We just went through a period where, you know, there was sort of mass stonewalling of Congress when it was trying to investigate what happened with COVID.

You know, people, there were key people like Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas, right? And so, we're going to have, there are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now, you know, with FBI communications between the Bureau and a lot of these scientists, you know, dating back 10 years, and it's going to tell a crazy story. I mean, a really interesting story. There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014 because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking,

which is, you know, when did we start defying the ban on gain-of-function research? We clearly did. I think that's pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advance notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine? And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House? there was also a sort of massive effort to control the public conversation about this that went through the health agencies. So, we know they're looking at that. And that's another executive order, by the way. The free speech order directs them, the Department of Justice, to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff. So we're going to find out about that. But I just think COVID is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff. And, you know, it's going to be like a Turkish shoot where every direction they look,

they're going to find something, you know, revelatory. The question is, will that information reach the public? Because there is the intermediaries, the media. So, like, congressional investigators, executive branch agencies like DOJ, you know, they're constantly inspectors general. They're always releasing reports. And I'm like, no one reads them because nobody picks them up in the media. Do we have enough interested reporters to, like, disseminate what they find? I think we do because I think that what we think of as the media is dead. They no longer really matter.

The media that matters now are people like you and Joe Rogan and other, you know, there's podcasters out there. There's this gigantic, thriving, independent's podcasters out there. There's this gigantic thriving independent media culture that turned the last election, clearly. It was also abundantly clear that the old media no longer had any ability to control the narrative about anything. They're totally discredited. So, I think this stuff is going to come out and

because it's going to be so explosive, it's going to sort of solidify and heighten the prestige of all this new media. I think we're probably going to see whole institutions that are going to be built around these disclosures. We're going to have new newspapers, new TV stations. So I normally save this for the end, but I'm feeling so enthusiastic. I'm going to do it now in case people don't get to the end. Where do people find you? How do they support you if you've made it this far in this conversation? You're like, this guy's unbelievable.

I'm sorry, shamelessly promote for just one second. Oh, thanks. No, I'm at racket.news on Substack where a lot of these news sites sites are for those who didn't grow up playing squash how are you spelling racket uh r-a-c-k-e-t dot news so racket so not not squash racket not squash racket like racket like that's a racket you know which this is yes it turned out to be aptly named. Nice. But yeah, no, I'm feeling very optimistic now. I think there are still some holes in this new media landscape. We don't have the huge institutions that have reporters who have beats, which I think is crucial, right? I agree.

Because you need to have people who develop sources in one small area. I agree. But you saw that with Julie Kelly on January 6th. Julie Kelly, I don't even know what she did before. She's purely kind of a creation of the internet. Well, she's a self-creation, but her medium was the internet and X specifically. And she just got mad about January 6th and just relentlessly focused on that. I'm sure she has other opinions, but she only did that.

And I mean, man, this one woman in who I think she's my age ish, like unearthed all this information that was like, no, no one else got it except her because she was just so focused on this thing. You know, it's great. It's incredible. And it's a, that's exactly how the press is supposed to function. They're not supposed to be credentialed. And that's exactly how the press is supposed to function. They're not supposed to be credentialed. It's not supposed to be a thing where somebody confers a title. You are the official media. No, the citizen, that's part of our job is to be the press, right? That's why the First Amendment was designed exactly for that to happen. And there was lots of incredible reporting that was done by either individuals or small organizations like the U.S. Right to Know. They filed hundreds of FOIA requests on Fauci and gain of function and everything.

And they really started the ball rolling on that whole side of that investigation. It's a relatively small site. And they had good young reporters there who were hungry. And that's how this thing works. Amazing. Right? Amazing. It's exciting.

It's so exciting. And it's also true that there are increasingly people making like a legit living. I'm not getting rich, but like paying the bills, doing this job. Right. Which is important. And that's also how it's supposed to work. I mean, I remember hearing around to some of the old timers and saying, like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media? And they told me a story

that they said, you know, I have Stone cranked out a newsletter for those people who don't know. He was a- Izzy Stone. Izzy Stone. He was a, you know, one of the original independent investigative journalists. He worked out of his house. He put out this little newsletter, the IF Stone Weekly. It was great reporting, independent, didn't have to answer to editors who told him to shape things one way or the other. And he made a nice living, got himself a nice little house, and that was enough, right?

And he had an impact. And you can do that now. The internet makes easier actually it's amazing yeah in america we do things a little differently and we always have but the british said hey we're gonna tax your favorite morning beverage the revolutionary sons of liberty said no and they poured the entire shipment of tea into Boston Harbor and created a new country, a country based on personal choice and freedom. Well, 251 years later, it is time to throw something else overboard. Your overpriced big wireless contract. You don't need it.

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knowing certain things to preserve societal stability. Yeah, and trust in institutions. Trust in institutions, exactly. Trust in institutions. So, I mean, that's already gone away, but it will evaporate completely the more we know, don't you think? Yes. Yes, but it'll be like, I mean, hopefully it'll be like the church committee hearings where, look, we just have to accept people are going to have their minds blown by discoveries, revelations. For instance, it's already starting in the news media. We're starting to get stories from journalists who were told they had to suppress certain angles, right? You know, there was a Politico story about some people who were told to stay away from the Hunter Biden laptop story. Two Politico reporters having left Politico admitted that Politico, which is supposedly covering Washington, told them, no, we're not doing that.

Right, exactly. And my first question is, why didn't you say that when it happened? But I guess people have jobs, right? So that's a thing. But there are going to be a lot more of those. I mean, there are already kind of whispers going around. But people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent, that they lied to them about important things. And it's going to be difficult at first, especially since there are not solid new institutions in place to replace them. Yes. You know, it's one thing if you're taking down the CIA in the 70s and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there, right? This is different. The media is going to have to rebuild itself from the ground up. I think it's already doing great,

but it doesn't have that look for a lot of people, right? That's right. It looks very different, for sure. And so, you know, it's going to be, I think that's a good point. It's a transitional period for people. I guess, look, if you want trust in institutions, and I definitely do. I do. I grew up trusting institutions.

I don't now. That's their fault, not mine. I think your country doesn't work if nobody trusts any of the institutions, right? It just doesn't. So we want that. The only way to that is through transparency, honesty. So I get all that and I'm for it vehemently. I guess what I'm saying is the people who've been administering the system and benefiting from it are completely freaked out, right?

That's why they're trying to stop Tulsi. But I wonder if they get threatened enough if they don't become like just flat out dangerous to everybody else. Like the only way to stop disclosure at this point would be with like a catastrophe that's so all-encompassing, 9-11, COVID, that it just, everything shuts down. All trends and progress stop.

And I just feel like there's a lot at stake for these people. If you're, you know, John Brennan or Jim Clapper, and you're like a criminal, or Mike Pompeo, you're a criminal. That's my opinion, but I think they're obviously criminals. Like, you know, you've got a lot to lose. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

And people in the intelligence agencies, whose names are not known to the public, they're about to be. Exactly. And, you know, we don't know what that's going to result in, what impact that's going to have. Well, so this was my thinking about, you know, the period between the election and the inauguration this week. I think that's one of the reasons that Tony Blinken was pushing so hard for a real war, trying to kill Putin, for example, which the Biden administration did. They tried to kill Putin. Really?

Yes. Yes, they did. Wow. Which is insane. Like, okay, so who takes over Russia? Right. And what happens to the nuclear arsenal in a country that's like so complex outsiders can't even understand. I mean, you live there, you know, that's demented that you would even think of something like that. Absolutely. So why were they? Because chaos is a screen

that protects them. I mean, I don't know this. That's just like watching what they're doing. I'm like, why would they be doing that? Part of it is because like, it's like when you're taking off for the roof of the embassy in Saigon, burn all the papers right absolutely they can't because they're digital so maybe you need like a war to hide your tracks or to keep the public's attention that's what i mean elsewhere right yeah exactly um yeah i i had the same fears and that was part of my thinking when they started you know approving the firing of american missiles into Russian territory and British missiles and French missiles, I'm like, why would you do? Like, what possible reason would there be to do this? You're not really going to make any military gains by doing this.

So, you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline. The headline, I don't think it gets you anything. So what were they doing? And, you know, if that's what you're saying, they were fiddling with regime change in the interim. Yes. Yeah, I think that was a fear that a lot of people had. I didn't think that, frankly, that Trump would become president.

I thought, you know, for a variety of different reasons, I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but it was hard for me to accept that it did happen. I was sitting about six feet away and I just thought,

wow, I can't believe this is actually happening. Right. Up until the second he said the oath, I was man you know I mean you just get superstitious or paranoid or whatever it is having seen all this stuff and I was embarrassed to have those thoughts I was like wow I'm becoming crazy yeah but it's not totally crazy when you see the pattern so but I guess my the point I would make is it's like we're not the process has not unfolded fully yet. So, like, there's still a lot that we don't know disclosure is, as you've said, like imminent.

And that sets up an incentive for the people being exposed to do something really crazy. It does. But I think the moment has passed for the real, like there was a moment where they could have installed, you know, a European style regime to stop misinformation. This is the new trend, right? Remember the hurricanes happened and immediately FEMA is talking about setting up an anti-misinformation center, right? It just happened in California. So fucking crazy. Right?

I mean, the fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation, but they could really have done that. They could have basically put a net over everything. I mean, that's the thing that's scary about the European situation is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information, what people see, what people don't see, that they can punish people who step out of line. And we were, you know, this far away from being part of something like that. And if they were going to do that, if they had done that, and I think there was probably some thinking that that would have been accomplished by 2024. If you go back and look at some of the European Union's papers on the subject, they were anticipating that we were going to be signatories to certain agreements, like

the Code of Practice on Disinformation, that we would have our own version by now. If they had done that, then none of this would be possible. All these independent outlets, they could scream to high heavens, but no one would see it. It would be like, but no one would see it. It would be like, you know. No, it's totally right. Right. I mean, you know this because when you were doing shows about COVID, well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook dial it down.

They turned it down to 50%. I mean, that's in print. What did you think when you saw that, by the way? I totally ignored it. I ignore all coverage that in any way pertains to me. I don't want to become self-conscious. So I didn't spend, you know, one second thinking about it. I've had a couple other things. And one other thing, particularly in the last year, that was like so shocking. I never thought about it again. Because you just don't, I'm sure you've been through this. I mean, you were, speaking of mistreated, I'm not going to bring it up, but you were identified as disobedient.

And I mean, they tried to end you. I watched it. Yeah. So you shrug it off or whatever, but you shrug it off. But from my perspective, it's always, you see things clearly when you're looking at someone else's life. Sure. Absolutely. I didn't even know you at the time.

I was like, why are they trying to kill this guy yeah right well they were and well that's my interpretation of it anyway um but you can't brood on it no but but the the fact that the mechanics they they were trying to install the mechanisms by which all this stuff would have been locked down. And we saw during the COVID period how effective it was. Yes. I mean, look, the new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, we mostly didn't hear about his research, right? I mean, this is the guy who... Can you believe Jay Bhattacharya, who I love, right? I mean, this is the guy who... Can you believe Jay Potichari, who I love? He's a thoroughly decent man, by the way,

in addition to being right on the science, but he's a decent guy. He's like the sweetest guy in the world. Yes. Yeah, I know, absolutely. He's the head of NIH? Yeah, I know. Isn't that amazing?

Are you kidding? Yeah. He goes from being censored to being the head of NIH. It's an amazing transition, but the thing that's so extraordinary about it is America would have had a completely different idea about lockdowns if they had understood how infectious the disease was, how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from you know getting infected uh and and and how unlikely that was to succeed and how you know compared to all the other uh negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that like they wouldn't have made that decision going forward but they were able to effectively suppress that point of view which is really scary right i mean there was real research out there and most people didn't see it

i didn't see it until a year and a half later no i know right no so uh and that's that's what could happen that's what could have happened with all this stuff so but i know that you without getting too specific but you're you know you're in touch with doctors, like on a personal level, like you know doctors. Just practicing clinical physicians, right? My wife's a doctor. Okay, I didn't know if you wanted to say that. You're married to a doctor. So, did they know?

It was kept from them, too. Like, they didn't. Yeah, I mean. Your average emergency room physician was aware that a lot of the COVID propaganda was fake. Well, yeah, I mean, I know some ER doctors as well. And they had to go looking for information. That's what I'm saying. And it was very hard to find.

And, you know, to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things you're not likely to find the sort of counter-narrative thing easily uh and i think for a lot of doctors during that period it was frustrating because um even peer-reviewed research was not always easy to find uh for them. So, yeah, during that period, it affected the whole question of like, experts who talked to the press, like they weren't always informed about what was going on or about different studies that have been done. And yeah, we had a completely different idea about the pandemic than maybe we should have. But the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself, though I think it was,

but that it was a proof of concept of something that was to come, you know? Do you think that as we unearth more about COVID that the biggest question of all, which was what was the point of that? Clearly it was a point. I mean, if every part of the society was coordinated and aimed toward the same goal which was increasing the fear um preserving the lies about its origin

hiding a lot of stuff and like telling you and pushing you toward the vaccine so like and it was utterly coordinated if anything was coordinated that was from the churches to the schools to the media, everything. Everyone's in the same picture. Like, why? I don't know. I mean, that's what we have to, that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get. Do you think that we'll ever get to, that we'll ever be able to say with some certainty or confidence, like, this is why they did that? We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean,

you're probably not going to get a document that says, look, it's really important that we do this because if we really stress masking, then we'll have established the precedent of that visible symbols of conformity are, you know, a positive goal for an authoritarian regime. I mean, they're not going to have that on paper anywhere, right? Yes. But there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to follow instructions, about how we manage the problem of academic freedom, right? There are probably going to be emails back and forth saying we have to change America's

thinking about this and get them to start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority, right? There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in, you know, FOIA disclosures with some, you know, some of these anti-disinformation groups and that sort of thing. So, I imagine there's going to be some stuff with the White House, the CDC, the NIH. There might be some things like that in there. But the higher level is sort of broader conspiratorial questions. I don't know what we're going to get, but I'm fascinated to find out.

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But Russiagate specifically, that's a big story. That's a place where I think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because the dot we know where the documents are in some cases we even have them already we just they're redacted um so we get to look under the redactions now why did they start the original investigation what was the what was the impetus for the july 31st opening in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane? You know, there's some conflicting stories in the past. Did it really come from Britain? Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it?

Or was it something else? Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in May of 2017? It's just an extraordinary thing. Thinking back to that time, we don't remember it, but the FBI opened a probe into the sitting president of the United States to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time and what evidence could they have possibly had for that, apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey. I mean, they had no evidence. If there's nothing under those redactions more than that,

then that itself is an extraordinary scandal just by itself, right? So the predicate for all of this, I think, maybe even earlier, but to my knowledge, late in the summer of 16 with the hacking of the DNC and the emails from the DNC. And the FBI never investigated it, never investigated the actual – the physical removal of this data from their servers. Instead, a company called CrowdStrike, which worked for the Democratic Party, did. And then exactly at that moment or right around that moment, a DNC staffer was killed in Washington, D.C., in an apparent robbery in which nothing was taken from him that I happen to know for a fact the MPD, the Metropolitan Police Department, thought was like bizarre. And they kind of didn't believe it. A Fox News host went on air and asked questions about this killing. Why wouldn't you? And the parents of the man who was killed either sued or I think they sued. They certainly threatened

to sue and basically scared the crap out of everyone. So no one's ever asked a question about it since. They hired a private investigator who looked around in that case, I remember. And there were some odd details there. The FBI ended up in possession of his laptop. Why would the FBI wind up in position? I mean, this is a local crime, right?

Yeah. This was one of the first reasons I started to look at that case because I got a call from somebody about that. And I don't know why that was the case, but it is the case. And there were people at the DNC, one of whom I know, who thought that he was murdered there were people at the dnc one of whom i know who thought that

he was murdered for political reasons at the dnc a very high ranking person the dnc told me that and i probably should just say but i everyone can guess who it is who's informed on this but i don't want to betray confidence but i'm not making this up and i don't know what happened, but as far as I know, not one person has looked into that in the media. No, and even if it is just an unsolved murder of a type that they normally solve, the whole situation, that whole timeline was very strange. It doesn't really make sense. The hacking of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, when the information was released online, they never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it and there was a an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign to create this narrative that you know upon closer examination turns out not to be true so we got to go back and find out what did exactly happen there um why did they why did they order this crossfire hurricane probe why Why were they sending informants in after Trump or people in his orbit?

And we know they did. And who were all those informants? It'd be interesting. I have some suspicions. Yeah. Well, we know who some of them were, right? But we don't know who all of them were. I mean, I did a story to the effect that the people in the House Intelligence Committee who were looking at this, you know, Kash Patel's initial probe, they came up with a number that it was 26 different people who were being investigated in Trump's orbit.

No matter what happened, it's a huge story because it's it's a political espionage story it's not unlike watergate really uh exactly and they and we've we've laughed it off uh or the you know the mainstream press is has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be um taken seriously but it does. It absolutely does. Just because it's Donald Trump doesn't mean you can ignore the FBI conducting political investigations willy-nilly and inventing predicates

to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all kinds of other crazy, can I say crazy shit? I mean, that stuff was all nuts. And we need to find out exactly what happened with that. And that is one of the reasons I think that people are nervous about this weaponization of government probe because it's absolutely going to look in that direction.

And, you know, that's one of the first things they're going to look at is who was behind that? Yes. to impeachment and the the leaks that were done um a lot of them were kind of illegal on their face right like you can't leak signals intelligence to uh newspapers and it was done repeatedly during that time to me they did it to me right yeah exactly the NSA yeah read my text and leaked them to the New York Times twice right um yeah and they you know admitted it one time, but it was under FISA. Which is, by the way, hilarious because initially they were denying that it even happened, right? And then, of course, later it turns out it was more advantageous to leak the contents. But people had developed very short memories during this time period. They were not able to retain information, among other things, because

journalists got out of the habit of repeating the story. That was one of the things that we were taught. I was taught growing up, when you're doing a story about anything, you have to recount all of the facts as if the reader has never encountered the story before. Each story should stand alone. Yes, exactly. You have to retell the whole thing so that they don't have to go looking for another story to find out what this means. And one of the subtle little changes that happened to the media business in the last eight years is they stopped doing that. They would tell you. That's fascinating. Right.

They would tell you the thing that happened that day and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that you needed to know to really understand what you were reading. And so, yeah, I think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and, you know, in hindsight. And that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who didn't see it the first time. That's such a fascinating observation, which I've never heard before or thought of. But isn't it true? It's so true. It's so true. And so everything's out of context. Right.

Yeah. There's a certain element of dot connecting required in journalism. Like, why am I telling you this? Why does it matter? How does it connect to things that happen, other things that happened or may happen? Even simple things like when, you know, if Anthony Fauci comes out and says, well, masks are important because of X, well, you have to put in the timeline of what he originally said about that. Yes. Or, you know, Joe Biden saying, you know, we have to correct misinformation because they're killing people and you got to point out that they were

wrong about things themselves that the the or that the biden administration itself was uh de-amplified uh by by some of these um platforms accidentally but they were right um but yeah they just left out a lot of backstory and and we have to get back into the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning. Fascinating. Yeah. Okay. So, Russiagate. Russiagate.

I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the pardon of Adam Schiff is kind of interesting, because he's a central figure of both the J6 committee, but also the Russiagate story. And, you know, he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given, but whatever. Yeah, Russiagate is a thing. Then there's the whole question of lawfare, right? And the effort to make sure that biden faced no opposition at all in his re-election campaign and this is here i'm not just talking about um you know donald trump in the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the 14th Amendment and all that. This extends to even to groups like No Labels, or the Green Party, or Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson, or Cornel West. There was an

extraordinary calculated effort to prevent competition. Now, that's not necessarily illegal. Parties can do whatever they want internally, but it's still fascinating that there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign. you know, no labels or RFK or, you know, issuing challenges. No labels went through this extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no labels site and it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it so that we try to associate no labels with Trump. And there's a lawsuit going on about it right now. What was the real origin of that? Like, you know, who financed that whole thing?

I mean, I think there are a lot of stories about little tiny dirty tricks that are going to be coming out. Well, and also, like, the main question was who makes these decisions? So if the Democratic Party is running the United States, which they have for four years, I think we can say that. What does that mean? Who's running the Democratic Party? Right. I mean, I would imagine it's a coalition of, you know, elected officials, you know, Chuck Schumer, big fundraisers, right? Mm-hmm.

You know, Jeffrey Katzenberg and, I don't know, Obama, I guess. But who really is running this? Who's on the central committee? Right. And how is that done? How was the coordination managed with these sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the ballot access issue to there were Klan act suits that were filed against people. I mean, did that have any connection to people who are actually in office? If it did, you know, then we have another corruption situation involved. But yeah, the larger question of who was managing all this stuff, because it clearly wasn't Joe Biden.

Right, who runs the country? Who runs the country? Don't in a democracy we have right to know? Right. You know, our mutual friend Walter Kern talked about this, saying that this was the first time that we had a president that had a sign on his desk, basically, that said, the buck does not stop here, right? We don't know where the buck stopped during this period. And so, that's a fascinating question. But the whole wargaming of the last election season, there are a lot of stories. People don't even remember this. New Hampshire held a primary, right? People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary. And then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night, months later, where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the the delegates uh themselves

like i'd never heard of that before just canceling an election and just sort of redoing it in a in a closed meeting like how does that happen and just turning the spoils over to somebody else i mean i think it ended up mostly having the same result but for some reason they they held the second contest. It's just very strange, you know, why that happened. So, that we got to get into, you know, then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents. We heard nothing about that. It was the most extraordinary news story that I've ever, I mean, apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and COVID, you know, presidential candidate and ex-president gets shot and the story's dead within like 48 hours uh and all you read in the news from the fbi uh there were these comments saying that they don't have any motive evidence we've done 100 interviews um but we don't know

anything about why this happened or you know what was going on there do you believe that i i have a very hard time believing that there's nothing interesting. He was kind of your classic 20-year-old American kid with no social media presence whatsoever, ever. Right. And it is a very typical American story where one day you just wake up and decide to die assassinating a presidential candidate for no reason. Right. It's like your first joint. Yeah. Your first joint yeah your first joint yeah um and then this the second one i mean you know the the ryan ralph thing that like that's not weird at all like

i just flew into florida last night i don't think i could have gotten gotten my hands on you know a chinese made sks semi-automatic rifle without help i mean i i don't know that's being a little conspiratorial but look there are a lot of met with the members of congress he was lived in ukraine what and we know that our intel agencies working through the ukrainian intel agencies have murdered all these people and tried to murder all these people including some i know personally and so that's a like that's just a fact and he he was there with them but this had nothing to do and by the way are those the only two attempts on donald trump's life do you think during this campaign season i don't think so so why don't we know more about that i don't know why we don't know more about that right so and i i mean i've you know talked to the trump people and trump himself and i i i'm being sincere

i really don't have a sense of what they think of all of that i know that in public they haven't been anxious to talk about it at all so i've talked to some of them and, you know, I've heard a lot of anger about this that, you know, and I think this is the impetus for these investigations. I think probably the second attempt was the last straw for some of the people on his staff. And, you know, it's part of the reason why I think they're going to be very public about this. It can't come too soon, I really think. And I will say, you know, whatever people watching think of Trump, I know for a dead certain fact

that a lot of the people who work for him really like him personally. So I think they are mad about it. They're very mad about it. And then, sorry, just to finish off the censorship thing, that is going to be a major investigation. There's at least two that I know of that are already underway. You know, the government affair, the Rand Paul's committee, the government oversight committee

in the Senate, they really want to do a big thing like a government files type of thing where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government basically. I think there are so many different

wings of the government that were involved in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence, and we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it. And I think what's going to come out is how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it, how many people were committed to that effort? Also, were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Was the State Department doing that? People who haven't followed it, can you just describe the Digital Services Act? The Digital Services Act is like the, it's like the wet dream of every censor in the world, right? Basically, it mandates that every internet platform abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers,

who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on at things on social media and if they see a narrative that they don't like um they will elevate it to the platform if the platform does not abide by the recommendations they get crippling enormous fines and this is one of the reasons why there was a dispute between uh elon musk and europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely closely enough this just came into effect last year uh but it's it's an extremely effective way to to uh regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits the censorship. And this third-party methodology,

which is specifically, by the way, what Donald Trump referenced in his free speech executive order, we don't want that to happen. We're going to not allow that uh they already have the full-blown death star version in europe of that right and so the investigation here in the united states is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing the twitter file suggested that we were already doing it informally and illegally probably uh but we want to find out exactly with snopes and all the other fact checkers yes all the fact checking organizations right uh you know sometimes that was done informally uh by inference or it was was done through NGOs that made recommendations. But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement

Center or the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force making direct recommendations to these platforms, or the White House in your case. We're going to find out all these communications, not just little pieces of them. What about the U.S. government, in your case, we're going to find out all these communications, not just little pieces of them. What about the U.S. government, the intel agencies' control of Wikipedia, which basically is our collective memory at this point? It's elevated by Google. It's the top of every search. It is the only history most people will ever read, and it's controlled by the u.s government to disappear inconvenient facts yeah i mean wikipedia has a very advanced system for regulating what gets into wikipedia pages if you if it's not a certain kind of source it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the Real Clear Politics polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades, they kind of left it off their page of polling average sites because they didn't like the page, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity

about what happened there. Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a senior position in NPR. The deputy or the COO... One government media job to another. Yeah, exactly. And the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is one of the groups that we investigated in the

Twitter files. It was sort of heavily into this whole content moderation question. So the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff that's probably going to come out too kind of weird that the head of the aspen institute wrote the biography of elon musk isn't it right yeah exactly yeah the walter pinkus right isaacson isaac sorry walter pinkus was the cia reporter at the washington can you cut that i'm sorry no no no it's just funny yeah you remember walter pinkus yeah walter isaacson yeah yeah yeah no, it's just funny. You remember Walter Pincus. Yeah, Walter Isaacson, yeah. Yeah, no, it is weird. The Aspen Institute, I mean, they played a very strange role in the media as constituted is dead.

But, I mean, like the Episcopal Church, like they have enormous like shells left. You know what I mean? Like the church has died, but they've got great churches, great buildings. What happens to to the Washington Post and NBC News? There's still these bureaus and CNN. What happens to these things? They're going to struggle, I think, to get audience back. You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they betrayed previously. Yeah, there was a funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live,

you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow. It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, okay, we're going to suck up to this group now, right, as opposed to the other one, which is so loathsome, right? So Rachel Maddow is not the core – whatever you think of Rachel Maddow, she just, like, advertises herself as Rachel Maddow, you know, one person's opinions. It's funny you sounded like her for a second there. Yeah, well, I know her, and I've never been mad at her. I couldn't disagree more. I know, sure, she's attacked me a lot. I wouldn't know, but I'm not mad at Rachel Maddow. I'm mad at Ken Delaney. No, of course.

You know what I mean? People who pose as reporters who are actually just mouthpieces for the Intel world. Of course, and my only point is that just by changing the direction of their BS, they're not going to win back audience, right? People, and this is something that I've noticed since I've been in the business, people in media continually underestimate audiences. They think that they're much stupider than they really are. I remember

when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it. They'll turn the page. But it's not true. People have a great hunger to find out things and they have a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine and so when they do these sort of transparent uh exercises and lying and pr and political propaganda and they think that people won't notice it makes it worse the the the number's going to go down rather than up when they start totally don't you think i mean well it's just interesting i actually think it's more sinister even than you described so the two topics after you know 30 years in the

in television the two topics that they like never wanted to do they always want to do stuff about trannies or race or you know whatever all stuff. But they never want to do economics or foreign policy ever. And their view was, or their stated view was, the audience doesn't care. And then I get fired and start doing foreign policy stuff and it gets crazy numbers. And I only do it purely because I'm interested. That's it. I was always interested. I'm also interested in economics.

Not an expert, but I think it matters. That's why I'm interested, right? You do a story like that, you blow out of the water all the pap that they do. So it turns out there's a deep reservoir of interest among viewers and readers for these stories. And I'm starting to think that maybe the people who run the networks where I worked, they just didn't want to address that stuff because there was a consensus on it that they agreed with and that they didn't want to challenge. Absolutely. You think so? Oh, 100%. I think that. I think that especially when you're talking about, you know, intervention of the big newspapers about, you know, maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, a thousand military bases in the Middle East or whatever it is.

Drone warfare, like, you know, you're going to have a hard time selling that one, right? But they did it in the slyest way. I mean, it went right over my head for decades. They did it not by saying, you know, we just don't agree. You know, we have one perspective on that and we're going to stick with it. That's a straightforward way to explain it, which I can digest. They instead said, no, the audience just doesn't care. And you're basically putting the business at risk

by covering things that people have no interest in. So get back to Natalie Holloway or whatever the drama of the moment was. And I believed that. I believed it. I mean, I just assumed people just aren't interested. I guess I internalized our audience's dumb position, which they had for the whole time I worked there. Yeah, and it's worse in TV than it is in print, but it shouldn't be, right? And I got the same thing. I mean, not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did one story where our plan was

to do one story on what caused the financial crisis. And we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere. People could not read anywhere what happened to the economy in 2008. There was not a rational explanation that people could read. And so- Well, you did big, I guess, numbers is not applicable to a magazine, but that got, I mean,

your stories on that were widely read because you're one of the only people doing it. Right, but it wasn't so much what I was doing. It was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes, et cetera, et cetera. Just basic questions and people wanted to know. And as you discover, they want to know other things. Where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon? That's right.

Right? How does it disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay? You know, it's funny. I remember getting back in the summer, late August of 2001 from Maine. I'd been in Maine and, you know, just on vacation going back to work. And I was at CNN then, and we were wall to wall, literally wall to wall on a story about a congressman from Bakersfield, California, Kern County called Gary Condit. And the question was, did he murder his intern, Chandra Levy? And then later, whatever, in case anyone cares, turns out she was killed by

an illegal alien from El Salvador called Ingemar Guendecke. He killed a couple other people, I think. Anyway, whatever. That was the story. But at the time, we were fully immersed in this question of is this moderate Democrat from Bakersfield a murderer? And, I mean, we did specials on it. It's all we did. And then that September, that was interrupted by 9-11 and i remember thinking

at the time like 9-11 came out of nowhere there was no kind of backstory it just happened it was like truly like the least expected thing that ever happened right right in retrospect i think were there things going on in the world long bigger trends that maybe we should you know as a news company we should have been paying attention to? Sure. To kind of prepare people for at least the idea that like, wow, something bad could happen because there's a lot going on abroad. Yeah, I think

if you had visited parts of the Middle East back then, you would have... Well, we had the coal bombing and then like the Saudis where we had bases in places that were clearly very provocative for no real reason. The Fatwa, the Kenyan bombing. Yes, exactly. There was a lot going on and we just kind of ignored all of it.

But we didn't just ignore it. We ignored it like this manic way, like must cover Gary Condit. And I'm not a conspiracy nut, Matt, but you do sort of wonder like, what was that? Yeah, those were the good old days when when the the manias were things like the summer of the shark right remember that do i remember i think i i think i participated in it should you swim but but then you get 9 11 like this one you know sort of beautiful fall morning and everything changes and it's like i do think it's fair to ask, even if there's no intent involved, like, how did we, like, what should we have done differently to at least give people the sense that there were highly organized, well-funded elements abroad that hated us? Like, I just did not know that.

And most people didn't. Why didn't we do that? Honestly. And it came as a shock to a lot of people. Like a complete shock. Were you in the country when that happened? No, I was in Russia. Well, so at least you have that excuse.

You know, you're living in another country. I lived in Washington, D.C. covering the news for CNN. I mean, I hosted a show on CNN and I had no idea that like. That's a terrifying feeling, right? To be, you got to cover something that you have no background in. Well, there was no covering it. There was just watching it. Right.

Right. And there's never actually been any covering of it. No one's ever really covered 9-11. Like, what was that? Yeah. Exactly. And what followed it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Well, I did cover that. But like the 9-11, like how exactly did that happen? We have all these law enforcement and intelligence agencies protecting us and they had no idea that there are you know dozens and dozens and dozens of you know the 19 hijackers but then all the support people living in our country training getting money from so we didn't we never really like what anyway i don't know i'm going off on that but it's like no one ever asked the basic questions. Right.

Right. And, you know, there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions in the last eight years. I've noticed. Including me, I guess, because a lot of the things you just said were like, yeah, whatever happened to that? Well, it becomes overwhelming after a while, right? I mean, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or you're going to die if you don't take this medicine or whatever it is or your kids are going to die. Emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult i mean i think this was a factor

in it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not where they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them so it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things. I think it's happening slowly, but what's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to come out. And I'm fascinated. I can't wait. You're going to need to hire more staff to keep up with it all yeah absolutely probably probably that's the case uh and it's gonna be a fun time for for

journalists like me but just just as a citizen i can't wait to read it you know so can i ask one last question of your your reporting is marked by its command of detail, I would say. I mean, it is. I read it. Hopefully. Yeah. No, but of like a lot of detail, like a lot of detail. And so you look at things, I kind of like, you know, I'm not a detail guy. You are.

What name one like tiny detail that you are personally obsessed with and maybe mildly embarrassed to admit you're obsessed with, but like what's the one thing that you just you want to know like you've that you've been wondering about i i mean i i think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in july yeah with with biden and uh you know and the the lying about the poll numbers and the phony, the clearly planted stories about Nancy Pelosi.

The lying about the poll numbers? Look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire. NPR did a story.

Like, virtually, I believe it was a couple of days after the debate. I'll have to go back and look at this. But there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls. And, of course, we later found out from Biden staffers that they said they never had – I'm sorry that that was about Kamala they never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead yes even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite which is but for me the the the story that I I just can't get past is what happened in that one week uh and and how did And how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it? You know, had the media been so completely paper-trained

by that moment that they... I guess so, right? But, you know... Well, it's the same impulse that maintains discipline in washington and in the media which is commitment to party first and what is so that is the one thing like all the things i disagree with the democratic party and some of the republican party on policy like i have all kinds of disagreements like i think that they think that's okay got it but the one thing i really can't relate to is the loyalty to party.

What is that? I never understood that. You know, like what you're going to agree with a bunch of people on everything that they do. And you're going to support that. It's one thing for politicians to act that way, but I cannot understand it in a media person. Do you think that's a defining fact of our life, is this commitment to party? Well, right now we have this situation

where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party explanations. And that's why it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions and that's where all the people are going i don't think it's a coincidence in that last i think it can i think what's going to happen is you're going you're going to have new institutions that are built up around that that are that are just going to find new ways to

and you can't have as long as that lasts you can't have authoritarian rule right oh yeah and uh and that was proven i mean look the handful of podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about had a huge impact in the last election and you know what shame on those media people who laughed at those podcasts because among other, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts, like significantly lower. Most of them, yeah. Right? And, you know, they're snobs about it. They say, oh, well, that's, you know, we have a better quality of audience. No, you just are not convincing.

Actually, they have a much lower quality of audience. You know, your average Rogan listener is way smarter than your average cable news viewer. Like, sorry. Right. Yeah. And they're more willing, partly because they watch shows like Joe Rogan, which ask them to

entertain multiple points of view on things. Right? That's kind of the whole idea. You'll see somebody, there are lots of people who go on the rogan show that i disagree with me too but i hear it you know um and that's the whole point right is you get to hear different points of view and that's been excluded from this other form of media this kind of bifurcated red blue landscape um which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse but um i i just think that this this period now uh it's going to be great for launching the this new media that's necessary

because they're going to have all this material to work with and because it's going to be all documents people are going to trust it right in the same way that they trusted the Twitter files, I didn't have anything to say about it. I just sort of put it out there. But all these independent organs are going to look at these reams of material and they're going to discuss it and pass it around. And that's going to be how the public is educated, which is great. I love it it's

the best right man you put me in such a better mood matt taiba thank you no thank you seriously i mean i i i think you would do this for free i get that feeling absolutely would i love it thanks tucker thank you appreciate it thanks for listening to tucker carlson show if you enjoyed it you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library.