The Tucker Carlson Show - Matt Taibbi: How Intel Agencies Control the Media, Putin’s Rise to Power, and 2024 Predictions

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Matt Taibbi is an award-winning investigative reporter and one of America’s more recognizable literary voices. His newsletter Racket News on Substack, is popular among readers all across the political spectrum. He also co-hosts the podcast America This Week. (00:00) Matt Taibbi (18:30) Putin's Rise to Power (54:15) The Twitter Files (1:40:55) The Intel Agencies, Censorship, and the Upcoming Election (2:06:00) Donald Trump vs. The Elites Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Tell you he's Italian. It's Italian by way of Lebanese. It's like Sicilian. It's Arabs. Sicilian, yes. Yeah, but I'm neither. My father's Filipino. My mother's Irish. He was adopted. Oh, my dad was adopted too. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Welcome to 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. Okay, so here's my question. You're a reporter. You've been a reporter your entire life. Your dad was a reporter, well-known reporter. So you grew up in journalism.

Journalism is now justly, I would say, the most hated profession. The Sackler family is more popular than nbc news at this point right and congress is more popular congress is literally yeah people like you know maybe a child molester can be fixed we don't need to execute them but nbc news okay so but um so that's bewildering i'm sure for you but for those of us who are having trouble remembering what the media landscape looked like in like 1990, when you're finishing college, what were your assumptions about journalism? What did you think you were getting into when you started?

So I grew up around my dad's work. He was a TV reporter in kind of the heyday of local affiliate news, like as portrayed in Anchorman, the bad facial hair, all that stuff. So I used to hang around the newsroom all the time. And my father is sort of a reporter's reporter. He's very gifted at striking up conversations with people. He's really good at that aspect of the job, which is know i would say probably the most important thing which is being able to talk to people and get everybody's perspective he would be able to go to um you know any scene of fire or murder or whatever instantaneously get people talking to him and trusting him and um well where does that skill come from i think you just have to be born with it yeah there's a certain a certain sort of gregariousness, right, that some people have. He likes people. Yeah, he likes people. He's

able to sort of strike up conversations quickly. And I was very shy growing up. So the first thing I concluded was I'm never going to be able to do that, right? So this is like a superpower that he has that I don't. And i thought i would have to go in a different direction i also grew up wanting to be a fiction writer right and i was really obsessed with that growing up um and then when i got out of college i realized that the only thing i really knew how to do was his job um because i had watched it so much growing up. And so it was something that would keep me at least tangentially in the writing business. So I got into it and only over time did I really appreciate the way they did reporting back then. It was a much different thing than what people

do now. Did you think it was honorable? Like when you were a kid, did you think like my dad does something embarrassing or my dad does something important and useful? No, I thought what he did was important, useful, and honest. And, you know, there was something very egalitarian about the way reporters carried themselves once upon a time. Only now are journalists universally culled from the Ivy Leagues and these upper-class schools. In fact, I was part of that generation of rich kids who went into journalism. When my father went into it, he started when he was 18. Journalism was more of a trade than a profession. It wasn't necessary to have a college education. And most of the people who went into it, they had kind of a natural antipathy for people in power. Yes.

They overwhelmingly sided with the ordinary person just reflexively. And they told the news from that perspective very often, right? And it was the classic editorialist at the time was somebody like, you know, Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko, this sort of voice of the people kind of a thing. And so, I grew up always imagining that the reporter was somebody who was on the side of ordinary people. Because he was one. Right. Yeah, exactly. And my father carried it that way, for sure. Did your father never go to college?

No, he did. He went to Rutgers. He had me while he was at Rutgers. That's why he had to go into reporting. He worked at the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And, um, and then, you know, as soon as, as soon as he graduated, he went to the TV, but, um, but no, I always had this vision of It was for people who hustled, who worked hard and had, you know, kind of a common touch, right? Like that's kind of the key to the job

is being willing to listen to people and all that. So I had a very specific idea of what journalism was when I went into it. I just thought I wasn't going to be particularly good at it because of that, you know, deficit, right? Like I didn't going to be particularly good at it because of that deficit, right? Like I didn't have that gift that he had. But I started overseas in Russia and because I was able to, I spoke Russian already early, I had an advantage over other American reporters at the time. What year did you go to Russia? So I studied in 89 and 90 when it was still Soviet.

I took a year and a half abroad and then went back as soon as I graduated. Actually, I went back before I graduated and started stringing and working for a bunch of different organizations there and finally got a job at an expat paper. So 91-ish? So, 91-ish? Yeah, 91-ish, 92. Right after the revolution, basically. Which was in August. 91, yeah. August, summer.

August 91. Yeah. So, shortly after that. What was it like? It was amazing. It was the Wild West, you know. I mean, the funny thing for me is if people ask me why did I love Russia so so much i mean the first reason was is that all my favorite writers growing up are russians and my you know nikolai gogol was my hero i wanted to be a comic novelist and the russians have so many

amazingly funny writers as you as you know right you know from bulgakov to you know to dovlatov all these people i wanted to learn the language. Then when I got there, I had been a very depressed teenager, had, you know, struggled socially, behaviorally, all these other things. I got to late Soviet Russia and everybody's depressed. And, you know, nobody's happy. And I thought, this is amazing. I fit right right in and uh you had a dark slavic zone you didn't even know it yeah exactly and and you know in america there's this incredible pressure on young people you have to succeed right away right cheerful yeah be cheerful look good be in shape like all these other things russians no way there was none of that. Nobody was going anywhere. And when I got there, that was just incredibly attractive to me. And so, you know.

Well, I've never heard that connection there that was very natural. And I really took to the place early on. How did you speak the language? Well, I mean, it's like anybody. You come to the United States, if you have no choice and you have to speak English, you learn it pretty quickly. So I studied in St. Petersburg, but then I briefly went to Uzbekistan because I had this idea that there weren't that many stringers in Uzbekistan, so I would get more work. I don't know that there are stringers anymore. What's a stringer? who is not on staff for a newspaper, but just sort of sits in a place and waits for something to happen.

And then, you know, like the New York Times or the AP will call them and say, hey, can you chase down that, you know, thing that happened? In my case, an earthquake that happened in Kyrgyzstan gave me an early chance to write a couple of stories, right? And- Who'd you write them for? I think I wrote one for AP,

uh, in 1991. Um, I ended up, uh, getting thrown out of Uzbekistan because I had a bad visa, but while I was there, uh, I, I really learned Russian because nobody there spoke English. And I also, uh, was on the Uzbek national baseball team, which was hilarious. So one day I was walking past one of the colleges and I saw people playing baseball and I was going to keep walking. And then I thought, I'm in Uzbekistan. What is that? It turned out that there was, I think it was like a refrigeration school and there were a whole bunch of students from Cuba and you know those guys could really play right um so I just went and asked um you guys mind if I play with you and uh so I ended up being a catcher on a team full of Cubans with a Russian coach and uh we played other central

Asian countries and it was hilarious yeah. Yeah. We had ground rules. This is going to sound like a fake story, but it's true. We had ground rules when we played in a pasture. If you hit a sheep, it was a double. I'm sorry. If you hit a cow, it was a double. If you hit a sheep, it was a triple. That is a true story.

Did anyone ever hit a cow or sheep? No, no, no. We only played like two games in that place. But that actually happened. I was actually playing baseball when I got thrown out of the country. So Uzbekistan in 1991 was not a first world place. No. Uzbekistan was, you know, it's kind of a typical Soviet satellite country.

It was really struggling economically. It had all kinds of problems, you know, environmentally. It used to be the big cotton producer for the Soviet Union. And then, you know, that sort of dried up for a variety of reasons. The Sea of Azov is now gone. Right. So, it was a troubled place. There was a war going on in Tajikistan right next to us.

And so it was an interesting place to be. But, you know, it was sort of my first experience. What did your parents think? My mother was terrified. When I got thrown out of the country, I got a visit by these people who were, I guess their word for it was the SNB, the Slujba Nacinalia Besopaznosti, which is just their version of the KGB. And they asked me for my papers. I had the wrong papers. I was there in a student visa that I'd kind of, you know, was kind of phony.

But I had to send a telegram telling my parents that I'd been kicked out of the country. So I wrote, KGB kicking me out, we'll call from Moscow. But she got KGB kicking me gut, we'll call when I get to Moscow. I'm being beaten to death by the KGB. So she was worried, but no, it was fine. But your dad was for it? Yeah, I think he thought the whole

adventure thing was interesting, and then when he finally visited Russia in the mid 90s, you know, and saw what the place was like at the time, he thought it was a paradise for journalists, which it was, because there was so much crazy stuff going on um and um it was a great place to learn the profession really yeah what

was press freedom like then it was really interesting there was a very vibrant community of um really hardcore great investigative reporters who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Because remember, the press had been suppressed almost completely for 80 years, right? And as soon as there was a little bit of an opening to do real reporting, there were suddenly these very brave reporters who showed up and you know they were they were risking their lives every time they wrote because the the way the system was set up was that every newspaper was basically owned by a different gangster um and you would get material they called it selling genes over there right so somebody somebody would give you a packet of information, you would write it

up about the rival gangland figure or politician, but if they wanted you to pay the price, you might get shot in a doorway or something like that. So there were people who got killed by exploding briefcases. For instance, there was a guy named Dima Holodov who worked for Moskoski Komsomolets when I was there who had written about Yeltsin's defense minister. He got blown up

in a train station. But, you know, the Russians, those guys were my heroes. I tagged on to a bunch of those people really early. And that's where I kind of

really learned the whole investigative journalism thing was from those people um you know not all of whom stayed in the business for very long sometimes not voluntarily you stayed 10 years yes yeah how come I mean I love the place I was planning on staying forever really um you, then things definitely turned weird when the transformation from Yeltsin to Putin

happened. You know, we all, none of us had any illusions about who Putin was. Putin was a known quantity. He was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg when I was a student in St. Petersburg. He was kind of known as, well, I mean, there were all sorts of stories that were told about him back then. And when he first came to power in Moscow, it was sort of widely understood that he was doing it. And Yeltsin even writes about this in his biography because Yeltsin needed

help getting out of the country and escaping prosecution. And there had been some indication that Putin had done that for his previous boss, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. So, you know, the sort of investigative journalism community was very suspicious of Putin when he first arrived. But the Western journalism community loved him. Loved Putin. Yeah. And this was, you know, I had already become disillusioned with American journalism before that because they had misreported a lot of things about post-communist Russia. But that was kind of the last straw for me, I think.

Traditionally, think tanks do a lot of thinking, and the Heritage Foundation still does that. But it also, thankfully, has begun doing. Heritage has built a massive investigative and litigation operation out of its headquarters to save this country from the corruption that is taking it over. Both actual, literal corruption, financial corruption, there's a lot of that, but also ideological and moral corruption. And to fight back, Heritage is engaging in almost 50 separate lawsuits against various government entities to try and pry out information to bring a little sunlight to the process that even Congress can't get. And it's been working.

They produced documents exposing the Biden crime family to the rest of the world. You've read those stories and helped kill the sweetheart deal that Biden's DOJ tried to make with his son, Hunter Biden. Heritage has also developed a comprehensive plan to dismantle the deep state, the swamp, by staffing the next administration with people who know what they're doing. Thousands of Americans who on day one can start to make this country better. So it's important work. Again, it's not just thinking, it's doing. And if you want to support it, go to heritage.org slash Tucker. This episode is brought to you by DAZN. For the first time ever, the 32 best soccer clubs from

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out to some provincial town like samara where they with an assignment um find the thriving, emerging middle class, right? And so you'd go out to a place where there's like a barter economy, right? And people are doing subsistence farming, you know, and they would ask around until they found somebody who had, you know, a VCR or who had been on a vacation to Ibiza once or something like that. And then they would do a whole story like, you know, transition to capitalism, you know, flourishing, you know, the emerging middle classes, you know, everything's happening right on schedule. And meanwhile, the country was really, in the Yeltsin years, was really doing very badly, right? In contrast to now, you know, Russia was experiencing sort of record levels of early deaths and all kinds of horrific things that they weren't telling people back home. Why?

Because the expat community, and I don't really know exactly how this works, but there was a monoculture about the reporting there that is very similar to what it's like now in America. But there, it was sort of cartoonized. It's a very small community. Everybody knew everybody else. And, you know, whatever the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote about, Pretty much everybody else followed their lead. There was almost nobody among the reporters who even spoke Russian, right? That was totally discouraged. How can you cover a country if you don't speak the language?

Because that was the tradition. I mean, if people would come in, they would cycle in there for a few years. They would work with translators. They stayed in a little compound on Kutuzovsky Prospect, which is, you know, right near the center of the city. In the Soviet days, it was sort of walled off by design, but they continued living there for some reason that I didn't really understand. And with a couple of exceptions, you know, I can think there was a Boston Globe reporter who was fantastic, while i was there um but for the most part you know people came in and they they just treated it as a you know as a third world backwater it's like

you know if you read the quiet american right it was it was that attitude toward but i don't understand so if you don't speak a language i mean i've lived here for 55 years i speak english as a native speaker barely understand understand the country. It's just too complicated. But if you can't speak the language, you just don't understand it at all. You have no hope of understanding it, do you? That's what I thought, right? And this was not just the journalists, but also the diplomats there. The diplomats didn't speak Russian.

Diplomats didn't speak Russian. We have the ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. He could barely put a sentence together in Russian. What is that? That just seems like a baseline requirement. So the way it was explained to us was that this was something that was a hangover from the American diplomatic experience in China before the Maoist revolution, where the diplomats were deemed to have been too close to the local population, didn't warn the people back home what was happening. So, they made a habit out of

cycling people from spot to spot so that they wouldn't become too, uh, accustomed to the culture, uh, or too acculturated. Right. Uh, which I can maybe see the rationale for a diplomat maybe, but for a journalist, it makes no sense at all. Right. So, um, to not, to not understand the, the, the place that you're reporting on. Um, so by then I, you know, I, it doesn't make sense to not understand the place you're reporting reporting on. So by then, I, you know, I... It doesn't make sense to not understand the place you're reporting on that. I think we can agree on that. Right? Yeah. But so it was a strange activity that a lot of them were involved in, where they mostly interviewed the English-speaking officials in the Yeltsin government, right? A lot of them had gone to Harvard, and they were getting one very specific version

of what Russia was going through, what its challenges were. And by then, I had already branched off. I had left the expat paper, the Moscow Times. I started up my own newspaper, which was like a nightlife guide. And I started doing this thing in opposition to that, which was I would go around the country getting jobs in weird places.

Like I worked as a bricklayer in Siberia. Really? Yeah. I worked at a monastery in Mordovia. What did you do in the monastery? Construction, you know. So, we just toured the country and kind of find out exactly how people were doing, what the situation was like. And it was an amazing discovery because every place I went, I learned about a new lie that was being told to people back home.

And it was deeply disillusioning for me. I mean, I know you've had experiences like this in journalism too, right? Where you find out that something you thought is totally wrong. And that was a real eye-opener for me. Like completely wrong. Completely wrong. Yeah, exactly. And moreover what that was proven

relatively quickly, right? There was a massive financial collapse in 98, and then Putin came in, and there was a huge popular repudiation of the American-style

version of managed democracy that existed under Yeltsin. And that was real. I mean, Putin, for all of his problems, and I was a real critic of Putin's when I was there, there was no question that he was much more popular than Yeltsin. The country was very embarrassed by Yeltsin because he was publicly drunk all the time. He was dysfunctional. I mean, I think we're living through some of those emotions now. Yes, we are.

That's right. It's shameful. Yeah. And so they wanted to, you know, their word was a senior, right? They wanted a strong hand who would come in and kind of set things right and compete with the Americans. And they didn't like being thought of as a vassal state to the West. This is an ancient conflict for Russia and America. This goes back to the days of Peter the Great, the Slavophiles versus the pro-Western crew.

And the pendulum swung the other way while I was there. And that was fascinating to watch, but it had some pretty serious consequences too. Well, yeah, that turned out to be right. Yeah. So, but as for journalism, you began to become disillusioned with the American version in the 90s. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. While I was in Russia, I became disillusioned both with the format of it, the kind of neutral third-person version of reporting where we pretend we're not having a point of view.

I didn't like that. You know, like, for instance, I would get sent out when I was at the Moscow Times, which was a paper I loved, but they would send me to all these events where funny things would happen. I would come back and write it up with humor, and they would tell me to take out the humor and write it in some other way that was more serious. And I think that's a lie right like if you if you go to a scene that's funny like for instance i had to cover this ridiculous press conference where

prince philip appeared for i think the world wildlife fund or something like that and he's giving a speech to all these russians about you know their backward attitudes about conservation and everything and in the middle of the speech, the hotel brings the spread, which includes booze. And all the reporters get up and leave Prince Philip talking by himself while they just eat all the food and drink all the booze. And to me, that's the story, right? Yeah. You know, so I went home and I wrote that up and they, you know, they kind of wanted me to do something else.

Like pretend it didn't happen. Right, exactly. And I thought, well, this isn't right. I mean, I was just a kid. I didn't really know, but I thought there's something not quite right about this. To what extent, in retrospect, do you think that Western news organizations were taking their cues from Western businesses or Western governments? Oh, I mean, 90%, 95%. Really?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you go back and look at the coverage of, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you know, some other organizations, you know, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland was sort of a colleague at the time. She was part of that whole crew of Western journalists there. What was she like?

Well, they were all doing kind of the same thing. The basic line was that there was a new group of robber-bearing capitalists who had appeared. And yes, it was messy. It was a messy transition to capitalism was that was the word they used for it now actually it was just pure gangsterism and most of the people who got rich did so through absolutely corrupt privatization yeah schemes were like for instance there was a thing called loans for shares but the government was literally lending the money to cronies so that they could buy companies like exxon for pennies on the dollar.

You know, I mean, like Yukos, for instance, was a gigantic oil company worth, you know, as much as any Western oil company would be worth. They bought it for nothing, basically, for a pittance because they were pals of the people in government. So they created an instant billionaire class and that was completely passed over nobody reported on that um then once these people had money uh they were treated as sort of legitimate wealth creators and you know entrepreneurs yeah exactly they didn't they weren't even with the robber barons who at least built railroads. Exactly. Right?

These guys didn't do anything except steal. They were wealth extractors. And it was amazing watching the hype of these figures, the whitewashing of Yeltsin's complete misrule, his brutalizing of domestic journalists, right? I mean, there was a ton of that going

on in the 90s, long before Putin came to office and became infamous. Really? Yes, there were so many journalists who were killed before Putin came along. Under Yeltsin? Under Yeltsin, yeah. Only Putin kills journalists. No, no, no. This started from the very beginning they were doing this.

I mean, that guy I told you about with the exploding briefcase, that was 1994 when that happened. You know, there were a lot. I had a friend, not exactly a friend, somebody I knew well, Alexander Hinstein, who also worked for a newspaper there. He got thrown in a mental institution in the Yeltsin years. There were all sorts of reporters shot. If you go in and shot, killed, beaten. I had another friend named Leonid Krutakov, who was not only fired every time he did an expose, but, you know, he would be attacked. He had somebody come through his window one night, if I remember correctly.

So, it was a dangerous profession before Putin came to office. Now, obviously, it went to a new level once he came in. And, you know, there were people I knew who died, right, you know, in the years after he came in. And there were people I knew who died in the years after he became president. But it wasn't an appreciably different vibe for journalists. The difference was that Putin concentrated government authority in a way that had not been done previously. Before, it was more of like a gangland free-for-all. Putin came in, he took over the last remaining independent television station and TV. He had one of the oligarchs arrested, Vladimir Gusinsky,

and the owner of Bank Manatee, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Famously. Famously put in jail. They were sponsors of media as well. But the only thing that was different is that the government was exerting sort of overt control over media. And they were stamping out the individual pockets of opposition. So during the Eltsin years, it was very dangerous. You just, you did still have some freedom to do really good work.

And that's why those people were amazing. Like, you know, they were risking everything every time they did a story and they were still doing it. They just had, they had such balls. It was incredible to watch. It's just interesting. And then the contrast, by the way, between that and the Americans, right, was just so striking for me. But why would American journalists be providing cover for Yeltsin or ignoring the downside of Yeltsin? So some of it was cultural, you know?

You come in, you don't speak the language. It's a temporary assignment. You're hanging around with a bunch of other Westerners. And so you don't see, right? Like that was a very typical thing. The few reporters who, you know, spoke the language and or, you know, married Russian women, right? Or were Russian men. They were better, right?

Because they were at least in tune to what was going on in the country. But Moscow was still, and St. Petersburg were like a different country compared to what was going on in the rest of Russia. You know, you could be in Moscow and it would seem like a more or less functional place. You go 40 miles outside the city, and again, there's subsistence farming, you know, or there's whole stretches where there's no government and people are just setting up toll roads. Uh, you know, they're, they're putting on camera, uh, fatigues and creating their own toll booths. Um, so it's like Beirut. Yeah, exactly. And, and, but if you didn't know, if you didn't go out, you wouldn't see it, you know i think that was it was a problem of perception for a lot of these folks and um but i thought it was inexcusable because you know as a reporter your first job is to is to find out you know to check for yourself uh and how were you treated by government there so the we had a unique position because we were publishing in russia so unlike all those other reporters american reporters i was technically a russian news organization we had a

russian newspaper we had a russian business right so even though we were in in english we were regulated by uh you know the the russian government um we got visited every now were regulated by the Russian government. We got visited every now and then by the tax police asking for bribes. And then after I left, they eventually shut the paper down. But they paid attention to us, but it wasn't the same as the way they paid attention to, you know, the New York times and other reporters. I mean,

there were people who were Paul Klebnikoff. Remember that name? Yeah. Yeah. So he got, he got shot. Right. While he was there.

And I don't, I don't know that it was a Russian government interest that did that, but they were paying attention to coverage that went out overseas. They't they didn't care so much about what i was doing which was writing for people who are in russia and uh you know and also we were writing in english so that god knows how many russian officials they were even understanding what we were doing so yeah so how did um well first of all why'd you leave well um it became harder and harder the expat community shrank uh when putin came to power which killed our advertiser base um and uh i i we had a humor newspaper that was sort of loosely based on like a cross between Spy Magazine and Screw. And I kind of thought that we had run the course creatively while I was there.

And at some point, I just wanted to come home. But also, it had kind of turned nasty. You know, some of the people who I knew, like, I vaguely knew Anna Polakowska, for instance, who got killed while I was there. who became a Duma deputy. He died under mysterious circumstances. Some people said it was a poison telephone. I mean, who knows, right? But it got kind of unpleasant. And, you know, the community was just not as big as it had been in the 90s. I mean, Moscow in the late 90s was an incredible scene. It was like Chicago in the 30s.

It's very difficult to describe what it was actually like. You know, gangsters everywhere, bodies, you know, all over the place, people being thrown out of windows. There were terrorist explosions happening all the time. It was a wild place to be. And that story kind of ran its course while I was there. And the city started to transform into what you saw when you went. Yeah, the most functional city I've ever been in. Which is so amazing for me to hear.

It was certainly shocking for me. So this winter, I'm standing in the kitchen with my dogs and my wife comes in. She's just come back from a long walk and she has this look on her face, this look of tranquility and joy and peace. And I said, what have you been doing? And she said, I was praying. And I said, where? She said, on my walk for an hour and a half. And it turns out she was listening to something I'd never heard of before, which is an app called Halo. Halo, H-A-L-L-O-W.

Hallow, like hallowed. And a friend of hers gave it to her. And this set off a chain reaction in my family where pretty much everyone in my family started to listen to Hallow every day. It's a prayer app. And it's the best way, as you know, to find peace. And this makes it very easy to set aside the time to deeply pray every single day. And I'm so impressed by Hallow that I tracked down the number of the CEO and I called him and I said,

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In 9-11. And so I think it's fair to say it was a completely different country in 2002 from what it had been in 1992. Mm-hmm. What did you think when you got back? Well, I mean, I was shocked when I got back. And I was thinking about this just the other day because I think a lot now about kind of America's slide toward autocracy. Because I had this vision the whole time I was there.

Watching the Russian government in action who was getting this incredible advanced education into autocratic methods and how things work, right? The jailing of political opponents on trumped up charges or blackmail and how things are leaked by the intelligence services. That stuff just happens out in the open there, right? And I always had this image that, well, in America, that doesn't go on. And then I come home to post-9-11 America, and the whole vibe is, well, we have to start throwing all of our democratic guarantees overboard because as i think as dick cheney put it we have to start exploring the dark side um because you know the bill of rights is inadequate to keep us safe we we need to start doing you know all these things that i that i thought were crazy you

know the patriot act the the authorization to use military force, right? So, moving the authority to declare war out of Congress to basically to the White House, mass surveillance, you know, Guantanamo Bay, all these things were really shocking to me. And it was kind of, I thought it was also ironic to come back from Russia to this developing situation. So what year did you get back? 2002. So was it clear to you then where the trajectory was headed? Well, I thought there would be, I was really naive in retrospect. I took all of my sort of fellow political liberals seriously when they said they were, you know, ardently opposed to this secretive revolution, right? And the spy state and drone warfare and all these other things. came along and there was this belief that a transformation he would usher in a transformative presidency that would undo you know this cheney vision which scared me you know which i thought

was was sort of going to undo this schoolhouse rock version of america that i grew up believing in um and i believe i i believed it i'm kind of embarrassed now. I actually thought that was going to happen, that when Barack Obama got elected, that all that would turn back. But in hindsight, they never had any intention, it seems, of changing anything. If you go back and look at the statements, they were saying things like, well, we're not, we're not, we might not change the status quo right away. Right. Um, and I had, you know, I had been very positive about Barack Obama. I covered him on the campaign trail. Um, cause my job, by the way, I, when I came back, I lucked into getting the greatest job in journalism, which is covering campaigns for Rolling Stone, right? And I was very impressed by Barack Obama. I thought he was incredible, but it was disillusioning to see what happened afterwards. At what point did you realize he wasn't what you thought he was? So, right after he got elected, I got assigned to cover the causes of the financial crisis, which was funny because I had no background in finance.

I didn't have any clue what a mortgage-backed security was or how any of that works. But one of the first things that happened was that I got calls from people in the Democratic Party who said, you should look at the president's relationship to Citigroup and how the Citigroup bailout happened. He put a Citigroup executive who had been a college buddy of his in charge of his economic transition, during which they gave a very sweetheart bailout deal to Citigroup. And this was an early indication that, you know, this president was maybe not exactly what I thought he was. Not transformative in the way you imagined. Right. Yeah, exactly. And, and, um, even though Rolling Stone couldn't, they were over the moon about Obama, right? Uh, that was true love. I remember that. Right? That was almost erotic. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody in liberal media loved Obama, but particularly at our magazine where the people who owned it,

they were just delirious about Obama. And so when I came to them and I said, look, I have to do this story about how this bailoutout situation is corrupt um they weren't pleased but they ran if you can go back and look you'll see there's a story called obama's big sellout uh it was like a 9 000 word feature that they let me run and um so that was like a year after he got into office but that was kind of the beginning of what did the peace say it basically said that uh that the obama had run as an economic populist um and had talked a lot about reforming uh certain things that had gone on wall street that had allowed, you know, the excesses of the mortgage bubble to happen. And then as soon as he got elected, he brought in all these acolytes of, sorry, Clinton's former Treasury Secretary Rubin, Bob Rubin. So there are all these, Rubin was at Citigroup.

Obama brought a whole bunch of people close to Bob Rubin into the government. And these were the same kind of people who had caused the crash, right? So to me, I wrote it as kind of a bait and switch. He ran as somebody who was going to change the system. He brought in people who were the system. And in addition, there was this bailout deal with Citigroup in particular that was kind of malodorous. And there were people who ended up paying fines in that situation. But it was very critical of basically who Obama had brought in to run his economic policy. And the idea was he had run as one thing and he was really another thing.

So that was one of the first stories of that type. How did the Obama administration react to the piece? They weren't happy. If you go back and look, there's an interview with Obama. They did an official Rolling Stone interview with him years later, where he sort of brought up the fact that even your magazine talked about how I didn't do enough. And this was like years after the fact. And by the way, I had been incredibly complimentary of him

while he was running, right? So of all of the things that had been written about him, what he remembered was this one slight, you know, which I thought was a very telling sign of his character, you know? And, but at the time,

I wasn't paying attention to the other things like about, you know, the continued prosecution of the war on terror, you know, the drone assassination thing, the kill list, you know, terror Tuesdays, all that stuff. I didn't really clue into that. Killing an American citizen with a drone. Yeah, no, exactly. That whole thing was incredible. I mean, I did a story later about another American who sued the government because he thought he was on the kill list. And the government's response was, you're not entitled to find out whether you're on it or not. You're on the kill list. Yeah. And the whole idea that we't grounded in any law that was passed or any court case.

They just sort of wrote themselves white papers giving themselves permission to do this stuff, which I think is crazy. To this day, I think it's crazy. Well, I found it totally shocking. And I think I'm basically opposed to the death penalty anyway. But, you know, I think reasonable people can support the death penalty. Absolutely. If there's a trial. Well, that's the point.

Right. But there's a trial. And the one thing you can never do is murder your own citizens because you exist to help your citizens. That's the only reason we have the government. Right. Why do we have government? It is a collective action on everyone's behalf. Who's a citizen?

So the idea that you could kill an American citizen, and the first time, I mean, I think they've actually killed quite a few American citizens. It turns out I didn't know that. But the first time I became aware of it, it was effectively a foreign national with a U.S. passport. The Al-Awlaki case. Al-Awlaki. And then, you know, Spartan was like, well, is he really an American?

Well, yeah, actually, he's an American citizen. Yeah. Like, that's the whole point. You're either a citizen or not. Right. And I remember being really shocked by that. Right, but it was glossed over in this weird way, right? People were like, eh.

He's a terrorist. Yeah, he's a terrorist, but... Or terrorist-adjacent. Right. Terrorist-y. Yeah. I mean, you could probably call him a terrorist, but they killed his 16-year-old son, too. So how did Obama explain that?

So, I mean, I remember he gave a speech. I was looking at this just the other day where he talked about, among other things, they said that al-Awlaki had been tied to the coal bombing and i remember reading that and thinking okay well he's saying that this is punishment for a crime um but there's no trial right uh we're pronouncing him guilty uh and just executing the guy for something that we say he did that seemed crazy to me you know yes and i remember there was there was another white paper i'm trying i believe leon panetta was involved where the the concept was yes um due process is required but it doesn't have to involve

the defendant right as long as there is a process right uh it can be unilaterally us just talking about it and it can be post-execution right exactly yeah but that stuff's all it's all madness and i don't know i mean i'd be curious to hear what you think i mean i i think when we when we did those things and didn't make a big stink about it, psychologically, we just crossed a line into something else. And I feel like there's no going back once you... So we were talking about this at dinner last night. I mean, obviously, you're coming from different poles, I guess. Probably.

Well, it turns out not. But in 1995, we would have been on exactly opposite sides. But I think we both, given our similar age, had the same sort of gut level belief, which is whatever the U.S. does abroad is in a completely different category from the way the government conducts itself domestically. In other words, you can't treat American citizens like you would, you know, the Houthis or something. It's like there's one set of standards for the way we deal, conduct our foreign policy with foreigners and a completely different standard for the way the U.S. government treats its own citizens who own the government. It's their government, right? Right. Right.

Exactly. And I guess what I didn't realize because I was morally deficient and young and dumb was that once you start doing really evil things abroad, you're going to do them at home, actually. Absolutely. And you can't defend democracy by subverting democracy. No. And also, you're basically denaturing the whole idea of democracy. You're diluting it.

Once you start murdering people without due process. You know, it's not democracy anymore. I mean, they use that term in a very facile way now constantly. Oh, we have to protect democracy. Well, what do you mean by that? You're going to protect democracy by censoring, right? Like this is the whole thing that I've spent the last two years on. If that's what you mean, that's contradictory, right?

Contradictory in what sense? Well, the First Amendment says that we don't do that, right? Well, you can't protect the Bill of Rights by violating it. Right. And, you know, this whole switch, I was, I think, like most Americans, I was like you, we all knew that America, the United States was whacking people all over the world, right? I mean, even though the church committee hearings came along and we basically said we weren't going to do that anymore, of course we were doing it, right? We were doing all kinds of horrible things we were probably uh fixing elections you know in half the

places on earth but not here right like that was a a bright line for americans now maybe that's chauvinistic to to believe in that but i was like you i didn't i didn't think they would ever cross that line uh and come and and bring these ideas home but you know this is what we're finding out now i mean this is the big theme of the twitter files was you know when we tried to figure out where so what are the twitter can you explain for people who didn't follow it at the time so uh in late 2022 after elon musk acquired um uh twitter you know there started to be rumors that he was going to open up the internal communications of old twitter and sort of give them to the world right and it turned out to be true i uh he i got a call one day or i got a note um sort of summoning me to san francisco and i'm

from somebody at twitter let's put it that way and um and so i was the first person uh who was put on this project of looking rummaging through old Twitter's correspondence. And I think he said that, Elon said that his idea was that he wanted to restore trust in the platform by telling people about the different kinds of censorship techniques that were going on. It's not clear exactly what he was up to, but he seemed sincere at the time.

He brought in me. He brought in Barry Weiss. Barry brought in a couple of other people like Michael Schellenberger. Lee Fong ended up being involved. Another really good young investigative reporter. Maybe the last one, right? Probably. He appeared.

And so there was a group of us and for about three months we got to look through um the internal correspondence of one of the world's biggest communications companies and the big thing that we found was that there was this nexus of communication between government enforcement and intelligence agencies and the internet platforms. And they had a very sophisticated, organized bureaucracy that was involved with controlling content in a variety of different ways. And when we started to try to figure out, first of all, this was shocking to us. We're seeing all these documents that said flagged by FBI, flagged by DHS. Just because that's a crime. They're committing a crime by doing that.

That's illegal. Probably. On the Bill of Rights. I mean, it just couldn't be clearer. Yeah, you would think, right? I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it looked bad to me, right? Certainly, it looked like a story. Yeah.

No question, right? But we had to figure out, where did this come from? How did this start? And when we started asking questions, it turned out that a lot of the programs that were now targeting domestic speech began as overseas counterterrorism messaging programs, right? So the State Department, for instance, has a thing called the Global Engagement Center, which is now very much interested in speech both abroad and at home.

But they were once exclusively a sort of counter-ISIS platform. In fact, they had a different name back then. They were called the CSCC. But in 2016, Obama rechristened them the Global Engagement Center, and they started to look inward. And when I asked people who, I managed to talk to a couple of sources

who worked at that agency, one phrase really stuck out. It was CT to CP. So that's counterterrorism to counterpopulism. And the idea was the whole mission abroad of countering ISIS or Al-Qaeda, contracting-wise, it was kind of drying up right because those threats had been somewhat neutralized um but populism you know was now a very serious it was viewed as a very serious threat after um occupy wall street the tea party the arab spring was something that maybe they didn't see as a bad thing but but they certainly saw the transformative power of the internet platforms.

I think that freaked them out. And the virus is communicable. Exactly, exactly. Then there was Brexit. Then I think Trump was the last, you know, the last stand for a lot of these folks. And that's when you started to see all these communications like, you know, we have to,

we need to get a more formalized, you know, control over these platforms. And so, yeah, that's when the war on terror mission turned inward. And I think that's a huge story, right? Well, it's the end of the country we grew up in right yeah you would think you know and and that's um you know for me it's been and i think probably for for you too the the uh this new theme of the sudden explosion of a liberal tactics in politics um that even if they're directed at somebody that you know liberals hate like donald trump or steve steve bannon how can you not be freaked out by stuff like that we haven't used contempt of congress to jail people since the un-american affairs committee in 1947 right this is like third world kind of stuff that we're seeing, you know, accusing the front runner in a presidential campaign of a hundred different felonies. Is that happening if he's not running

for president? I mean, who can honestly say that, right? But you can't talk about it now. I mean, if you mention it, you're out of the club and mainstream press now, which is incredible to me. You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network,

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be prepared. Go to AmmoSquared.com to learn more. so i mean it raises so many questions but uh most obviously then if uncovering the abuse of power by the powerful and particularly by government isn't the point of journalism. It's clearly not the point of journalism anymore. What is the point? Well, I mean, then you become courtiers, right? I mean, I think that's, again, what's ironic for me is that, you know, I saw this process happening full circle. You know, when I first got to Russia, the first reporters I met had worked at places like Komsomolskaya Pravda in the 80s, right? Which were, at one time, it was the world's largest newspaper. It had a

circulation of 21 million or something like that. And, you know, I worked in the old Pravda building when I was at the Moscow Times. And the people there, you know, they would tell me stories about what their jobs were in the 80s. And that was taking dictation they were clerks basically right yes you know they they would get the whatever the message of the day was and they would do it and then go home to their wives and they would go fishing on the weekends and there was no you know intellectual anything involved with it um you couldn't take it in that direction. It would be hazardous to your health if you did. Well, that's what journalism is now in America. I mean, look what just happened with the Nord Stream thing.

Just take an example, right? Nord Stream happens and there's no investigation whatsoever in any of the major newspapers. How can that happen? It's this major consequential thing that might have an impact on starting a war with a nuclear power. And it just wrecked the economy of Western Europe. And it's a major ecological disaster, which you claim to care about. It's the largest man-made emission of CO2 in history. Right.

So if you think CO2 is driving the greatest threat that we face, the existential threat of climate change, then you kind of want to know how that happened. Right? Wouldn't you? Right? Right. You would think, you know. So, why wouldn't, I mean, it is, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because, you know, I was like the only person in mainstream news to point out that no russia did not blow up nordstrom and was attacked for it but i was wondering like if i'm at the new york times like a lot of people i know why would i just like try

to report that story out it's so interesting right why wouldn't they yeah i i have no idea you know i mean obviously you're getting a signal from down on high that that's not wanted. But it's different, okay? So, in the early 2000s, yes, there were high-profile instances where people like Jesse Ventura were unhired from MSNBC because they mistakenly thought he was pro-war when they hired him, right? Phil Donahue is getting good ratings, but he's bounced, right? I was there for that, yes. Chris Hedges, you know? Yes, I know.

And Chris was sort of a classic example of a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky once wrote about in Manufacturing Consent, which is that they don't fire you necessarily, but you just don't get promoted if you're considered the wrong kind of personality. Which is weird because good investigative reporters should be difficult personalities, right? If they're not, they're probably not good reporters. I mean, just look at who our great reporters are. They're independent-minded people. Independent-minded people. And you want to experience them in little bursts. Yeah, I agree with that.

They're all kind of crazy, to be honest. But that's okay. It's part of the job. Right. But this is different. There were a few instances like that back then of people who were critics of the war whatever now it's just this blanket if you step out of line on any one of two dozen different topics you're out you know um and i think everybody's gotten that message and that's the only thing that makes sense to me is like what

so there are no brave people in all of journalism? There are no honest men left? Well, how can that, I mean, it can't be possible, but it kind of is, right? I mean, there are a few people who I think tried to do a few things, you know. But just to take the, look at the Russiagate story. They made so many mistakes on that. Jeff Gerth. Okay, so before you, I want, let's put you at the center of this, because you were, one of the reasons we're having this conversation, is you were one of the only liberals in all media who, and you speak Russian, you live there for 10 years, you have credibility on this question, I would say. And you were the only ones who said, you know, I don't like Trump, I didn't vote for Trump. But like, I don't think this is real. I had a book out at the time called Insane Clown President about Donald Trump.

Right? I mean, I'm not a fan of the guy, right? But they came to me. So where were you when the Russiagate thing started? I was at Rolling Stone. And what did you think when you first heard that he was a Russian agent? So it was in late 2016 2016 it was right after he had gotten elected you remember that list that came out proper not um well the washington posted this

story about this weird blacklist that uh they had discovered of people who the russians were supposedly in league with and it was this shadowy organization called Prop or Not. And they linked to this list of sites. And without any evidence at all, they were linking all kinds of independent journalists to Russia. And I thought, well, that's crazy. And then there was this whole thing about, I actually had to do a segment on MSNBC with Chris Hayes. The other guest was Malcolm Nance, of all people. And it was all about, you know, is Trump in league? Before he got inaugurated, is Trump in league with the Russians? There had just been a big leak about that.

And I thought, well, there's no evidence for this, right? Like we just had a catastrophic episode in journalism with the WMD thing where anonymous sources get us in a lot of trouble. If you can't recreate the experiment in the lab, you got to be careful of that story, right? And that's all I said. I wasn't like, he's innocent, you know? Like, I just thought, this is a dangerous story. Let's all be careful with this. And immediately there was this reaction

that was just shocking to me. It was like this shunning thing. It happened to me. It happened to, you know, Greenwald, obviously. Aaron Mate at The Nation, there was like a group letter that was written by the rest of the staff denouncing him. The husband of the editor of The Nation also, Stephen Cohen, they didn't want him around. Wonderful man.

He was. Yeah, absolutely. He was a good friend of mine um but it was crazy because this was so early in the process and everybody had already predetermined that some this thing was true this extraordinary complicated thesis um they had somehow already arrived at the conclusion that it was proven and at this, you didn't know either way. I didn't really know either way, but I had a strong suspicion that it was wrong, right? Like, you know, journalists have a sense or the sixth sense. It doesn't smell right, right? Like, it's kind of like the French connection where, you know, Gene Hackman looks over and

he says, that's a wrong table, right? Like, this was a wrong table. It didn't look right. I felt the same way. Yeah. And it was too complicated for me to see. I wish I had known at the time. Even in right-wing world where I then worked and lived, I felt like everyone believed it.

Yeah. But how is that possible? Well, I remember saying to somebody, you know, I think this is, I think this could be like complete bullshit, like actual bullshit. And my friend goes, be careful, be careful. I think there's something there. I was like, okay. By the way, I try to be very open-minded. Like, I don't know.

Right. If you're actually a space alien, I don't know, prove it to me. Right. I really try to keep every possibility open. But I kept asking people like, what, okay, how do we know this? Right. Everybody believed it. why you know they hated trump that was obvious you know um but that wasn't enough for me right like just on a superficial level it didn't fit donald trump you wouldn't tell me he's involved in some mob deal uh to build a casino in atlantic city or something like that right like i'd believe that donald trump being james bond

involved in a five-year conspiracy with uh the russian government uh you know what what did steel call it a well-developed conspiracy of five years. That's ridiculous. This is a guy who, if you've been to any of his campaign speeches, he can't get through the first sentence of one of his scripts. His brain is already off in another direction. How is that guy going to keep a secret? It didn't make any sense. And nobody had any evidence. And then even when things came out that should have been fatal to the story like when it finally came out in october of 2017 that the clinton campaign had funded the steel dossier um i thought well that this it's over now right it's a republican donor

too well yes yeah sort of previously right steel um didn't come on until till later but still once that came out and you know you knew that campaign research had ended up in an intelligence assessment um that should have been it i i thought and everybody just plowed ahead like it was still a thing. So what happened to you in the middle of all this? So you're at Rolling Stone. You're this famous liberal reporter, one of the most famous liberal reporters, actually. And you make the mistake of saying, well, we don't know for a fact this is true.

People start shunning you. Where does it go from there? So then I started to get angry about it. And at one point i went why oh because uh you know i don't like to be told what to do i don't like to be told that i got to ignore something right um you know like i'm one of those difficult personalities in journalism right like you know it just happens that way but i i went to Rolling Stone at one point. I had really good editors there for the most part, but I went to them and I said, look, this story is wrong, right? And it's going to come out that it's wrong.

Give me eight weeks to chase this down and let's be the first mainstream organization to get it right and put it to bed. And it'll be a coup for us, right? You know, let me do my thing on this. And they said no. The first time they ever said no to me on, you know, like an investigative project. And just to restate, you speak Russian. You can read Russian. So there's like probably no one better to do the story.

Yeah, I would think, right? You know, I even had some sources over there right who could have chased it down you know certain aspects of it down like you know the trump tower deal and all that stuff like that would have been relatively easy to to go through and i and i had covered congress so the people who were investigating this like i i knew some of those folks too um and it's a it's a great story i mean when it first came out it was obvious this is either the biggest intelligence uh coup in history right the russians getting a manchurian candidate in the white house or it's the biggest fake in history right the biggest setup in history somebody's either

telling the biggest whopper ever or or the russians have just pulled off this the most amazing thing it can't there's there's no other option yes right so if it's not this it's that and we might as well be the first to report that right yes and so what did they say when you make they said no on what grounds i don't even i mean i don't even remember what the excuse was. They just weren't enthused about the idea. And I understood that. Look, they're a Rolling Stone.

They have an audience that has certain expectations. But that was a big moment for me. I mean, i was naive i i actually thought they you know that that the the magazine would be interested in in going there because they had let me you know go against obama before they let me do other things but not on this so um so how what did your colleagues say because by this point i think it was becoming public to anyone who was watching like me that you were dissenting from the line on this question yeah so i would say glenn greenwald took the brunt of it um you know there were stories in the the new yorker profiles you know

the bane of their resistance right like why is is Glenn Greenwald being a stick in the mud about this Russia thing? That was like a feature topic in magazines, like a bunch of them. And, you know, and they concluded, by the way, that he was motivated by his impatience with the rise of women and minorities in the Democratic Party.

It was unbelievable. He was a racist. Right. Glenn's a racist. I actually had the physical copy of The New Yorker when that came out. Did they really say that? They did, yeah. And it was an on-the-record quote by one of his former editors, of all things.

That Glenn's a racist. Yeah. Well, they didn't... Right. He's impatient with the rise of women and minorities. So when I saw that, I'm like, wow, this is like, what is going on with this? Right. And meanwhile, you know, I was getting it from all angles.

There were former Russian, former American diplomats who were going after me online saying I was in league with Putin. And, you know. Seriously? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a heavy charge. Yeah, you would think, you know. And that was becoming increasingly common. And it was an implication of a lot of the back and forth on social media.

You know, this person is too close to Russia or, you know, he loves Putin, right? Like that kind of a thing. Had you ever worked as a secret agent for Putin? Of course not. Are you kidding? I am kidding, actually. It's so nuts. You just said you left Russia because you didn't

like the vibe under Putin. I mean, we put Putin in the cover of our newspaper like in drag carrying a dominatrix whip you know like yeah we we lampooned him constantly and um and i actually i did some journalism in russian for another paper that was very critical of him and talked about the apartment bombings and some other stuff and um so i was no friend of vladimir putin's but that became a common thing in journalism and it's it was just so shocking and i i knew at that point that my time was limited at you know at rolling stone which i loved the place i really loved that place it was

and it's a great gig too um but there was no way i was going to be able to stay under those circumstances how long did you last until um 2020 i guess so 15 years roughly um you know maybe maybe 16 i guess um so it was it was a great time so when it became clear that you know the claim that putin had installed trump as the american president when it became clear that was like malicious fantasy it was a total lie did any of the people who attacked you and called you a russian agent apologize or change their mind of course not did any of them apologize to you no but it's a little different because by that point i was like such an outlaw that like i had or change their mind? Of course not. Of course not. Did any of them apologize to you? No, but it's a little different because by that point,

I was like such an outlaw that like I had no expectation of being treated fairly by anyone ever other than my wife. So I was just, no, I'm serious. By that, you know, I was just like your head changes,

but you were very much at, like everyone liked you. And I mean, you were not an outlaw. Right. But you became an outlaw kind of overnight right yes no yeah not now no my name is sort of uh you know synonymous with

you know reactionary troll that you know that kind of thing um and that happened basically overnight. It was a little tough to take for a few years there, but I got over it relatively quickly. I moved to Substack, which turned out to be a great thing, which is an independent platform. And I was one of the first people who um kind of left big mainstream media to do the self-publishing thing and and uh discovered that there was actually you know um a functioning business model there i mean um i had been in journalism for 30 years and had never seen it as anything but a dying business, right?

There was never any money that you were actually going to make, right? If you're making 100 grand, you're like psyched. Yeah, exactly. And then all of a sudden, it turns out that there's actually this huge market out there because people hate journalism, right? That's the problem. When you're in mainstream media, you don't see that there's actually this screaming need for something else that people aren't getting because they don't trust regular media. So I was an early beneficiary of that whole thing. But it was a default though. I mean, you probably would have stayed at The New Yorker or where you

were, Rolling Stone, forever, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Had this not happened, I would have been there. You know, I was very loyal to the magazine. You know, I stuck up for them always, even when they were wrong, even during the UVA thing. You know,

I said, look, they made a mistake, but we're doing the right thing. We're self-auditing. Like, you know, this is a great magazine.

We have a great tradition, et cetera, et cetera. I was kind of a company man in an embarrassing kind of way. But when the Russia thing happened, you know, all bets were off. And I wasn't the only one. There were other people in the business that this also happened to.

But none of them came back the way that you did. I mean, Glenn did. Well, Glenn, for sure. Yeah. Well, very few. Yeah, a few. Did you think about just hanging it up and becoming a translator or doing something else? No.

I mean, I love this job. You know, after initially not really loving journalism, I learned to really love it while I was at Rolling Stone, you know. And then, you know, now, additionally, I think the country needs journalists. I agree. And the thing that you need most of all in journalism to be good at it is you need to have some bravery. Now, that wasn't true in American journalism for a long time, probably not since the Vietnam days or the Red Scare, you know, was there a situation where there was a real social price to pay for

taking, you know, a certain stance on things. Now there is, right? And if you're going to do certain kinds of reporting, you're going to lose all your friends, but that's the job, you know? And not many people are willing to do that. I am willing to do that because I never expected to keep friends in this business. So I think it's unfortunately

an exciting time to be a journalist, but I would feel wrong to quit now. I'm sure you'd probably feel the same way. I do feel the same way. That's exactly how I feel, actually. Right? Nicely put. Yeah, you don't.

Yeah, that's right. If you're in it to make friends, you're probably in the wrong business. Go to church. Right, yeah, exactly. But tell us about like having been in institutional journalism you know at the top of it really and then finding yourself like having to work for yourself like what are the advantages and disadvantages

well first of all being in institutional journalism there is a little bit overrated right like i think um because i came from alternative journalism yeah i i had financed my my own newspaper in moscow um and you know i did everything from printing to running the plates to to the printing press and selling ads, everything. So the business is something that I've always been familiar with and suddenly being involved with a big organization. It's nice, but I don't see it as a prerequisite. I thought it was really funny

at the beginning of Trump's reign when a couple of the reporters were complaining about losing their White House press credentials. It's like, who cares, right? You're supposed to be on the outside. Right? Like, what are you whining about? You know, do the job. You've been to a White House briefing? I have, yes, yes. Then you know how soul-killing it is.

Yeah. You learn nothing, you're captive, you eat lunch out of a vending machine. Everybody has got the most distorted value system. They're so impressed by their hard passes and they're all such losers. You would quit the business, right, if you had to do that? Absolutely. In fact, one of the first things that I was assigned to do when I went to Rolling Stone, they sent me on a campaign junket with John Kerry. So I was on the plane with Kerry during that campaign for like a month or something like that. And it's a similar dynamic

to the White House press corps. It's the same people every single day. It's very clubby. They have- Extremely. Right? So there's even seating arrangements right so the new york times gets to sit in the front and then they they kind of it's almost it's like heathers or mean girls you did they you know according to how how well known you are in the business you you have to sit further and further back in the plane right or farther back in the plane um and at the very back or the cameraman yeah exactly and and they at the time back are the cameramen. Yeah, exactly. And at the time, they were angry

at Alexander Pelosi because she had filmed some of them. So she was in the back with a bunch of piles of equipment. But I got frustrated very quickly

by the fact that all they were doing all day long was just taking press releases from flax and then they would eat. They would be given these big-

Macaroni and cheese, Butterfingers, beer. So, I went on a hunger strike in my first trip. I had this like epiphany that they're just giving me too much stuff. I'm just not going to take anything from any of these people. And I stopped eating. I stopped taking the press releases. So, the only one who didn't get fat on a campaign yeah exactly right um and and when we got to the events i would not go to the events i would run a mile in any direction and just talk to anybody about

anything but the campaign um because the the like this isn't journalism you're sitting there just being just taking something and then converting it into a press release. Like, what is that? You know, but the white house is even worse because they have, they have airs about it. Right.

Um, and you know, even though I haven't done that beat, you know, uh, for, I think it's an important beat. Like you have to,

somebody has to ask the president questions, but they don't for the most part. Right, I know. Do they? I've never seen it. Right? So, you know, I don't know. At best, you get some reporter

whose goal is not to elicit information, but just to prove that he's like an antagonist to the president. Right, exactly. I'm, you know, Thanks, Dan, rather. But it doesn't advance the story in any meaningful way. Right, right, exactly.

What they want is, and that's what they were upset about, the Jim Acostas of the world. They were upset that they were being denied this saleable piece of video where they could stand up and do this, you know, and gesticulate. I always wonder with Jim Acosta,

who I don't know, but I always wondered, Jim Acosta was always telling me what a journalist he was. And a lot of guys were like this, including some I've worked with, but I'm a journalist. Okay, Tornado comes to Trailer Park.

Give me 750 words on that. Like, I don't think they're capable of writing a story. Do you ever think that? Like, could Jim Acosta actually just write, like, a news story

or even an expository essay? Well, I wonder about that because are they even, you know, once, not that long, not to be all back in the day about it,

but you wouldn't have gotten a job in the White House Press Corps if you hadn't have gotten a job in the White House press if you hadn't come through covering town meetings and all that stuff. I mean, I did that. I covered aldermen. I covered the police beat, fires, stuff like that. You have to be able to do that stuff. And that's the basics of the job is you know showing up talking to people on the street

talking to this person that that person you have to be able to do crime reporting you know um and you got to talk to people who are on the other side of the law all that stuff i don't think they can do that i mean i remember seeing somebody i forget what organization it was, but somebody, one of the kind of mainstream sort of web only sites, one of their columnists was talking about how much he hated the telephone. And I thought, what journalist hates the telephone? How can you do this show if you hate the telephone, right? And it's because the new thing is they decide what they think. They find links that support their ideas. And then they just type the thing.

Whereas, you know, what you're supposed to do is talk to everybody, then figure out what the story is. To add information to the story. Right. Right. Not just, you know, the snake eating its tail. It's just all self-reference, actually. Right. Exactly.

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Get 25% off. We enjoy them. You will, too. So you get out of that. So the business model works in independent media? Well, kind of, right? So it works if you're cranking out content. What I don't think they figured out how to do is how to monetize investigative journalism, which takes a long time. It's expensive. It's expensive.

And you're not producing stuff that's every couple of days. And even when you do, it's not always the stuff that people like. People like reading op-eds with strong takes. You can make money doing that, right? Also, you whiff sometimes. I mean, a lot of stories don't. It happens to me even now a lot. You waste a lot of time on stuff that's not real

or not provable right or or you think that people are going to go bananas over something and they don't there's that right yeah what stories have you had that you thought would make a splash have an effect but that were sort of instantly forgotten well i don't know if forgotten but i would say that a lot of the twitter file stuff um i expected that to be i mean i naively expected a lot of that stuff to be so give us an example of what shocked you uh that you discovered during that reporting so uh one of the things was that Twitter, heading into the 2020 election, had worked out a system with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Twitter and about two dozen other internet platforms and briefing them on things that they might expect in the information landscape. basically twitter was receiving recommendations about content from the federal government through the fbi and then from the states through the department of homeland security it was it was that organized they like they had worked it out that like if it comes from you know a local police department it's going to come from the dhs if it comes from the hh, it's going to come through the FBI, right? So they had a very organized system of flags where you would see the FBI say, for your consideration, here are some accounts that may violate your terms of service.

And there'd be an attached spreadsheet with 400 account names on it. And that was just happening constantly. It was an industrial process that they had worked out. I thought that's a huge story, right? Here's the FBI that's devoting resources to looking at social media accounts of ordinary people and worrying about terms of service violations. What is that? Why are they not looking for child predators and stuff like that, right? And so what was that?

Well, it's part of this sort of spiraling, sprawling thing where a whole series of government agencies are very intensely interested in what's online and who's reading what and and in developing new ways of um you know suppressing content de-amplifying other things and with covid there was a really really intense effort to um to create rules about what could and could not be seen what you know they were they would decide that things were, one of the key right that may be true but internally at the company they're but knowing that might convince other people not to take the shot exactly and so they looked at that as a kind of disinformation even though it's true one. Disinformation doesn't mean untrue, correct?

Exactly. It carries the connotation. The definition involves falsity, right? Or misinformation, even, right? So, disinformation is like the intentional spreading of lies, right? But even misinformation, Homeland security has something they called the mdm or they had the mdm committee which is misinformation disinformation and malinformation committee and malinformation is it it's just material it's true but kind of politically

wrong right um or inconvenient this and that could be something that, you know, promotes vaccine hesitancy or, you know, we have the Supreme Court case now in Murthy v. Missouri that's partly related to the Twitter files. And the plaintiffs, a couple of the, three of the plaintiffs in that case are doctors who were, who had published true research about covid um but were suppressed were de-amplified they were put on you know in twitter they were put on trends blacklists uh because you know their research tended to go against federal policies about lockdowns and vaccination and all kinds of things so to me that's what the First Amendment is there for, right? Like, we do not want the government in a role of deciding what's true and untrue,

because once you do that, the government has a monopoly on misinformation. The only protection against that happening is absolutely unfettered free speech. And they're messing with that, you know, because I think there's just this gradual moving away from belief that all the concepts in the Bill of Rights work. And so this, what we looked at in terms of the censorship, it's very much an evidence there where they just don't believe that the first amendment works i don't think but they're the government they exist to protect the first amendment that's the whole point of having a government right so again that seems

like a prima facie crime to me and as you said at very least a huge story. Right. What happened to that story once you reported it? I was denounced as a right-wing tool, right? The Washington Post, their first story about the Twitter files described me as conservative journalist Matt Taibbi. And then they did a silent edit of that. I would beg to differ. Yeah. This is ridiculous. And that was the line all the way through.

Even though the reports really, they weren't really about suppression of one political party or another. They were really much more about this process, which is just so scary, right? And nobody in the regular press really picked it up. And that was a shocker to me because I thought, well, somebody's got to be interested in this, you know? And they weren't, you know? How long were you there? At Twitter doing the story?

You know, three and a half months, I would say. So we got a lot of stuff. We got, you know, probably, I mean, not a lot, you know, 200,000 emails, something like that, attachments. We still haven't gone through all of it. But the big thing was that there's just lots of evidence of this interplay between government and these platforms. I think Elon at one point said publicly

that there were Intel operatives working at Google, at Twitter, rather. Lots of them. Working there. Lots of them. And that was another thing we didn't understand when we first got there. We're like, why is there a CIA person here? Why is this person a former National Security Council operative? What value add do they bring to...

A tech company. A tech company. I couldn't understand that. But they're actually working there as employees. Yeah. And they were making a lot of the big decisions about content, too. In fact, one of the biggest emails that we found,

there was a debate about whether or not Twitter had the ability to say no to in this case it was a state department request about content and the the former cia employee says you know our window on that is closing um as our government partners become more aggressive in their attributions right so what they were basically saying is we're running our ability to like pushback is is evaporating, you know, and that I think has turned out to be true with these platforms. I think they're they're increasingly just sort of intertwined with the thing, because they began by demanding that these companies fork over, you know, information about geolocation of users and other places around the world, even in the United States.

But now they're venturing into content, right? Content domestically that people see. So Google's the biggest, of course, of all these companies and by far the most influential as a monopoly on search, which is your window into all information. Right. If we were ever to see what goes on internally at Google, what do you think we would learn? Well, I think we would find that they have massively changed the formula for search returns. I mean, they even talked about this in 2017 and 2018 when they had this thing called Project Owl, which was designed to change the parameters of the search towards something they called authority. And authority was basically, the way it was explained to me when I talked to somebody at

Google, it was like, if you search for baseball five years ago, you might've seen your local little league team. Now you'll see MLB.com come up first, right? And you've probably noticed this when you do a Google search, the first 40 or 50 results will all be of a certain type. And you'll have to, it's much, much harder to find kind of this counter-narrative version of reality now. Even if you know exactly what you're looking for or type in the title of the story, it's made reporting harder. Don't you think? Yeah, I mean, it actually challenges your understanding of what is reality.

Right. Right. So, I mean, the potential for mind control, or in fact the reality of mind control by the state and by affiliated actors dependent on the state or living in a symbiotic control by the state and by affiliated actors dependent on the state or living in a symbiotic relationship with the state it's like it's almost impossible to have independent thoughts yeah at this point yeah i mean if the if most people are getting their information through these searches um and through social media exchanges and those things are heavily, heavily, you know, managed,

then everybody's getting a skewed version of reality. And that's going to change the way that they think about everything. I think that's really dangerous. Obviously, it's not a new concept because we all read about it and Orwell and, you know, all this Huxley and all these other books. But, you know, what happens to people when they're getting their information in a way that's completely inorganic and false? And, you know, I think we have to get to the bottom of that. I don't know.

I think it's scary. Do you think there's been any slackening of it? I mean, we're in the middle of an election season right now. Pretty clear that the people in charge in both parties will do anything to stop Trump. And for reasons probably nothing to do with Trump, actually, but bigger story. But whatever the cause, they're totally determined to control the outcome of this election. Yeah. Well, can you have a democracy under those circumstances i don't think so um so the there there was a supreme court case there's one that's still going on um murphy v missouri uh and originally the lower courts ruled that the federal government can't be

you know doing that back and forth with all these platforms and from what i understood there was a little bit of a a backing off point right where they they weren't so intimately involved. But just about a month ago, Senator Mark Warner had a talk, and he said that essentially the companies have begun talking to the agencies again. This was after the Supreme Court held the hearing on that case, and it didn't look so good for the free speech advocates afterwards so um you know that that tells me that they're already you know thinking of coming up with another program i know for a fact um for stories that i'm that i'm working on that there are a couple of different contracting ideas for new uh sort of content review programs that would be partnerships with government

in the same way that there were the last time around. Like the last time around, we had this thing called the Election Integrity Partnership. It was run out of Stanford, but it was done in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center,

which is at the State Department, and the University of Washington and some other partners. But that was a thing where there was a big organized content flagging operation that involved the government. They're going to do something like that again. It's just a question of who's going to do it, what the method is going to be. And my understanding is that it's going to be more aggressive this time around. So there have been a number of war games, right, where academics, NGO officials, government officials, it's all sort of this blob. It's kind of hard to disaggregate it, but have gamed out various election scenarios.

And it sounds a little more to me like contingency planning than like an academic exercise. But tell me what you know about that. Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. So you may have noticed in the news lately that there have been a lot of stories warning about AI deepfakes. Yeah. This is the new, if Russia was the excuse for getting involved in content moderation in 2020 or even in 2018, AI and deepfakes are the new buzzword in Washington.

I thought it was just a way to explain away your porn tapes. That's right. Yeah, exactly. I didn't make this. It's a deep fake. But this is something that somebody tipped me off to. Now, this is not like a secret. It's actually public, although nobody has brought it up. There is a website that's out there. But this is a secret. It's actually public, although nobody has brought it up. There is a website that's out there. But this is a game. It's basically Elections and Dragons. It's made by In-Q-Tel.

You can see the IQT here, which is the venture capital arm of the CIA. And it is a... Wait, stop. Why does the CIA have a venture arm? Because to develop technologies that would otherwise probably be prohibited. And, you know, because there's a lot of things that they get into that maybe are good money-making ideas. I mean, part of what being in the intelligence business is about is getting out and making money, right?

So, but that's, I mean, that's kind of a problem if your Intel agencies have venture arms. Yes, right. You would think that would be a problem. So this is a CIA-funded election game. Yep, it's a CIA-funded election game. And just to start, just like Dungeons & Dragons, it has funny dice. This is a 10-sided die. For the record, are you making this up?

Is this real? This is real. This is real. Haywire is the name of the game. And if you roll the In-Q-Tel symbol, right? It says on the back, if you roll... Basically, the premise of the game is that you are trying to avoid a haywire situation, meaning an AI-induced disaster. Where the voters get what they want.

Basically, yeah. So if you roll the In-Q-Tel logo, it says haywire reverted. So basically, if you roll cia you win right the cia venture logo looks a little bit like the uh the symbol for nuclear power it does look a little bit like that yes so this is this game is used to train uh from what i understand it's used to train, from what I understand, it's used to train people in government to war game out scenarios that may happen, right? Which is why this is so, some of these scenarios are so incredible. Like if an orange populist were to somehow become president again. Well, right. And when I went through these i know

obviously i just opened this box but i had but i have another one um the one that really jumped out at me is this thing called the purple disappeared the purple disappeared if you can read out what it says swing states appear safe on the national electoral map in early polling later it emerges that ai driven election forecasts were wrong because the data scientists overlook significant partisan differences that make swing states highly competitive. Discuss your response plan, then draw two injects. Real-world harm, it says at the bottom, misinformation slash social bias, heightened stress, anxiety, and depression. What's social bias mean? I'm actually, I have no idea, but that certainly sounds to me like they're

asking the game players to come up with, you know, with a plan for some kind of reaction to election results that don't necessarily square with what the polls were indicating, right? I mean, that's basically what they're saying in that scenario. Here's another one, Mind Games. An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia suggested discuss your response plan and draw two injects uh so it's just full of stuff like this and this you know we started to hear about this idea that there were people in this information management slash censorship slash content moderation space that were deeply involved with finding new ways to manage information that people see. Back in 2010, the army actually got rid of the term PSYOP because they thought it had negative connotations.

They brought it back in 2017 because there was a widespread belief that we have to engage in influence operations, that because Russia is already doing it, because Russia is already doing it, because China is already doing it, we need to do it. And it's the same thing. Aimed at our own population.

Yeah, and that's the thing. We did this before previously. We created phony social media accounts in Arabic and Pashto, right? And that's something that we've understood. What's different is that they're now doing this in English, right? And they're now aiming this at domestic populations. I thought that was illegal.

It is. I would think it's illegal. I think a lot of this behavior is just unregulated, not looked at. I mean, who's going to go in and tell them they can't do this? What body is going to... The New York Times, can't do this um what body is going i mean it's a new york times the washington post democracy dies in darkness i mean that's that's that is the role of the press yes but to expose excesses and roll them back by exposing them but the but the problem is that they see they see for instance donald trump and you Trump and the Trump movement as an extension of what they might call the Russian information ecosystem.

The Global Engagement Center of the State Department has this concept of information ecosystem. alignment with Russian foreign policy views on, say, Ukraine or something like that. You can be part of the ecosystem even if you have nothing to do with that country. So, the idea that, you know, the first head of the Global Engagement Center is a former editor of Time Magazine, Rick Stengel. He wrote a book called Information Wars that we all had to read when we were doing the Twitter files because we didn't know about this organization. You know, talked openly about how he thought the Trump campaign, in it, he recognized the same techniques that he saw from ISIS and from Russia. So, they're now, they see all this as all part of a peace,

you know? And that is what I think is dangerous is that we're sort of bringing the ethos of military counter-messaging from the war on terror. We're bringing that home

and the enemy is now the domestic voter. Right, okay, so military messaging, but the purpose of military is to kill people in the end and to deter war by the threat of killing people. But basically, it's killing.

That's their business. Killing, yes, but also trying to discourage recruitment, right? Of course, right. Of course. But fundamentally, if you were to say, like, what's the purpose of the military? It's to exert force, physical force. So if the U.S. military is turning its psyops on the country, it's not that far, the nature of organizations and mission creep,

from there to hurting people. Exactly, exactly. And they actually, you'll find NATO, we found NATO papers that talked about how they found the american belief in um informed not influence or you know truthfulness that that was actually that's part of an uh an old nato memo about influence operations that we have to you can't tell untruths. The more modern belief is that that's outdated, that because the Russians don't do that, that we shouldn't have those restraints. So we have to worry now about sort of phony influence operations in the United States. And if you look at things through that lens, suddenly things like Russiagate start to make a little bit more sense,

right? Because you can imagine somebody in the intelligence services saying, well, Donald Trump is part of this nexus of anti-American forces and anything's fair game against that kind of person. So what, what Russia is central to all of this in the minds of the people doing it. And from my perspective, as someone who's never been that interested in Russia, the country, you sort of wake up one day and, you know, 25 years after the end of the cold war and realize you're required to hate Russia. And I just refuse to go along with that on principle, not because I love Russia.

I do kind of like Russia, actually, having been there, but I didn't have any feelings about it a year ago. But I just, I'm an adult man and I don't want to be told what to think. And I'm not going to be, period, under any circumstances, because I'm not a slave. But unanswered is the question, like, why? Why is that a requirement of living in the United States, where I've lived my whole life, hating Russia? What does that have to do with anything? How do we get there, of all countries? What is this?

I don't understand it either. You don't? I mean, especially compared to when Russia actually was a major. I mean, it wasn't nearly this intense in the 70s and 80s. I was here. It was not. Right? Of was not. Right? Of course not.

In fact, people said, I mean, Russia was actually running actual psyops against the United States. AIDS was created at Fort Meade to kill black people. You know, all these things. That was a Russian. The active measures campaigns. Big time. And, of course, there were all these proxy wars going on even then in Mozambique. And, you know, they were like actual wars.

And the prevailing view among people I knew was, you know, Soviets are bad. Of course, no one's pro-Soviet in normal person world, but it would be kind of nice to be at peace and nuclear war is really scary. And like, let's avoid that. I mean, that was the view that I remember as a child, right? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we had Sting telling us the Russians love their children too. Yeah, which is true.

And when Gorbachev came on the scene, I remember very distinctly people saying that we have to find a way to get along with these people, that we're spending too much money on defense, and that this is costing both of our societies. But that's not where we're at now. And oddly enough, the current American government, it feels a lot like the Soviet government of the early 80s, right? Where Joe Biden would have fit in perfectly in the Politburo of the early. He is Brezhnev, I've thought that many times. Yeah. I mean, he's the doddering old, physically dead leader who still has a title because,

you know, he hasn't actually expired yet. He's presiding over a decayed cynical society that no longer believes in the slogans. Right. I mean, the Russians have a joke where Gorbachev gets in a limousine. He's late for work, so he drives too fast. The cops pull him over and Gorbachev's driver is drunk, passed out in the back. So he had to drive himself.

He gets stopped by the police and the cop sees him, salutes, goes back to the car and the other cop says, who is that? And he goes, I don't know, but Gorbachev was his driver. And that's how you feel about America now.

Who's running this country? Does anybody know? Who is running the country? Is it Jake Sullivan? I mean, you'd have to make a guess, wouldn't you? I mean, somebody has to have the final say about these things, and it can't be Biden. I just think that's a very weird thing to not know and no one seems curious about it either right where are the stories about that who's that well i mean then

what the wall street journal just did a story about that they broke the seal on that but it's kind of a silly dishonest story but but in it were um quite a silly dishonest story i thought but whatever but there were certainly things in there that had not been in the Wall Street Journal or Big Paper before, for sure. Right, right. They took a, you know, they dipped a toe in the lake of... They dipped a toe. Right, yeah. But still, you know, in a real country, we would be

scrambling to find out, well, the president is clearly not capable, so what's going on, you know? Nothing. There's not a? You know, nothing. There's not a hint of anything, which is just, it's so bizarre. Well, and especially given the consequences,

I mean, if this were 1995, you could sort of say, it sort of runs on autopilot and, you know, Tim Cook and the captains of industry can pitch in and sort of keep us on the track. I mean, that would be the view, right? But now we are on the brink. We're closer to nuclear war

than we've ever been, closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis right now. Right. To total nuclear annihilation. And if the commander-in-chief is non-compass menace, and I mean,

the ship is listing, it's on its side, where are the people saying, you know, I hate Trump, I love Biden. Politics don't even matter at this level.

We're on the verge of nuclear war? That's not acceptable. Let's pull back. I have not even heard any person say that. What is that? 1986, and we were at this level of antagonism with Russia, if there had been an exploded pipeline, if there was a shooting war in Ukraine, right, or some kind of proxy territory where our weapons were killing Russian troops and vice versa, because, you know, some of ours are over there too. Quite a few. And, you know, people would be panicking right because at any minute you know we're all relying on somebody like putin being rational which is already you know i i made that mistake in thinking that he would never invade ukraine i thought that too and um so what are we banking on the on the idea that if you idea that if we launch some kind of a weapon into the Russian territory that they're not going to hit us?

What do you think? I mean, I think the people who are prosecuting the conflict from our side, I'm very familiar with their mindset because I knew a lot of these folks when I was in Russia. It's kind of like all the president's men. These aren't very bright guys. And things have gotten out of hand. And I think that they

have no idea what they're doing. And this could easily get out of hand very, very quickly. Because they're messianic about this. They think they must continue this conflict. Whereas the one thing that I thought Barack Obama was sensible about was when the Crimea thing happened. I agree. Look, it's always going to be more important to them than it is to us.

Yes, that's right. Very important to them, by the way. Right, exactly. going to be more important to them than it is to be yes that's right very important to them by the way right exactly so i hear these people including the u.s ambassador to ukraine and but many others just sort of blithely announced that well we're going to take crimea uh and that again i don't have strong feelings about crimea i've never been there but i i think i know as a factual matter that that is a trigger for nuclear war right there for For sure, for sure. And it's kind of a jump ball also, like should that place be? I think it is Russian at this point, but.

Right, and it's been Russian historically. I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff about Ukraine's history, like the fact that they gave, they created the territory as sort of on a whim, in the middle of the Soviet period. The lines are very arbitrary. They're not drawn along, you know, real linguistic or cultural lines.

And if you've been to the place, you'll find that it's very Russian in some parts and very Ukrainian in others. I'm sure that's changing now. But the people who are pushing this, they have no knowledge of that whatsoever. It's the same thing as when I was in Russia. They've been told one thing, and so Ukraine to them is like Switzerland, and we're saving it from Russia, whereas the reality is that it's nothing like that in reality. And I don't know. How dangerous do you think they are? I think they're crazy. I think they're the most dangerous. I think they're seized by hubris. I think there is a messianic quality to this. I think the entire leadership class of the

country is determined to commit suicide. I think that they've boxed themselves in. They're criminals. They know that they will be exposed as such. And they've also reached kind of the apogee of American empire anyway. It's all downhill from here. I do think that they feel this. And I think they want

to extinguish this society. And that's such an incredibly dark thing to say. I hesitate even to say it, but I don't see a rational explanation for any of this behavior at all. I don't think it advances anyone's aims, including own right i don't believe that larry fink is like

orchestrating all this so black rock can get even richer i think they want to get richer i think larry fink's a bad guy obviously but i don't think it's or lockheed martin that's exactly right the defense contractors and that's all true on one level but that's not the explanation no no it's all true on one level but that's not the explanation no no it's way deeper than that i think this is a spiritual thing and i do think societies um kill themselves just as people do and i think that's what we're clearly that's what we're seeing i mean tell me how that's not what we're seeing and i think that's just such an ugly idea again it it hurts me to articulate it but you asked so that's what I honestly think. Well, I mean, what other explanation is there?

Well, kind of, yeah. Right? I mean, I've kind of run out of, I made the mistake, I think, for years of trying to think, well, what's the angle on this? That's right. That's how I thought. You know, like, there's got to be some end game that they're going for. And the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think, because there's something darker going on in the culture of people who run this country that it's inaccessible if you're trying to like assign motives to it. Right. They could easily like just take the problem with donald trump they could easily defeat donald trump as a political entity if they just if they were

thinking as political consultants did in the 90s or 80s right like they would just make some subtle adjustments they would throw a bone to to working people and and you know, they would put forward a candidate who isn't, you know, physically dead and they would win, right? But no, for them, I think it's a principle that a certain kind of voter not have a say in things. And I don't, that's just totally counterintuitive to me. I don't, I just don counterintuitive to me i don't i just don't understand that you know um but so in other words it's it's not just trump it's the idea that the people who like trump those people might have power or be rewarded right we we cannot legitimize the the negative feelings of those voters is how they think.

Whereas it's incredibly obvious if you go out in the campaign trail and talk to people who vote for Trump that they do it for a million different reasons. Right. You know, ranging from, you know, the town that I live in used to be a booming economic center, and now it's dead, right? It looks like a third world country. There isn't a functioning hospital within 300 miles of where I live. The Walmart is now the only place where you can buy anything for 50 miles. There's a million reasons.

And then there's some social issues too. But once upon a time, I mean, I remember not so long ago, even Bill Clinton talking about trying to reclaim some of those working class voters. And that was like a legitimate activity. Bill Clinton won West Virginia. He won every county in West Virginia. Imagine. Every county. That's amazing. Every county in West Virginia in 1992. And of course, I think he lost California. Wow.

And so imagine a Democrat winning any county in West Virginia. Well, they wouldn't want to win. No, they don't. Right? That's totally true. Right? That's totally true. I mean, they go in there with this scolding attitude, like, learn to code.

Like, what's wrong with you? Like, there's this punitive attitude about it, which is, as you know, if you've covered campaigns, you cannot win if you have hostility towards the voters. Well, that's Trump's secret is he doesn't hate them. He loves them. I know. I know. Right. is he doesn't hate them. He loves them. I know, I know. Right, and that was immediately apparent from his first campaign is that he got up there

and people say, well, what does a billionaire have in common with ordinary people? Well, he's liked them in a lot of ways. He has the same, he probably does the same thing in the spare time. He goes to the same websites. We eat at the same restaurant.

We know that. Right, exactly. And so when he opens his mouth people think yeah you know i can connect with this guy now it's a lot of it is fake right and and the policy prescriptions may not make any sense but you can understand why at the level at the at the you know at the level of viscera, he has affection. Right. And they have hate.

And I think that's the thing that shocks me most. I think I'm way too autistic or something to understand a lot of the things that are happening right now. But I think in terms of outcomes. And that's not what any of this is about. And the thing that shocks me most is the actual hostility that people in D.C. where effectively I'm from have for the rest of the country like they hate the people in the country they do they don't just look down on them i thought it was just like looking down on them in a snobbish way right no it's like a hostility right when they die and you saw this during covid oh he didn't get the vax

he died i'm glad he died like i'm glad he died right american right right right i'm not happy when a gang member dies in the south side of chicago no i'm sure i'm glad he died right american right right right i'm not happy when a gang member dies in the south side of chicago no i'm sure i'm serious i couldn't be more opposed to gang members but like i don't know it's like a it's a human being it's american like i think it's sad actually oh i mean the hostility during the covet thing was also it was unbelievable to watch that yeah i mean i mean jimmy kimmel does this does this whole Annie Vax Barbie thing where it's just, you know, it's the worst kind of, you know, cosmopolitan looking down at the hick kind of a thing.

And they hate these people, right? But why? I don't understand, you know? Like, once upon, again, not long ago, entertainers wanted to connect with ordinary people. And now they don't like that audience. They wouldn't want to get plaudits from that audience. And politicians don't either. They want to be elected by the right people or they want to do it without the help of the wrong kind of voters.

But they can't because they're outnumbered, you know? So, it's a crazy time. But I do think you're right that if you try to figure this out by assigning rational motives to any of this, it doesn't make any sense. It won't work. So, we're on a slide, as you said, at the very outset into authoritarian government, certainly a different

form of government, not a democratic government at all. Some kind of oligarchy. I'm already there. Is there any way to arrest that? Slow it down? Is it inevitable? If you could project, what do you see? I don't think so um part of the reason that i'm so spun up about a lot of a lot of the stuff that's

happening is because i got to i watched what happened when you know speech freedoms even limited ones like the ones in russia they they disappear they don't come back. That's kind of what happens. They don't come back. That is true, isn't it? Right. And in the United States, there was a reverence once for the First Amendment, for the whole Bill of Rights,

that it just doesn't exist anymore. There's this kind of defeatist or unbelieving attitude about it. And that's been another revelation of, you know, working on stories like the Twitter files is finding out that people don't really, they don't have the same feeling about the First Amendment that people did in the 80s and 90s

or even the early 2000s. I mean, even Rob Reiner does the American president, right? And it's all about how, you know, the ACLU and, you know, being allowed to burn the flag and, and he's, you know, he's on the other side of this thing now, right? Like, and, and so what happened to all those people? What happened to that, that belief in the system? I mean, for all of them, you know, you mentioned that you and I came from probably from different political places at one point in time. I think we probably both

share a belief that America on some level worked, right? It had all kinds of flaws. But, you know, immigrants came here from all over the world they built good lives and they chose to stay here i mean my family you know came from different parts of the world and um this this country is screwed up i like the fact that it's screwed up uh but it works this this system um has been a great thing and people don't believe that. I think they've lost that belief, I think, which is so sad. I don't know.

Do you feel that? I mean, I... I feel it really strongly and I also feel that any semblance of national unity or common belief, shared culture, even shared language,

but particularly the culture, is gone. And I noticed it in talking to you because actually, you know, maybe you voted for one guy, voted for the other, but our core beliefs about the, you just articulated them right there. I've never doubted that a day in my life. Right. I just didn't, you know, cause like, yeah, America screwed up in a lot of ways, of course.

First of all, it's huge. So of course it's screwed up. Everything big is screwed up. Sure. But the best best the system works and um i don't feel that there's a national consensus on that at all anymore and it seemed to have evaporated very very fast and i'm not quite sure how maybe that's the problem with being in your 50s things change and you didn't see the change coming yeah that's still a mystery right right? Like, where did that happen? There had to have been a moment in time where... Well, I'll tell you, part of what happened is the people who were deputized to defend it refused to.

That's true. And Rick Stangles of The World, who was supposed to be, he was literally a guardian of the First Amendment. He's the editor of Time Magazine. Right. And next thing you know, he's a federal official working for Obama against the First Amendment. And you're like, well, that's a dereliction of duty. That's a major sin.

I think it's a crime. I think you should be punished for that, actually. You can't allow that. I mean, if you're in a battle and the officers desert, they get shot for that. You're not allowed to do that. Like, you need leadership in order to preserve whatever it is that you have. Right, right. And so I blame the leaders 100%.

And without leadership, of course, things fall apart. Right. Right. you're not allowed to do this period yeah i i agree um and you know not now of you know the role the role of the media i think is an important one in american society um we were given a very important responsibility to to um tell the public when things aren't going right. And to do that continually, no matter what, you know, the, which way the political winds are blowing to stick to that. And so now it's kind of more important than ever to,

to keep, to keep doing that. I mean, you asked me like, what, how does this get turned around? I don't know. But the only thing I know is I think,

you know you have to keep doing this stuff and telling people about it and in the hopes that it will get turned around so last question you um you spend 10 years within a society that you know punish journalists physically at times for telling the truth uh you're watching political figures go to jail and whatever you think of the charges or convictions or whatever in every single case you know for a dead certain fact that person hadn't been in politics on the wrong side he would not be going to jail that's just a fact so they're using jail as a political instrument how long until that comes to journalists like do you worry that at this rate like you wind up indicted uh i've i've started for the first time to worry about that um you know because because i

spent so much time in russia and i knew people who you know physically suffered for what they did right i whenever people talked about taking risks as a journalist in the United States, I always said, look, please, you know, in other parts of the world, they actually go through hardship. Yeah, try that in Mexico. Yeah, exactly. See what happens, you know?

You know, but it's gotten weird here. I mean, even, look, even the Bannon story, there's an element of that where it may not be as much about him as a political figure as it is about War Room, necessarily. Well, it's 100% that. No one wants to say it, but at this point

in his life, as of today, Steve Bannon is a journalist. That's what he is. You may disagree with him completely. He hosts a talk show every day. It's like, what is that? And the most influential one. Yeah, I know. You hear people like Rick Wilson show every day right it's like what is that right and the most influential one yeah i know right and you know you hear people like rick wilson uh getting up and saying yeah it's four months but

it's it's it's four important months it's where it's four key months he said you know like um you know the republican strategist he he said that the lincoln project yeah the lincoln project guy and the former dick cheney aid you know like i I saw that and I was like, wow, they're kind of saying that out in the open, you know. And even my experience, look, you had the FISA thing happened. When I did the Twitter files, an IRS agent showed up in my house while I was testifying to Congress. That's absolutely crazy. Yeah, I thought it had to be a coincidence, but I now no longer think it is.

And I do worry about it. I mean, I haven't even shared this with my wife yet, but I thought it might be time for us to get another house in some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty. Yeah, well, there aren't many. You know, yeah, which is a problem, right? Oh, I'm aware of that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. some other place that doesn't have an extradition treaty yeah well there aren't many you know um yeah which is a problem oh i'm aware of that yeah yeah yeah and um i i never had those thoughts even even a year ago but uh you must have had them um i've had some thoughts yeah i've had some

experiences that you know are pretty shocking i would say um not interested in talking about it but yeah for sure really really shocking but it's still kind of all hard to believe i guess it's always that way right when your society changes it's hard to believe it's actually happening well it's it's it's happened slowly like um somewhere along the line i became conscious of the fact that obviously somebody must be listening to yeah you know the people who I have in my contacts list. A lot of them are out of the country or running from the law or on the wrong side of the intelligence services. And, you know, there's no way that somebody is not aware of what's going on, you know the of what i do and that's that's

unnerving on one level but yes this this this recent thing about you know even even the stuff involving the epic times and um alex jones you know i was never a fan of his. He had some choice things to say about me, but I think this whole thing started with the decision to take him off the internet. And that's troubling, you know, like they clearly see journalists and information as a threat. And I don't think it's an accident that there aren't that many places left to publish and there aren't that many people left doing real journalism. So, yeah. Do you think Twitter will stay open for the duration of the election? Yeah, it probably will. But, you know, Trump's not on anymore.

I mean, Trump's Twitter account is what won him, I think, the 2016 election. And that was one of the reasons I think journalists hate him is because he proved that in the internet age, you don't need reporters if you're a politician. And they couldn't stand that i mean i i listened to those conversations they they they were very resentful the fact that they he didn't have to go through their approval system you know um but he's not on twitter anymore and you know i mean it's extraordinary that joe b Biden's the only candidate in this election who hasn't been censored in some way. RFK has been censored. Yeah.

Ramaswamy's been booted off LinkedIn for periods of time. I mean, like. Jill Stein, for that matter. Jill Stein. We found her in the Twitter fell. She was on a list called is underscore Russian, which was. Jill Stein? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Her, she and... Can they hear themselves? I mean, can they... By the way, I like Jill Stein. I know Jill Stein. I'm not against Jill Stein. Not voting for her, but like...

Right. Fine. But if you find yourself thinking that Jill Stein, Dr. Jill Stein, is the threat to America, like, you're a buffoon, too. But they think that, right? I mean, they have the hostility towards Jill Stein the same way they had a hostility toward Ralph Nader once in a day.

And the difference is now, if you're Jill Stein, they see you as part of the Trump apparatus. You're no different from trump to them assange uh jill stein you know isis whatever they're all together yeah yeah so snowden exactly yeah so it's it's these are crazy times um what is there anything that could get you to stop uh no i mean I've got kids, so I'm obviously not completely invulnerable. Right. But, um, but I, I think, uh, I think the world, America needs journalists and our, and again, our first, the first thing that we have to be is, um, you know, tough about it. Right. And so you gotta, you gotta get knocked off before you, you give up i think you you shouldn't give up right i mean all my heroes in journalism didn't didn't do that so i'm not going to do that i don't think um but i mean you wouldn't would you under any circumstances right exactly thank you thanks

so much tucker i appreciate it thanks for 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, TuckerCarlson.com.